WATCH HERE ...
Later, Dave continues on with his point about startups, specifically within the Israeli/Jerusalem VC ecosystem:
“So, with all that said, as a primer, I wanted to share a few important lessons that literally any company at any size I believe can take in and start to embed in their business immediately.
So, the first thing is always to start with the problem, not with the features, but with the problem.
We wrote a lot about this in the book. If you have a chance to pick it up and give it a read or listen, there's a lot of amazing companies, a lot of amazing products and trillions of dollars of category economics built around just solving these types of problems.
Problems like “taxis stink” (that's Uber and Lyft), “end of software” (that's Salesforce), “thumb drives are stupid” (that's Arash and Drew over at Dropbox). And notice how simple these problem statements are. And most of you probably recognize all of the problems on this list.
And I didn't mention one company, I didn't put up one logo. I didn't even infer one brand. And so that's the power of the problem. If the problem is big enough, people will act on it.
And there's a lesson we learned and we're sharing with everybody we know around the sole notion of a simple Rule of 10 when it comes to your problem statement and all of you can do this.
If you didn't remember anything from the session, just go ahead and take this down because I think it will help you really articulate what problem you solve, the simple rule of 10 is this: Use 10 words or less to articulate the problem you solve.
We’ve worked with some pretty amazing CEOs and founding teams and they get mad at us about how hard this is. They say, ‘I need 500 words. I need 5,000 words. I need a whiteboard and three hours of your time to explain what we do.’
If you can get it down to 10 words or less, you're already going to have a differentiated advantage over those who take three hours and 10 whiteboard sessions to explain what problem you solve.”
