My work with startup "Zazu" from values to product market fit

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MY WORK WITH STARTUP –

“ZAZU” FROM VALUES TO

PRODUCT MARKET FIT

MBA Part Time II - Company Project 2017

AUGUST 30, 2017

AMRIT PAL SINGH

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Abstract

This company project is dedicated to Zazu, which is a spinoff from University of Amsterdam from 2016 and beginning of the year 2017 they have joined the UVA incubator lab at Amsterdam startup village. The concept of Zazu is built around having virtual private assistance, which negotiates and schedules meeting on behalf of you.

The term “Artifical intelligence” is coined in August 1955 by John McCarthy (Dartmouth

College), Marvin Minsky (Harvard University), Nathaniel Rochester (IBM), and Claude Shannon (Bell Telephone Laboratories) (Press, 2016). Since then it had made very slow and sluggish progress until recent years with the invention of cloud computing, connectivity in devices and application and dramatic increase in processing power of the computer to process data. Now you may know Artifical Intelligence as Siri or Google Now on your iPhone, Jarvis from Iron Man or IBM’s Watson. (Diamandis, 2016) Various tech giants are investing huge money in

developing AI based product and services. Soon AI will become the most valuable human collaboration tool ever created, amplifying our abilities and providing a simple user interface to all exponential technologies (Diamandis, 2016).

The founder of Zazu has similar ambitions to bring Artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities in the form of product, which will revolutionize how we arrange meetings with each other. They developed this concept for the first time in their entrepreneurship course at the University of Amsterdam and now officially registered startup company at Startup village in Amsterdam, working toward making their ambition into reality with the team of three young, ambitious graduates.

Keywords

Zazu, VDUF (Viable, Desirability & Usability, Feasibility, Startup, AI (Artificial Intelligence), O.O.O (Out of office Outing), VPA (Virtual Private Assistance), API (Application Programming

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Acknowledgement

A thesis is considered as the final setup and deliverable for any graduate pursuing university degree. Even though it’s a last part of the education, but it contains a lot of hard work,

dedication, and all the knowledge acquired during the whole period of our studies. So there are many people throughout these two years that I need to be thank full for making me realize my ambition to graduate as MBA degree holder. First of all, I would like to thank Sebastian my supervisor for his guidance throughout my thesis and also all the UVA professors for sharing great academic and business insights during the whole MBA.

I would also like to thank all my MBA colleagues and special thanks to Pokon Ganguli, and Okke Plantenga for their motivation to study in Library, which brought a lot of discipline and focus for me to complete my thesis.

Special thanks to my friend Mark van der Kolk for his support and letting me stay in his house while I was working on this thesis.

And last but not least the young team of Zazu, for giving me the opportunity to work with them and contribute my knowledge and skills to build the future of Zazu.

Last three months of MBA thesis has been challenging, thoughtful and full of business and academic insights, which has significantly contributed to my wisdom and professional life. Thank You, All for your Help, Support, and Encouragement!!

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Introduction

Zazu – an artificially intelligent personal assistant that schedules meetings through email, taking away the time-consuming hassle of email, back and forth. The challenge many people face (especially in businesses) are the low-value efforts of scheduling meetings manually at their work. Professionals spend over 120 hours a year just on scheduling meetings. That's over two hours a week, which you could have spent on your core activities. Zazu offers an on-demand artificially intelligent personalised scheduling assistant that will do all the e-mail negotiation for meeting on behalf of you. You simply, Cc your Zazu into any email

conversation, and then the meeting schedule will be done automatically for you. All that is left for you is to attend the meeting.

Zazu is also a platform independent tool, which does not require any app or installation on your device (Laptop, Mobile). Therefore really easy to use as a feature in your outlook.

With the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques, like deep neural networks, long-short-term memory networks, natural language processing, and natural language

understanding we make it possible for everyone to automatically schedule meetings. This technology disrupts the widely known personal assistant space, by replacing it with an artificially intelligent entity that will do the job faster, more accurate, all day all night, and much cheaper. (Nguyen, 2017).

Meet the Team at Zazu

Originally Zazu started with four graduates from the University of Amsterdam in 2016, and since then two founders have left the company. I have joined the company in May 2017 as MBA advisor to help them in building product and business around it. The current team at Zazu is composed of these individuals.

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Tony Nguyan, CTO & Founder

He is also the technology brain behind Zazu. He is expert in Machine learning and natural language procssing

technology.

Jesse Grift, CEO & Co-Founder

He is CEO of Zazu and also member of Ministerie van Onderwijs, Culture en Wetenshap.

Amrit Singh, Business Advisor He is pursuing executive MBA from Amsterdam business school and also holds a MSc degree in IT . Currently working with TomTom as Business Intel Specialist.

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How does the product work

In a typical conversation over email, the user has to send a chain of multiple emails to figure out the available time slot and date to meet another person. This process is slow and time- consuming especially, if you are in a business (B2B) context, it requires lot more time to schedule meetings as you have to deal with multiple people over the email.

In a new scenario, Zazu will negotiate the meeting on behalf with you as soon as you put Zazu in cc for email conversation to schedule meeting. These two scenarios and product demonstration have been shown below.

Figure 1 : Old and New meeting scheduling scenarios1

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9 | P a g e Figure 2 : Zazu Product demonstration2

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The Research Question

This thesis deals with two fundamental issues, which are essential for every startup company. However, In this paper, these issues are discussed and applied in the context of Zazu, which is an Amsterdam based Artifical intelligence startup company.

The first question of the thesis deals with the foundation of startups by defining Vision,

Mision, and Culture for the company and explores the significance of having this foundation in the startup.

At Zazu, we wanted to have shared vision, mission to decide the future path of Zazu. We would also like to create a culture of trust, openness, and innovation for the entire Zazu team by making it a great place to work.

The second questions of this thesis, focuses on how to apply lean product development framework to find product market fit for Zazu? We are working with TomTom, a global navigation technology company as the first customer to build product market fit for Zazu. The primary deliverable of this thesis is vision, mission and culture document for Zazu and product market fit using the lean startup methodology to build a right product.

