Icon Ambulance

Is that what he literally said? "In religious services"? I find it really hard to believe. It is more fitting of a blog post that has been adopted to the format of "The Jobs Tales". Gender-neutral, religion-agnostic, PG-13.

Vic Gundotra at Google I/O 2010: "if Google did not act we faced a Draconian future, a future where one man, one company, one device, one carrier would be our only choice"

Here is the text from it.

Steve Jobs, is someone I admire hugely. Yes, he has numerous personality floors but his obsession to follow his heart in all things in his life is extremely admirable. Watching his Stanford Commencement speech too many times in a job I didn’t enjoy led me to quit as a Derivatives Trader and sent me on my current path, back to the startup world I left many years ago. He has literally changed my life.

Steve’s obsession has led him to become a product perfectionist. And is why Apple is now the second most valuable company in the world. Almost every product that comes from Apple is spectacularly awesome. And Vic’s post illustrates the depths of Steve’s obsession. I have heard similar stories about Jack Dorsey at Square, tweaking spacing on receipts because he felt they were not beautiful enough.

In Vic’s post the comments are full of ‘the devil is in the details’ quotes of admiration for Jobs’ obsession. But the question for us is, ‘Should we as startup entrepreneurs have the same obsession with the details of our products?’.

My answer is that, unfortunately, we can’t. And I really mean it when I say unfortunately. I am a perfectionist myself in a lot of ways. When I do something I pour my heart and soul into it. I want it to be the best I can make it. I become obsessed and it is constantly in my mind. I go to bed and wakeup thinking about it. My girlfriend recently pointed out that 70% of our conversation is about SayMama. All the SayMama animations, transitions and buttons movements, design, logo and user flows have all been laboriously thought through and refined. The amount of energy myself and the team have spent on details has been immense.

The problem is that we misplaced our passion. We are currently pivoting the business, or rather accelerating it to where we wanted it to be in a year or so from now. This means that we will be putting most of our energy into a new product. All the details we crafted in saymama.com don’t matter.

Obsession is not the problem, the problem is where we focus the obsession. For us startups, the obsession should be placed in finding product/market fit and gaining traction. And in finding our product champions who will help spread the word. A higher level of abstraction of obsession. Not the details but the broader product.

Obsession with the details of a logo are only gifted to those who have viable product that serves a users need. Those like Steve and Jack who already have a viable business. Personally I can’t wait for this day, but until then all my energy will go into defining where SayMama and our subsequent product fit into the world of real time video communications.

We are still guided by the same compass, ‘to take real world human interaction and replicate it online’. But the obsession is not on the product details. It is on creating something that solves users’ problems in a way that no one else does.