Composite

For the past week and a half, I’ve been scrawling diagrams, lists and mind-maps on stacks of blank card stock with a Sharpie, littering my desk and walls with the results. It’s a scene straight out of A Beautiful Mind. But, as a result, I feel like the outlines of Composite, my next project, are finally coming together.

It’s a feeling I’m used to, a sense that I’m standing on the edge of a boat, looking down into the deep, where I can see the outlines of something big below, just need to wait for it to slowly make its way to the surface.

In the case of this new fitness project, there are three ideas that have been bouncing around my head for a while, which I think form the core:

  • Fitness is Composite.
  • There is a Right Answer.
  • Excellence is a Habit.

And, relatedly, three legs of how that plays out in implementation:

  • Get a Coach.
  • Leverage Technology.
  • Build Community.

I’m still expanding and refining, still charting out the roadmap going forward. But I think I’m closing in on preliminary launch. And, as part of that, I’ll be circling back to unpack both of those trios of ideas, which I realize currently only make sense (and even then, only sort of) inside my own convoluted brain. Stay tuned.

January 13, 2016

165

Over years of running CFNYC, we discovered that, on average, our members attended the gym about 2.8 times a week. Talking to coaches at other CrossFit boxes, to yoga, pilates and spin instructors, and to private trainers, that seems about par for the course. In a committed, workout-attending population, people seem to hit the gym about 2.5-3 times a week.

And, indeed, that’s great. If you’re smart and focused, that’s often all the gym time you need. Though that depends, entirely, on what you do with the other 165 hours of your week.

There’s an old fitness maxim: you can’t out-train a bad diet. You also can’t out-stretch days full of sitting, standing and moving in terrible posture. You can’t out-caffeinate a lack of sufficient, high-quality sleep. And your three hours at the gym are only enough if they’re just the far end of the power curve – the small percentage of time you move at high intensity, paired with the large percentage of time outside the gym in which you’re still moving, albeit at a lower pace.

The problem is, gyms aren’t really set up to address those other 165 hours. Sure, trainers and coaches will sometimes give homework; but we know from research on adherence in physical therapy that people just don’t do their fitness homework, even if it’s literally hurting them not to.

Which, I think, is an opportunity for technology. Pair a great in-gym experience with a well-crafted app that extends that experience to guide the other 165 hours of the week, while still tying back to the expert accountability and community support you have in the gym, and you’ve got a far more effective way to help people make positive change in their lives.

July 2, 2015

Keep Going

“You will never stub your toe standing still. The faster you go, the more chances there is of stubbing your toe, but the more chance you have of getting somewhere.”
— Charles F. Kettering

March 14, 2015

In the Mood

We’re gearing up for some Northstar build-outs, designing spaces that live up to the coaching, community and the broader member experience we’ve been developing. To that end, some mood boards we’ve pulled together:

Reception:

RECEPTION

Locker Rooms:

LOCKER ROOMS

Workout Space:

GYM SPACE

In short, we’re shooting for ’boutique hotel’ in the entrances and bathrooms, while keeping the WOD spaces to a gritty, industrial, authentically CrossFit feel. Looking forward to seeing them done!

January 22, 2015

Lindy Hop

exponential-growth

Recently, I’ve been obsessing about the Lindy Effect, an observation about the lifespan of stuff like technology and ideas.

In it’s original form, the Effect observes that every additional day of life achieved implies an even longer life expectancy yet.

Or, in plain English: on average, you’re halfway there. So there’s likely another half of the life of an idea or technology still to come.

Applied to startup companies, that means that, on average, you’re about halfway through your growth cycle, about half as big as you’re going to get.

Therefore, if you tell me your company is going to double in size in the future, I should probably believe you. But if you project 10x or 20x growth, I should be dubious.

The problem is, to double in size, you usually only have to do the kinds of things you’re already doing, just a bit more efficiently, or maybe with a little more economy of scale. But to hop up an order of magnitude, you need to do completely different things, in ways completely different from how you’re doing them now.

Psychologically, that’s challenging, the startup version of the Innovator’s Dilemma. You’re running the company the way that you’re running it because it works, because it’s what’s gotten you to where you are. But, to keep growing, to keep from stagnating indefinitely, you have to leave that safety behind, start trying out new things, think in bigger new ways, and risk failure all over again.

Which is hard. And stressful. But also necessary. It’s the only way you can build a company that doesn’t just double once, but somehow pulls off the exponential trick of doubling again and again and again.

January 5, 2015

Comedy before Competence

I was discussing the previously-cited Netflix Culture Deck with a few new colleagues, one of whom pointed out that the word ‘failure’ is conspicuously absent from the presentation.