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Research Methodology

This research is conducted collecting information from the following sources:

1. Interviews and weekly strategy and operational meetings with entire team of Zazu.ai

Since I have joined zazu.ai, we had our weekly strategy and operational meetings to keep track of the progress we are making as a company and decide key actions for future. These meetings were really beneficial to understand challenges associated with running a startup company. 2. One full day strategy workshop with founders of Zazu.ai @ statrup village.

We had one full day workshop with the founders, where we did a lot of contemplation about zazu.ai and how we would like to evolve as a company. The result of this workshop is vision and strategy document, which was agreed and accepted by the founders.

3. An Extensive survey with TomTom as a potential customer and product prototype partner. Since I am working with TomTom and therefore I took the opportunity to propose the zazu.ai solution to address TomTom meeting requests and as a tech company, it always look for innovative product and services for its employees to improve their work efficiency. 4. Interviews with management assistances @TomTom to understand the job of personal

assistance and challenges in their job.

Since we are in the business of developing AI based personal assistant, so I have interviewed ten management assistants to understand the job and challenges related to attending meetings.

5. Another short survey with other entrepreneurs, developer community, and key test users. One external survey to get different perspectives and understand the needs outside B2B environment.

6. External sources like startup events and meetings with the delegation of other companies. 7. Market analysis and competitor study.

8. Academic literature published on the lean product development and lean startup methodology.

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Research Outline

Part A - Deals with Vision, Mission, and Culture at Zazu and explains the

importance of having a vision, mission, and culture at Startups.

This part is represented in two sections in the first section, I have described the formation of vision, mission, and culture and in the second part enables the academic view of having vision, and culture in the company

I Zazu’s Vision, Mission, and Culture from workshop day with Founders

In this section, we will discuss the formation of Vision, Mision, and Culture for Zazu. The one-day thoughtful work with the founders of the company and framework.

II Literature review and Importance of having Vision, Mission, and Culture for Startups

In this section, we will enable the academic view of Vision, Mission, and Culture in a startup environment and gives you insight into why it’s important to have right culture in the company from the very beginning and how mission and vision steer the company in right direction.

Part B – Deals with creating a Product Market Fit – using Lean Product

development framework at Zazu with our first customer TomTom.

This part of the thesis describes how we are applying product market using lean product development framework at Zazu for our first enterprise product. Some elements like Vision from the first part are also used here to find product market fit for our product using TomTom as one of our first customers.

Part C - Recommendations and Conclusion

This part concludes the thesis with closing remarks, and recommendations, which are shared with the founders of Zazu.

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I - Zazu’s Vision, Mission, and Culture from workshop day with Founders

I joined Zazu in May 2017, and at that moment, I was the first team member, who was outside of founders group, so technically the first Zazu employee. Founders are young and passionate entrepreneurs, trying to bring artificial intelligence to our everyday life. I am excited to be part of the team, and the whole idea of building artificial intelligence based virtual private assistance is bold, courageous and innovative. Since we were a tiny team, so I was fully involved in every major activity and important meetings at Zazu. The entire team is creative, tech savvy,

hardworking and dedicated but at same time lack experience as most of them are just graduated from the University of Amsterdam.

Very soon, I had experienced this lack of expertise on the team, when we faced the challenge of not knowing what our strategy is? Where are we heading as a company and what would be the right product to build?

We had no shared vision or mission in the company, there was a vague idea of vision, but it was never formally communicated, debated and implemented. Instead, founders had their own different views on vision and mission of Zazu. These various versions of vision and mission were also not formulated and not even discussed or mentioned in any of formal meetings. I felt like; we were sailing on a ship which has neither navigation nor destination to reach. As an

independent observer, I have raised my concerns with the founders, and they were quick to acknowledge the fact that they didn’t think about these elements till now as their primary focus is to develop the product. However, we were struggling to find out what would be the right

"Good business leaders create a vision, articulate the

vision, passionately own the vision, and relentlessly

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15 | P a g e product for the customer? Which will bring some benefits to the customer and customer will be willing to pay for it and eventually this product would be a market fit. Subsequently, we realized the fact that without defining vision and mission for Zazu, any progress we make with the product and the team wouldn’t be a success and we would be wasting our time and efforts on building a product, which might not be required or valuable to customers. Since the inception of Zazu, Its founders themselves have put in a lot of efforts and tried different strategies to build the right product. Nevertheless, we were not even close to having a product, which can serve the purpose of prototype and testing.

After a lot of deliberations, we all agreed to have one day workshop with the entire team to outline Zazu’s Vision, Mission and Culture and also outline strategy going forward on how we are going to achieve our future goals.

Workshop day with the Founders

Extensive study with potential customers in term of survey, feedback and Internal brainstorm sessions was carried out for few weeks before all of us came together on workshop day at startup village on 1st_{of July 2017.}

The team consisted of three of Zazu founders (Tony Nguyen, Jesse Grift, and Megan van Doorn) and me as an independent business advisor. The purpose of the workshop was to contemplate on vision and mission for Zazu and come with the strategy to move forward with product development program.

The following questions were asked to each of the founders to start the contemplation session:  What are our core values?

 What is our reason for existence?  What is our purpose at Zazu?

 How will the future of Zazu look like in next five years?  What do we need to do, to reach toward this future?

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16 | P a g e Figure 3 : Workshop day at Startup Village

After a lot of serious discussion and debate, we all agreed upon the vision and mission

statement for Zazu. And this not just a statement on paper, we envision the future of Zazu as in where are we going to be in next five years, what is our purpose at Zazu that brought all of us together and what is our mission at Zazu.

Deciding on Vision is like imagining how the future would look like once you realized on your vision. To get to this stage you need to ask ourselves and each other lot of questions, and we don’t have answers to them now, but at least you have right questions to look for the answers. To reach to our Vision and Mission, we took inspiration from academic methodology described by James C. Collins and Jerry I. Porras in Harvard business review paper “Building Your

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Core Ideology Envisioned Future

Core Values

AI Driven Thinking – Think and apply AI and machine learning techniques for every work that we do.

