Category: Leveling Up

Expanding? Questions to ask yourself.

5/5/2024

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Am I ready?
How much do I know about the market I'm going to/into?
Do I have sufficient resources? (capital and team and plan?)
Who has done this before that I might be able to talk to?
Are there any conferences in this space that I could attend?
Where do I focus?
Have I learnt enough from my recon trips?
What don’t i know?
Do I have a market map? Eg: who invests in my space? Partners? Competitors?
What do I want from the Kiwi Landing Pad?

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Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
CEO & Founder
Xero

A: Building a mental model of your industry. How things work. Who the key people are. How you get to see them. With Aftermail, we knew getting on the Gartner magic quadrant and having the analysts understand what we are doing was really important. So who are the analysts? Ring them up. Are they speaking at a conference? Can you meet them face to face? Can you ask them out to lunch?

I was pretty ruthless at that networking. I remember going to the angel investment conference before we raised any money. I was thinking where’s all the money? Oh, all those people are together, they have a conference. They had an event at Black Barn and when I got up to speak I said I’m so disappointed there’s no cheeky founders here. Any cheeky founder would have done the mapping and worked out that all the money was going to be at an event in Hawkes Bay for two or three days, that’s where you want to be to build that relationship. The money you want to raise in New Zealand will come from people in that room. So working out how to get in there.

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Q: How do you make sure you get the nourishment you need in terms of intellectual conversations, and keeping a view on what’s coming ahead?

5/24/2017

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Rod Drury
Founder & CEO
Xero

A: We have people right through all levels of the business that really get it. You naturally build those relationships and so get a lot of that internally. If you do find people from other companies you look forward to those interactions. CEO’s share a lot of stuff. I just had a text from Mike Cannon-Brookes yesterday, wanting to benchmark some policies they were doing. So you just ping it straight back on a text. There is lots of support in the network. We’re all time poor so we don’t want to reinvent the wheel, so we ask for help quite often. When you find people that are stimulating, push back, and have a good perspective, it’s really interesting.

Some tips on this. I’ll see one of my staff and they’ll say ‘hey Rod, how are you?’ And I often think doesn’t really matter, does it? Ask me a question or something relevant. When you’ve got fifty people asking you how you are it gets a bit tiring. But if someone says ‘hey Rod, I’ve got a problem or what do you think?’ That’s really interesting. Asking questions is a great way to connect and just get to it, because you don’t have time for pleasantries when you’ve got lots of people. At a certain size there is this asymmetry where everyone wants to talk to you, but you’ve heard every conversation - unless someone blows you away and it’s really interesting. So consider that perspective if you want to network with important people. Ask them a question that makes them think. Chit chat isn’t really that interesting, we’re all too busy.

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Expanding? Questions to ask yourself.

Q: What’s some advice for founders and teams who don’t know what they don’t know? What should they focus on to get ahead of the curve?

Q: How do you make sure you get the nourishment you need in terms of intellectual conversations, and keeping a view on what’s coming ahead?

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