That highlights a key difference between big companies and startups. In a large, publicly traded company, there’s a lot to lose. While not all new initiatives can be successes, it’s at least as important that few are damaging failures. Whereas, in a small company, chasing the upside of continually swinging for the fences is the only way to grow substantially. Focusing primarily on not screwing up keeps a startup from ever getting off the ground.

In that light, it’s interesting to consider Facebook, which attributed a lot of its early success to the internal motto, “move fast and break things.” A few months ago, it shifted the motto, to “move fast with stable infra.” By now, Facebook has more to lose than to gain by excess speed, but it never would have reached its current dominant position had it played conservatively from the start.

I’d have been curious to read the deck Reed Hastings might have crafted in Netflix’s earliest days; by all accounts, they were a hard-charging, risk-taking culture. Because, in particular, I’d have been curious to see how they balanced accountability and encouragement. On the one hand, Netflix fosters a competitive culture, where people are held to high performance standards; on the other, for employees to take necessary risks, they have to feel safe getting things wrong.

In building Northstar, we’re trying to strike a similar balance. But, in my experience, the more serious early stage danger tends to be too much conservatism, not too little accountability. Which is why I’m posting a ‘Comedy before Competence’ sign on my office wall; I don’t mind if we get things wrong, so long as we try them out aggressively, and can laugh about it along the way.

November 22, 2014

Decked

Still on the theme of hiring: if you run a business, and haven’t read Netflix CEO Reed Hasting’s ‘culture deck’, go read it now. It’s a cogent philosophy for hiring great people, running a company and scaling up an ‘A player’ team.

A few gems:

“We’re a team, not a family. We’re like a pro sports team, not a kid’s recreational team. Netflix leaders hire, develop and cut smartly, so we have stars in every position.”

“The Keeper Test: Which of my people, if they told me they were leaving, for a similar job at a peer company, would I fight hard to keep at Netflix?”

“Netflix Vacation Policy and Tracking: there is no policy or tracking. There is also no clothing policy at Netflix, but no one comes to work naked. Lesson: you don’t need policies for everything.”

and a personal favorite:

“Adequate performance gets a generous severance package.”

November 19, 2014

Technical Hires

Back in the 1990’s, during the first internet bubble, there was a real divide in the startup world between the ‘tech people’ and the ‘business people’. Sure, you needed the tech people to actually build the products you were selling; but everyone knew that tech people couldn’t run companies. (The old joke: how can you tell the engineer you’re talking to is an extrovert? He’s looking at your shoes.) That’s why you needed to hire a recent b-school grad, with marketing experience and good hair, to lead the charge.

As early 2000’s stock market returns attest, that didn’t turn out to be a great long-term strategy. Which is why, in the tech world of today, there’s a bias towards founder-run startups. Using lean methodologies, the guys who actually understand what they’re doing build the companies, with little initial capital, retaining control, and growing based on traction with customers and real results. The tech team rules, and smaller-scale acquisitions are even valued by the number of engineers on staff.

In that light, the parallel growth of CrossFit makes a lot of sense, as the affiliate model similarly puts domain experts in the driver’s seat. Consider a Globo Gym, the soul-sister of the failed late–90’s big tech startup: an executive team, bolstered by a ‘coffee is for closers’ sales staff, run the show, while the trainers are treated roughly akin to the cows at a dairy farm – the core leveragable asset, sure, but certainly not a voice at the table. Then along comes CrossFit, with what’s essentially a lean startup approach to the gym business. With a few thousand dollars, an excellent coach can open a garage gym and build organically from those humble roots, keeping technical concerns (ie, good training) at the forefront and making more money (with more autonomy and control) than she did in the Globo world.

But here’s what’s interesting to me: in the tech world, companies like Facebook and Google have grown to huge sizes, while still keeping the technical talent at the forefront. A Google gig post-graduation is a big win for a computer science grad. Yet nothing similar exists in the fitness world. There’s no large-scale company that puts coaching first. There’s no opportunity at an Equinox that looks better than starting your own CrossFit Box.

In fact, even in the CrossFit world, there’s really no long-term career path aside from starting a box of your own. For some people, that’s a great choice. But many others don’t want to deal with running a company – they just want to coach. Much as more top computer science grads choose to take jobs at Apple, Google or Facebook than choose to go it alone and start their own company. So how come there’s no Apple job for the best CrossFit coaches in the world? How come there’s no place for them to get respect, autonomy and control, along with stability, great compensation and long-term career growth propsects?

I’m betting that, if such a place existed, it would quickly attract the very best coaches in the CrossFit world. And, because a gym is only as good as its coaches, that place would quickly clean up. Let’s see what happens.

November 17, 2014