Collaborative – Collaboration with the world outside will make us agile and keep us innovative.

Be Imaginative – Be daring to imagine the product that no one has seen, without having a fear of failure

Be Trusted – Trust in the team, technology, partners, and customers.

Purpose

We are passionate about AI and machine learning technologies, and we want to bring the benefits of these technologies to the world out there.

BHAG

“You’re Personal fully autonomous AI Assistance for arranging and organizing all

type of meeting from Start to Finish”

Vivid Description

We want to develop fully autonomous virtual assistant to reduce email negotiation time for arranging and organising meetings radically. We want to make easy and hassle free way to find time in other peoples’ agenda and an effective and efficient way to arrange

facilities for meetings. Proactively suggest and arrange your travel options,

accommodation, and food. With machine learning capabilities, It adapts and improves your working environment.

Table 1: Framework to build vision and mission (Collins & Porras, 1996)

1. Our Vision, and Mission

After lengthy discussion and debate, we came up with the following vision statement.

Zazu Vision

“You’re Personal fully autonomous AI Assistance

for arranging and organizing all types of meeting

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18 | P a g e The vision statement mentioned above is elaborated and explained here to make it understand what the meaning of “Start to Finish” is?

We enable Easy and Hassle Free way to find time in other peoples’

agenda.

Be able to reduce email negotiation time to organize meetings

radically.

We will make your meeting facilities Smart, Effective and Efficient.

We will suggest and arrange not only your meetings but also travel,

food and accommodation options.

Enable machine learning capabilities to adapt to your personal

preferences and fully autonomous.

Easy integration with office 365 and Google Calendar

Zazu Mission

“We are passionate about AI and machine learning

technologies, and we want to bring the benefits of

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19 | P a g e After agreed upon vision and mission statement for Zazu. We had a discussion on this year’s strategy to work toward realizing our ambitious vision. We ended the workshop day with following strategic initiatives that we would undertake in upcoming months.

1) Be our own customer and focus on only one customer at time – We had trouble searching for proof of concept partner, so we decided to be our own customer. We wanted to be the first to use and experience our own products. If we are convinced and impressed with our product, it would be easy to convince others.

We decided to focus on one customer at a time as we had attractive offers from KLM, USG, and TomTom but due to limited resource and maturity of the product, we decided to focus on only one customer.

2) Product Market Fit – We decided to have MVP (Minimal viable product) ready by the end of August, which would be ready for product porotypes and can also be sold as a personal package to induvial clients. In meanwhile we would work on Product market fit, this has been discussed in the second part of the thesis.

3) Intern Training program for extra resource – Because of financial constraints, we decided to have an intern program for Zazu, whereas Technology intern would help us in product development requirement and he or should get exposure in working

ambitious young entrepreneurs in a startup environment.

2. Culture

Culture is a foundation for future innovation. It is a blob of glue that keeps everyone together. It’s imperative for a startup to have right culture in place at the very beginning stage of startup formation as the culture not only helps in communicating company vision/mission to employee, investors and other stakeholders but also it makes everyone in the startup to work toward that

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20 | P a g e one common vision. Later in the literature review section of this thesis, I have highlighted the importance of having a culture in startup from the very beginning.

At Zazu, when I have joined them as an advisor, within the period of first two months, one of the founders had to leave due to non-performance and lack of right motivational spirit in the company. But there are no defined set of cultural rules at Zazu as it was not considered as a priority and the founders knew each other from the university. So there was no necessity to have cultural guidance at the company, but when you start collaborating in an organised working environment to accomplish something than it’s really important to have a culture in place to avoid conflicts, misunderstandings and creating a great working atmosphere. But as mentioned above having culture values was not on our priority list as we had no such incident before and we didn’t realize the impact and importance of having cultural guidelines in the company.

But after this incident, it became really important for us to have right culture in the company to make sure such incidents never occur again. Our aim with having a culture is to make Zazu fun & innovative place to work and where meaningful discussions can take place without having conflicts with each other. We collaborate with various stakeholders, internally with employees and externally with customers, partners, suppliers, investors and various interest groups and with the absence of right cultural values, it would be difficult for us to accomplish our goals and stay motived towards our vision and mission.

It’s critical for us to have certain shared values in place which will help us build a culture based on trust, diversity, and performance. It would not only assist us in avoiding further conflicts and misunderstanding with each other but also going to motivate healthy discussions and debate on various challenges we face. After lot of observation and contemplation, I have proposed founders the Zazu “Culture Box” and idea behind the culture box is following

The culture box is started with the three cultural values which synergies with “who we are” and

“what kind of challenges we face as a team and as a business” and “How we can stay

motivated”. This is not a fixed box, Later when the team will grow the box will grow with them by adding more values which are relevant to the time and situations.

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21 | P a g e Table 2: Zazu Cultural Box

Since we are an Artificial intelligence based meeting automation company, we wanted our values to reflect our business and our age as young entrepreneurs. Also, we wanted to create a platform, which is fun and at the same time, everyone feels comfortable sharing their concerns and raising their doubts. Zazu cultural box will be a platform where an honest and thoughtful discussion would take place and consensus can be achieved in a matured way. Each of these three values of Zazu’s cultural box is described below.

Get yourself a Date – Be proactive and take initiative to meet and talk about any burning matter at Zazu Date. This is open dating invitation to everyone at Zazu to communicate about any product, business, process or technology idea they might have or any issue or concern they have with anyone in the company. All they need is to send an email to Zazu date and they can discuss and communicate their message to whoever they want with the company.

The Stand-up Friday – This is our weekly Friday meeting with the entire team and participants

It’s our

quarterly

review

meeting to

measure how

are we

progressing on

our vision.

Decision on

new strategy

and also time

to reflect and

enjoy with the

whole team.

