Builders vs Sellers

The movie Blackberry has two scenes that perfectly captures the tension and co-dependency between builders and sellers in technology businesses. I’ve experienced this tension first hand. Getting the balance right can yield tremendous success - getting it wrong can lead to business and sometimes real life tragedies. Builders of the best product sometimes go bankrupt because they miss the market opportunity or fail to explain what’s so great about what they built. Sellers who oversell the capabilities of their technology or push builders to take too many shortcuts sometimes go to jail for fraud or endangering the lives of their customers.

Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie who ran Research in Motion that built and marketed the Blackberry could just as well have been Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs. A tech savant and a ruthless businessman with a flair for what sells builds a massive company together. At its peak in 2010 37% of all Smartphones in the United States was a BlackBerry. Ironically Apples introduction of the iPhone in 2007 was the beginning of the end for Blackberry as a phone maker.

In the first scene Jim wants Mike to build a cheap prototype of his innovative phone. When Mike refuses to build anything less than perfect Jim reminds him of the saying that “perfect is the enemy of the good”. Mike counters by saying that “good enough is the enemy of humanity”. When Jim manages to push Mike into building a cheap prototype anyway it turns out that it was just what was needed to get the fledgling company off the ground.

Builders naturally don’t want to commit to doing something until they know that it can be done and you don’t really know for sure that something can be done until you’ve done it. Good builders also want to do things right. However sometimes the impossible is in fact possible and sometimes good enough now is worth a lot more than perfect later. That’s why some sellers have a habit of asking for the impossible now. Sometimes that pays off and sometimes it leads to disaster.

Boeing started out as an engineering driven company that built things right. At some point the hunger for more profits turned it into a sales driven company. Maybe that was needed in the beginning. As competition heated up perhaps perfect was indeed the enemy of the good. However at some point the engineers who cared about building things right gave up or were replaced by engineers who no longer cared. In hindsight it’s easy to see the results: several crashes, close calls and quality problems that has sullied Boeings reputation as a reliable airline manufacturer.

BlackBerry seems to have gone through a similar journey. It started out as an engineering driven company where the builders were in charge. They got a much needed push when Jim Balsillie joined and saved them from bankruptcy. However the seeds of their demise was sown at their peak when they started to take too many shortcuts and their fate was sealed by their response to the introduction of the iPhone in 2007. The Blackberry Playbook was rushed to market in an incomplete state and sold poorly. Outsourcing manufacturing lead to massive quality problems and recalls.

In another scene Mike and his engineers has just managed to send an encrypted text message between two of their devices. When Mike excitedly shows Jim the message and tells him about the end to end encryption Jim could not care less and exclaims “it’s just a text message, who cares - the phone company charges 10 cents a message”. It turns out that Mike has completely buried the lede. When he explains that the message is sent as data and completely bypasses the phone company Jim realizes that Mikes invention means that they can offer “unlimited text messages”. That’s s unique feature that will sell more devices.

I’ve witnessed this dynamic first hand many times. It’s not uncommon for innovations to start out as an experiment driven by curiosity and a purely technical challenge. However in order to sell the end result you have to figure out why someone who isn’t interested in technology for its own sake would care for it. That is often hard and requires a mutual respect between builders and sellers. Unfortunately builders sometimes think that anything they build can be sold and sellers sometimes think that anything that they sell can be built.

"If you want to clarify your thinking, remember something important, or communicate something clearly, write it down." – Jeff Bezos

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 Ne quid nimis

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Dream in years; plan in months; evaluate in weeks; ship daily.

Prototype for 1x ; build for 10x; engineer for 100x.

Find what’s required to cut the timeline in half; what needs to be done to double the impact.

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