Friday Fives

1. OPERATING SYSTEM (OS) CANVAS

Here at O/TG, we’re always fond of a good canvas. From the Business Model canvas, through to the Lean canvas, and Storyte.ch’s Brand Story canvases, they are all powerful tools for describing and tackling business and innovation problems of all kinds.

The latest one to catch our eye is a goodie, and comes from Aaron Dignan, author of the upcoming book, Brave New Work, and which tackles the hefty problem of organisational design.

Dignan’s OS canvas builds on his recent research into ‘evolutionary organisations’, and looks at how you document an organisation’s ‘operating system’, which he uses as the term to describe the core set of assumptions, beliefs, principles, practices, processes, and policies that act as the foundation upon which the day-to-day work unfolds for a team.

Really good stuff, and a compulsory read for anyone looking to drive high performance outcomes from their organisation, whether it’s a startup or large corporate.

Extra points too for the use of New Zealand based collective, Enspiral, as a case study example in Aaron’s book.

2. AMAZON BREAKS UP WITH NYC ON VALENTINE'S DAY

We’ve been following the Amazon search for a new HQ location closely, and Friday Fives last week looked at the (now confirmed) rumours that Amazon were considering pulling out of their planned Long Island headquarters. At the heart of the criticism is the $3 billion of business incentives offered to the tech giant; along with that the site promised had been previously designated for two public schools, 5,000 units of affordable housing, parks and commercial space.

Amazon confirmed the rumour on Thursday that they would be pulling out of the NYC plans, citing opposition from state and local politicians.

3. HAS SILICON VALLEY LOST ITS SHINE?

Exorbitant rents, companies that literally build campuses designed to make it as easy as possible for staff to never leave and “Google Buses” all make the headlines around what’s wrong with the tech mecca of Silicon Valley. Now we are seeing a growing disenchantment with the Silicon Valley approach to doing business.

Rick Turoczy from the Portland Incubator Experiment has done the hard work for us and in this recent post on Silicon Florist he has gathered some recent articles on the discontent which he sees as quite different to the criticisms lobbed in the past. From reflections on failure to grow a billion dollar company; the fundamental problems with the horse-race investment mentality; tech companies failing to live up to their mission statement hype; through to Stanford University looking hard at how it is educating the next generation of tech leaders - this is a list worth reading.

4. CROWDFUNDING SUCCESS

Who doesn’t love a mystery package delivered to you only to find out that it’s the Kickstarter product you backed two years ago finally turning up on your doorstep. That saying - we’ve backed some awesome projects on the platform and were interested in this analysis from the folks at The Hustle on your chances of successfully raising money on the crowdfunding platform. They looked at publicly available data from Kickstarter for the ten years from 2009-19 to see what the success rate is on crowdfunding platforms; what type of products are most/least successful in raising the funds; and the average amount that creators raise.

There’s a lot of data in there - but a really interesting read to get insights into what’s getting funded and how much. A must read if you’re considering going down the crowdfunding path.

5. VC FUNDING IN NEW ZEALAND

Investment funding for startups and scaling companies has always been a subject of much discussion. New Zealand is no different in this regard, and in a widely read interview on Idealog, Andrew Simmonds of leading technology lawyers Simmonds Stewart shared a few insights into the glaring gap between angel investment and VC capital in this country.

Andrew’s solution is to look to other countries of a similar size who have thriving VC communities; Singapore being the best example, with a government that has intervened actively to kickstart the VC ecosystem there, something New Zealand has been reluctant to do in the past.

And as always with smart writing, Andrew’s article has triggered some other conversations well worth diving into. Local investor, Ben Kepes, has penned his own thoughts off the back of the Idealog piece, and adds another perspective to the discussion, suggesting that NZ’s angel investors also need to step up their game and deliver more value to founders than just dollars (and in some cases he points out, they’re not even doing that).