Out of Office

Outing (O.O.O)

This is our

weekly Friday

meeting with

the entire

team and

participants

are allowed to

ask only three

questions to

each other.

The Standup

Friday

Be proactive

and take the

initiative to

meet and talk

about any

burning

matter at Zazu

Date.

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22 | P a g e are allowed to ask only three questions to each other. This meeting is to keep track of progress regarding our ongoing initiatives, and you also allowed to share your weekend plans.

 What did you do last week?  What will do next week?

 What’s stopping you from making progress?

The aim of startup Friday is to keep the meeting and discussion relevant and short.

Out of Office Outing (O.O.O) – It’s our quarterly review outdoor meeting to measure how are we progressing on our vision. We will evaluate our strategy and make the decision to continue or change to the new strategy. This is also a day reflect on your work and yourself and enjoy the quality time with the whole team.

As you can see now, how we have applied vision, mission and cultural elements at Zazu. In the following section, we will discuss the academic implications of having vision, mission, and culture at startup. We will look into some relevant examples and cases from other startups to analyze its impact.

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II - Literature review of Vision, Mission, and Culture for Startups

A great culture starts with a vision or mission statement. These simple turns of phrase guide a company’s values and provides it with purpose. That purpose, in turn, orients every decision employees make. When they are deeply authentic and prominently displayed, good vision statements can even help orient customers, suppliers, and other stakeholders. (Coleman, 2013).

1. Defining a Vision

The business dictionary describes vision as an aspirational description of what an organization would like to achieve or accomplish in the mid-term or long-term future. It is intended to serve as a clear guide for choosing current and future courses of action. (Dictionary.com, n.d.)

A vision statement says what the organization wishes to be like in some years’ time. It’s usually drawn up by senior management, in an effort to take the thinking beyond day-to-day activity in a clear, memorable way (Kenny, 2014).

A vision statement is like a picture of your company in the future, It’s an inspiration, the framework for all your strategic planning. (Ward, 2016)

1.1 Examples of Inspiring Vision Statements:

Microsoft: A computer on every desktop and in every home. Charles Schwab:Helping investors help themselves.

Instagram:Capture and share the world’s moments.

John F. Kennedy (for the United States):Landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth (before the decade is out).

Wikipedia:Imagine the world in which every single person is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. (Miller J. , 2016)

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Amazon: To be earth's most customer-centric company; to build a place where people can come to find and discover anything they might want to buy online. (Woodley, 2008)

1.2 Why Vision is so important for Startups:

The ability to articulate and visualize the future of an organisation has always been a vital component of successful and great leadership. In fact, when initially describing someone as a “great business leader,” the knee-jerk reaction is often to cite something about his or her strategic ability or vision. We often hear stories of exalted CEOs and their strategic prowess. The downfall of many a failed CEO has also been attributed to his or her lack of vision. And in many cases, with 20-20 hindsight, it is easy to understand and sympathize with a leader’s vision (Mayo, 2007).

Speaker, author and leadership expert Scott Hunter in his book Unshackled Leadership,

explain that, After 20+ years of working in and observing organizations of every type and size, I have noticed a theme all successful ones share. They have enthusiastic, confident, optimistic, appreciative and happy people who work together on behalf of a future they have all

committed themselves to. (Hunter, Unshackled Leadership: Building Businesses Based On Faith, Trust, Possibility, and Abundance, 2011)

Furthermore, Scott adds that vision is “a complete sense of what your company could be/might

be some time in the far distant future. It’s something that you work toward without any sense of when it will be fully realized, perhaps never. It’s the light in the distance that gives meaning to everything you do. It’s what your company would look like, some day, if anything and everything was possible, which it is, and your company could truly be a dream come true”.

(Hunter, Unshackled Leadership: Building Businesses Based On Faith, Trust, Possibility, and Abundance, 2011)

Now the question is “Does your company have one”? Some companies have yearly goals, some even have a five-year plan, some do strategic planning. But rarely do we find companies with a true “vision.” (Hunter, Why having a company vision is so important, 2015)

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25 | P a g e Costolo struggled to define the vision of the company, and the result was plunging share price after its IPO and investors worried the company growth was stunned. Before joining Twitter in 2009, Dick Costolo founded and ran three startup companies. He is excellent decision maker but at twitter, he struggled to explain and differentiate Facebook and Twitter to the investor community. He gathered all his managers and management team for months to boil down Twitter’s vision and strategy, so that he could explain it to wall street and finally, Twitter articulated the vision in company’s second quarter report “To build the world largest

audience” (Grind, 2014). Now we know twitter as one of the most successful and influential social media company but behind its triumphant story was a relentless persuasion of vision. Eric Ries and all Lean Startup practitioners explained that your vision cannot change suddenly or in 2 -3 years’ time but the strategy to carry out to your vision can change due to many reasons like customer feedback, learning experience, change in market needs, shifts in the technology landscape. This process is called “The Pivot” where as a startup, you can change your strategy over the years. The difference is, in a large organisation pivot process is expensive because it takes a long time to change and execute the strategy. Therefore you have the ability to outmanoeuvre the large size companies because startups can change, adapt and implement strategy more efficiently.

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26 | P a g e In his book “The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create

Radically Successful businesses” Eric Ries described vision, strategy and product pyramid for

illustrating, understanding and for applying the lean startup methodology (Ries, 2011). This is straightforward framework but often underused by many lean startup practitioners, one of the reason is that its vision and strategy is linked with traditional waterfall business planning, which doesn’t work with startup (King, 2015). Entrepreneurs need to guide the startup through vision, and every setback is an opportunity to learn and change strategy and product.

1.3 How to build Your Company Vision

(Collins & Porras, 1996) In Harvard business review on “building your company’s vision” authors have highlighted two components of building a convincing vision. These two components are core ideology and envisioned future. Core ideology never changes and provide the glue to hold the organisation together through time, it consists of core values which are intrinsic values of the company, which are upheld by everyone in organisation. The other part of the core ideology is core purpose, which is the reason for existence or also known as a mission of the company. The second part of the methodology is envisioned future, which can be described as Big, Hairy, and Audacious Goal for next 10 to 20 years, it’s like painting a picture of the future and what would it take to achieve the goals. Here an example of Sony using the methodology described by the author. We have also used this framework as shown above to envision our future.

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2. Defining a Mission

Business dictionary defines mission statement as “a written declaration of an organization's

core purpose and focus that normally remains unchanged over time”. (dictionary, n.d.)

A mission statement defines “what an organization is, why it exists, and its reason for being”. (STAFF, 2017) Traditionally mission statement was way to communicate with potential shareholder and investors however nowadays it’s a statement for employees and customer stating that what does company stand for.

2.1 Examples of inspiring Mission Statements

Starbucks Coffee: Our mission to inspire and nurture the human spirit — one person, one cup and one neighbourhood at a time.

Patagonia: Build the best product, cause no unnecessary harm, use business to inspire and implement solutions to the environmental crisis. (Teresa Amabile, 2012)

Google: Our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.

Forbes: To deliver information on the people, ideas, and technologies changing the world to our community of affluent business decision makers. (Sinha, 2017)

2.2 Why having a mission for startup is essential

Whenever you think of the startups, you are very likely to think of young people packed with innovative ideas sitting in the garage and trying to solve the next big thing in technology. but it’s not the idea that always succeeds, in fact, most of the time it’s the team that makes the

“It is impossible to have a great life unless it is a

meaningful life. And it is very difficult to have a

meaningful life without meaningful work”. –

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28 | P a g e idea grow, if it were not for the team, probably the startup would have failed. (Miller R. , 2014). Running a startup is like a roller coaster ride as some days seems to be surely good and

suddenly, things start to fall apart and you go in deep sense of misery because you are not getting customers anymore, there are anomalies in the product and motivation of the team is all time low. This makes it difficult to attract funding and also talent. Some entrepreneurs believe that for a startup, their idea, dedication, and drive is enough to make it till the end but in fact, without clear mission and vision, your idea can start stumbling after few months, and within no time the dedication and drive will also disappear through the roof. Startup should have a sense of purpose and ideology because it’s not just you but also investors would like to know “why do exist? Who do you serve and what do you do”?

A Mission statement explains the reason to exist by describe the overarching purpose of the organization. It also brings a clear focus in what the startup does. With so many forces competing with you, entrepreneurs need a mission to stay focused and say no to ideas or alliances which don’t fit with the mission of startup (Sinha, 2017).

2.3 Compelling Reasons to have Startup with Mission

 As mentioned above mission statement would reflect determination of the direction that startup is taking.

 A mission statement provides a platform for clear and focused decision making, and it keeps the startup on track towards its future by enabling decisions, which is aligned with its purpose.

 Strong mission statement compels entrepreneurs to think out of the box to realize goals and tasks which considered as impossible. It provides a template for innovation to take place in startup.

 Mission also offers employees a direction and goal to work towards therefore it results in better employee engagement. You can retain good talented employees and have them work passionately towards achieving the mission.

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29 | P a g e employees have a clear direction for the startup (Dehestani, 2017).

3. Defining a Culture

Business dictionary defines culture as “Model or style of business operations within a company. The business culture determines how different levels of staff communicate with one another as well as how employees deal with clients and customers” (BusinessDictionary, n.d.).

Culture is pattern of basic assumptions and beliefs, the learned behaviours, shared values and norms that define the work in an organization (Schein, 2004).

(Kono, 1990) Described culture as shared values, decision making methods and behaviour.

3.1 What is a startup culture?

Startup culture is not about free beer, gaming room, pool table, bean bags, casual clothes, and free snacks on Friday, and these perks are available in a lot of the established organisations as well. Like in most of the organisation, culture is created by how people in the team interact with each other, what is the goal that they are trying to achieve. However in startup the teams are small, and they are close to each other, concerning small space is shared by few people, and they sit next to each other, so obviously in this setting, there is more interaction and

engagement with each other. Its founders that drive most of the time startup culture, if founders are hardworking and stay in office till late, you will notice rest of the team would be staying office till late. (McAveeney, n.d.) But at same time most of the founders struggle to devote time to define their culture from the beginning. Let’s have a look at what some of the

“A company’s culture is the foundation for future

innovation. An entrepreneur’s job is to build the

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30 | P a g e startup founders think about culture?

Damesh Shah of HubSpot “The culture of a startup is defined by three things: 1. how the founders behave, 2. who they recruit, reward and recognize. 3. Who they release (let go). Joel Gascoigne of Buffer “There’s no right or wrong with culture, it is simply a combination of natural personality of the founding team in addition to proactive work to push the culture in a desired direction and to maintain certain values” (Burke, 5 Founders Talk Startup Company

Culture, n.d.).

Neil Patel of Crazy Egg “One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that culture is really

important. I used to think that you could just hire smart people and expect them to do wonders for you.

But if people don’t fit within your company culture, they will be more likely to butt heads when it doesn’t make sense, quit when things aren’t going well and not care for your company”. (Burke,

5 Founders Talk Startup Company Culture, n.d.)

Matt Barba, CEO and Co –founder of Placester "You're wearing lots of different hats [and have] less time and resources, but you're also intimately connected to what you're building,”

Dane Atkinson, CEO of SumAll "Culture is creating an environment in which your team members are owners of the process, so they're dedicated to the team in a different fashion”. (Gausepohl, 2016).

Kevin Rose, partner at Google and founder of Digg“A team aligned behind a vision will move mountains. Sell them your roadmap and compromise – Care about the details, culture fit and finish”.

3.2 Why it’s important to have defined culture in startup?

At Zazu, when I joined them as advisor and to do my thesis, within two month time one of the founders had to leave the company due to non-performance and non-motivational behaviour in the company. So it’s really important to have right culture in the company as you need to work

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31 | P a g e with lots of people within and outside your organisation and with the absence of right culture, it’s going to be difficult to get things done and stay motived to your objectives. Communication and relationships are the two elements of a startup culture, which is really important because most of the time there are only a few people and a lot of time it’s just a few founders. So relationship among them and how they communicate with each other is really important, and that’s what I have observed at Zazu that communication lines among founders were blurry, which leads to misunderstanding and in the end departure of one of the founders.

Figure 6: Newsweek Story on Uber Culture Issues3

Recently, the tech giant Uber is in the news for my wrong reasons. There are lot of opinions out there for problems Uber is facing, and one of them is its company culture. Dan Hill in an article on Newsweek highlights the point that Uber has cultural problem and these problems are deep rooted in the foundations of the company, there are no quick fixes for this problem. Brand makeover and PR exercise are like a fresh paint to cover up the deep cultural crisis in Uber. The author put up strong emphasis on making sure that company culture is a great deal and requires special care and attention within the startup organisation. (HILL, 2017)

In a Startup, the company culture is heavily influenced by the founders as they are most influential people in the company, so it becomes really important how founders of conduct

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32 | P a g e themselves around and what kind of work ethics they follow in the company. But it’s wrong to leave the entire burden of forming culture in the company on the shoulders of founders.

Company culture is a combination of your shared vision, and the way your internal team and the organisation acts. Many entrepreneurs believe that their first priority in the startup is to build product and look for product market fit, company culture is the last thing on their list. In the early years of most of the startups, founders don’t even pay attention to the culture. But most of the founders don’t realise that there is culture already around them. In fact, the moment you have more than one founder or employee in the startup, your culture already kicked in. So it’s up to you now, if you want to shape the culture early on to make it positive or leave it unattended.

Miles Burke is the founder of 6Q. He is passionate about peer-to-peer recognition, company culture, and employee engagement and wants every workplace to be the happiest it can be described. He has proposed below-mentioned points to nurture the culture at startup (Burke, 5

Founders Talk Startup Company Culture, n.d.).

3.3 Five steps to understand and nurture the culture in an early stage of startup.

Understand your purpose – It’s important to create shared vision in the startup, which gives you a sense of purpose in the company. You will be working toward achieving that vision. It’s equally important to articulate, communicate and make it understandable to employees, customers, and partner to keep them motivated.

A lot of time in startups the purpose is to make lots of money and create products. You need to think deeper than this to get real meaning behind your work.

Define and document your values – There are many ways to create company values but probably best way to create them is:

 Leadership Brainstorm  Refinement

 Team Brainstorm  Feedback Cycle

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33 | P a g e  Adoption

Hire with value fit – It’s really important to have the employee, who fit within your values. Even though there is a shortage of highly skilled technical people but when you find the right person who fits your job requirement, make sure that he or she also fits with the culture and values you shares in the company.

Work hard to create positive culture - Starting something new is not easy, it requires lot of hard work, considering that startup possesses fewer resources compared to established organisation (Burke, Creating a Great Company Culture at your Start-Up, n.d.). Creating company culture require lot more than just writing down the rules. You have to feel like member of family that respects each other, they are critical and not afraid of raising their opinion and same time cracks jokes with each other.

Figure 7: Importance of Cultural Consistency4

Michael Skok, runs Harvard I-lab, Startup Secrets at Harvard University also put a lot of

emphasis on cultural consistency throughout the phase from being Startup Company till you it becomes matured organisation. Cultural consistency not only helps in finding and nurturing right people but it will also give directions and decision-making abilities to execute your strategy, which will eventually make the startup to realize its vision.

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34 | P a g e To conclude, in part 1 of this document, I have demonstrated and presented the importance of having strong fundamentals in the startup as these fundamentals provide you the bricks to lay down the strong foundation for your startup. In the following section of this document, you will also see how vision, mission, and culture make an impact on developing product and applying product market fit framework.

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35 | P a g e

Part B Creating Product Market Fit - Using the

Lean Product Development with our first

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36 | P a g e Since we came into existence as Zazu, we are in product development phase. We had many successes and also many failures while developing the product. The founding team of Zazu has been to many startup events to present our ideas and demonstrate our product. We received very enthusiastic response from various groups and investors on our ideas however at some stage these ideas would start taking shape in form of mature products that we want to deliver to the market. Nevertheless, for us, some of the big questions related to product development remains unanswered as shown below.

 “Is this product fits with the market expectations”?  “Is this the right product that we are building”?

 “Does this product bring value to the customer? And if yes, will the customer be willing

to pay for it”?

To figure out the solution for all these questions and develop a product which is actually required by the customer, we are applying Product Market Fit framework using Lean product development. Later in this section of the thesis, we have also described the academic view of product market fit and how it helps startups to develop right product without wasting

resources and time.

Zazu has been in contact with KLM, USG and recently with TomTom to understand their needs and get detailed customer requirements. Since these companies have shown their interest in our product, we decided to work with them to develop product prototype. Presence of these companies as our potential customer proves that we are targeting the right market segment since beginning. We received a lot of feedback from KLM and USG through various interaction with them. Recently we have made significant progress with our customer TomTom. We received a proposal and contract to have three licenses for our product to be used as product prototype. Hans van Rijsbergen, manager of OTS (Operation technology services) has confirmed this in an email mentioned below.

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37 | P a g e Figure 8: Email Confirmation from TomTom as our First Customer

Before getting to this stage with TomTom, lot of work has been put in place using Product Market fit approach and still, lot work is underway. We have carried out an extensive customer survey and interviews to understand the customer requirements and applied PMF framework to develop our product. The next section will describe how we are implementing product market fit with TomTom. We have also incorporated feedback from KLM and USG in the framework as a lot of their requirements were similar.

I. Usability and Desirability Study of the Framework

Usability &

Desirability

Problem Definition Customer requirement

Empathize with Customer

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38 | P a g e As mentioned above to identify the usability & desirability of the product we have conducted full analysis and customer survey at TomTom. We have also conducted interviews with KLM and USG executives and incorporated the feedback from other entrepreneurs from various startup events. The summary of the problem definition, customer requirements are shown below.

1. Problem Definition

Numerous studies show and prove that professionals at work spend significant amount of time on scheduling, arranging and managing things around meetings. Our survey at TomTom has highlighted that employees in the company spend around 3 hours in one month arranging meetings. And meeting with KLM executives and other companies have indicated around 120 hours in one years’ time which comes to spending 10 hours in a month.

According to our competitor Julie Desk, professionals spend at least half a day per week (Agossou, 2017) . Obviously, it’s hard to quantify the exact numbers as it differs from company to company and type of work professionals are engaged. But one thing is clear that automation of this activity would save a good amount of time for busy executives, and it would also let them focus on things at work, which matter most to them. Therefore, if we can address this issue, it would undeniably bring a lot of value to the customer in terms of saving hours from less productive work. The early interest shown by customer like KLM, TomTom and USG is an example of the fact that it’s valuable to them and partial success of our customer Julie Desk and X.AI also prove and support our findings.

2. Customer Requirements

TomTom, USG, and KLM have shown their interest in our concept of Artificial intelligence based virtual personal assistant. You can find detail analysis of customer requirement in survey

section described below. It’s important to know that, the product we are trying to build doesn’t truly exist in its full form however it does exist in different product setting (partially automated and not complete solution) with our competitors like Julie Desk and X.AI.

2.1 Customer Survey (As a part of Customer Requirements)

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39 | P a g e product prototype with them. We have been in discussion with these companies over few months and before starting pilot with them we wanted to study customer behaviour to find out:

 “What are customer preferences for meeting automation”?

 “And what does customer value most in personal virtual assistance”?

We carried out series of interviews with management assistant as they are experienced in this

job, and they know the challenges being in this role as management or personal assistant, so we wanted to hear their perspective on this. We have conducted a survey at TomTom by randomly

picking 100 employees with different role and responsibilities and received 63 responses. The reason to choose different roles was that in some positions employees spend more time

arranging meetings than others. These survey results are only related to our potential customer TomTom, however, some of the findings can be considered as general consumer behaviour, and therefore, these findings can apply to other companies as well.

2.1.1 Time saving is clearly on of the value proposition

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40 | P a g e The survey highlighted that most of the employees (Around 70%, if we combined the first two

categories in survey) spent average 3 hours of their time in one month arranging meetings.

Therefore if one company employ 100 people, it would save them at least 70 ∗ 3 = 210 hours

per month and subsequently 210 hours is divided by 30 days equivalent to 7 hours each day, which is equal to getting one extra FTE every day.

Thus in a large organization, this would save a lot of productive time for employees and they would be able to concentrate on value added work rather than arranging meetings.

2.1.2 Finding Location (Internal or External) is equally valuable as finding time on other people agenda.

Figure 11: Q4 Survey Results from TomTom

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41 | P a g e assistant was that finding a meeting room in the company could be painful process. There is always struggle between finding a meeting room and a free time slot at same time in someone agenda, most of the time these two combinations are hard to find it together. It also

highlighted the fact that within TomTom the physical infrastructure (meeting rooms) are not used efficiently. Olimpia Mascolo, the senior management assistant, told me in an interview that “There are days like Thursday and Friday, when most of the meeting rooms are free in the corporate department, but no one uses them and similarly Monday in technology department the meeting rooms are free. But employees find it hard to book the meeting rooms as they only want specific a place in a specific location, which is frequently already blocked. Therefore meeting rooms are not being efficiently used within the company.”

For us, this could be a great insight as now we know that there is a bigger problem out there with a lot of companies. Their infrastructure related to meetings has not been efficiently used, and if we can provide autonomous location arrangement service along with the automation of meeting scheduling, it would be a great value added for the clients.

None of our competitors have this service in place, and they only provide meeting automation services and the way their products have built, it does not have the capabilities of handling the company’s internal meeting related infrastructure. There are some companies, which provides specialized hardware (IPad) and software solution for this particular problem but in these solutions, the software is not intelligent enough. These are just standard software packages for meeting room arrangement, and they have no AI or Machine learning capabilities. Therefore these companies cannot provide the right technology driven solution. And on top of it, these solutions are expensive because of the hardware (IPad) which comes along with solution. We have spoken to reception desk representative at TomTom, they use this software for guest reservation, and according to them these solutions are not user-friendly as software and hardware integration is not done as per customer requirement, so the product doesn’t live up to the expectations. TomTom happens to have one of the solutions called “Teem”

(https://teem.com/products/meet/) but after using it for three months, they decided to

discontinue the product as it was too expensive to have installed and used its IPad capabilities in hundreds of meeting rooms throughout the company

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42 | P a g e 2.1.3 There are more meeting types than usual one on one meeting

Normally, when you think of arranging meeting with someone the natural or most common choice that comes to your mind is “one on one meeting” and then “one-to-many meeting” however there are more meeting types available, which has different requirements, and more difficult to arrange compared to one on one meeting. Our survey showed that Seminar and Workshops are two different types of meetings, which are even harder to arrange compared to any other meeting type. There are some similarities and some differences in these meeting types and if we can provide full automation of seminars and workshop meetings along with standard automation of one on one meeting. This would be another way to capture higher value, and we would be able to differentiate from competitors.

2.1.3 There is clear opportunity in B2B Market for this product

While building product, it’s really important to know who your customers are and what their specific needs are. In lean product development, you can quickly adapt to changing

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43 | P a g e Figure 13: Q7 Survey Results from TomTom

Our survey has highlighted that this product can be useful in both professional and personal environment but probably, we are going to capture most of our value from professional companies because that’s where customers have most of the pain points.

We need to clearly decide and choose up front, who we are going to target while building the product. Because personal user and professional users have different application and usage for this product. Since as a Startup, Zazu is restricted to a certain number of resources, so we need to focus and pick our battle wisely. Most of our customers provide both personal and

professional product, but there is no difference in the product itself. If you add more than three licenses, than product categorized as enterprise edition. This is smart approach because basis product is same for personal and enterprise user. We could also offer the primary product to individual entrepreneurs as personal license but enterprise edition requires more features and functionality.

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44 | P a g e 2.1.4 Think Big for Your virtual private assistance

Probably the most significant insight we have got from our survey is that there are much more things that your virtual private assistance can do apart of arranging meetings. If we think of an ideal virtual private assistant, it should be able to do at least anything related to meetings that currently humans can do.

Nowadays, with the availability of API (Application Programming Interface), we can incorporate a lot of 3rd_{party services in the product, and API’s allow us to manipulate and enrich the}

product the way we wanted it to be. All big technology giants like Google, IBM, Amazon,

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45 | P a g e you are planning to create. For example, to add location service in our personal virtual

assistant, we can add Google or TomTom location API’s. To proactively arrange and suggest travel information we can use UBER and Sky scanner API’s. These API’s have given us the ability to add multiple components in product to make it more valuable and therefore you can

redefine your business. (Columbus, 2017). 2.1.5 Data Privacy and Security Concerns

There are data privacy and security concerns with the virtual private assistance because for the product to work you need to get access to calendar of customer and there is genuine concern about the misuse of their calendar. The robust data privacy and security measures are required to address these concerns.

At Zazu, to address this concerns, we have been working with EY consultant and attending workshops and seminar related to this topic.

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46 | P a g e

2.2 Summary of Customer Requirements

We have only incorporated the few very relevant questions in our survey analysis section above however the whole survey contains much more questions. To put these needs in a more

organised manner for product development, we have used project management based requirement capturing technique and format as shown below. This may seem like a waterfall method, but it’s not that these requirements contain the entire customer desires. These requirements are not set in stone and they are going to change as we engage with customer in empathy process (Describe in the later section) to build, test and measure the product.

2.2.1 Functional Requirements -

1. Ability to negotiate the time to schedule a meeting with one to one and one to many users with VPA (Virtual Private Assistant).

2. Ability to use from both mobile and PC platform.

3. Users should have the ability to set personal preferences as per examples mentioned below  Coffee Meeting on Friday from 11 in the morning till 18:00 in the evening.

 Business related meetings from Monday 9:00 AM till Thursday 17:00

 Meeting with Friend only on the weekend from 11 AM till 12:00 in the night.  Preferred places to have drinks – Café ABC, XYZ

 Preferred places to have food – Restaurant ABC, XYZ

4. Ability to pick the decline, postpone and suggest different time for meeting. 5. Ability to update user calendar with the meetings.

6. Ability to follow up with meeting attendees and initiator automatically. 7. Ability to book location outdoor and indoor (Meeting rooms).

8. Able to read free or busy status from calendar

9. Ability to rename the domain to user’s company domain.

10. Ability to suggest and organize travel, accommodation, weather and food options. 2.2.2 User Interface Requirement-

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47 | P a g e domain in an email. So primary interface would be email client which is office 365, Google Calendar, ICloud or Microsoft Exchange.

2.2.3 Availability

VPA should be available 24/7 and user should be able to go offline and VPN should be able to read offline and online status.

2.2.4 Capacity

Able to work store meeting invites and able to trace back in case of verifying the history. Unlimited storage for meeting invites.

2.2.5 Maintainability

The User should not worry about its maintenance as its platform independent tool. The users are able to use it without worry or even thinking about its maintenance.

2.2.6 Security

Only Zazu should have access to user’s calendar only. The users can trust Zazu and allow access to their calendars to Zazu.

3. Empathize with Customer

For any product to be successful, empathy is the key. You need to have empathy with the people who will buy, use and experience your product. (Kolko, 2014) When we first started interviewing management assistants and told them that we are working on virtual private assistance, which is going to automate lot things they do in their job. I saw their reaction that they were resistant to provide us any further information. Somehow this was our initial idea that we would replace personal assistants (PA) with our virtual private assistant technology without realizing that these PA could be our first adopter of the product but they could also be against it as could threaten their job security. This is the real case of empathy, we need to understand our users and their needs and assure them that what you are doing is going to help

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48 | P a g e them immensely.

So when we went to TomTom to interview management assistants, we modified our questions according to our audience because we want our product to help them and we view them as early users in TomTom. We have asked them “Whether they find it boring and irritating to

arrange meetings? Because they have to send hundreds of emails back and forth to get someone time and find an appropriate location to book the meeting”. They articulated, how

much they hate sending emails back and forth to find time on someone agenda and look for meeting rooms. We empathized with them and the problem they were facing and then we explained to them that we are working on product which will make their job much easier by automating the repetitive task of arranging meeting and they would be able to devote their valuable time on value added activities. They not only provided valuable information but they also expressed their interest in being early adopter for the product. This gives us clear

perspective of user’s desirability and usability of the product.

II. Feasibility Study of the Framework

Feasibility

(Technology & Architecture) Technology Knowledge Synchronize

with tech & Arc. Test Solution

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49 | P a g e 1. Technology Knowledge

The feasibility of this idea is high due to the already made advancements with Zazu product, which is developed in house by Tony Nguyen, he is also the founder of the company. The product is developed using Python programming language. With the kind of advancements already made in artificial intelligence this definitely possible.

2. Test Solution

We have already tested the functionality of one-to-one meeting and one-to-many invites, and now with TomTom, we will work on adding testing meeting room functionality. Since we are a small team and we don’t have a dedicated testing environment and team. Therefore to

overcome this challenge we have adopted the strategy of “Be our own customer,” which means that we use our own product as much as possible to be confident that it works and we also use the online community of developers and SME’s (Subject matter experts) to test our product.

III. Viability Study of the Framework

Viability

(Business)

Market

Knowledge Company Vision

Competitive Knowledge Figure 17 : Viability lens of Zazu

My work with startup "Zazu" from values to product market fit