The Learner Lab

Learning Like a Startup with Shaan Puri

March 05, 2019 Trevor Ragan, Alex Belser Season 1 Episode 3
The Learner Lab
Learning Like a Startup with Shaan Puri
Show Notes Transcript

The tech world is constantly pushing the limits of innovation, problem solving, and product development. This week we brought in the CEO of Bebo, Shaan Puri, to explain some of these systems and how we can all use them to become more effective learners.

Question Hotline: 805-635-8459

Full Show Notes

Quick Links:
The Learn Startup Overview
The Lean Startup by Eric Ries
Shaan Puri
Intrinsic Motivation - TED talk by Dan Pink
TrainUgly.com

Speaker 1:

Ladies and gentlemen, we have a really important announcement to me. What, what's the important announcement? I bought a thousand stickers. Uh, so here's the deal for the next month. If you subscribe, comment or rate the Pod, we will send you a sticker for free and they are dope stick. There are great. All you have to do one of those three things. Send us an address. We send you the sticker to the magic or the snail mail. It's pretty simple. We might even let Jack Send you a handwritten note as well. So I think it'll be a cool way to get this rolling and the stickers are great. Appreciate it. I'm Trevor, I'm Alex. Welcome to the learner lab podcast presented by a train, ugly.com each week, something new that can help us learn. Let's go. I think the coolest part about my job is I get to hang out in lots of different industries. When I do these workshops like lots of times with sports teams, schools and companies and something I've noticed is like these three buckets, they're doing really brilliant things within them and there should be like more collaboration between the three. Definitely. So I think a cool angle here for today would be to look at some of the things from the business and startup world, some of the tools and tactics they use and figure out maybe if we could apply some of those ideas to learning. That sounds awesome. Are you in on that? I'm in on that. Let's go. Let's go. I think there are four sort of mental models we can work to unpack. Obviously there are more, but for that matter, so what would for let's start, we're going to start with what they call it, the 80, 20 principle. Basically the idea that the majority of our results come from a small few of our actions. Sure. Just a tool for separating out the most important things from the things that don't matter as much and it shows up everywhere. It shows up in the management world, uh, as a function of the 20% of your customers bring in 80% of your revenue. It also shows up in our language. Like in our conversation we only use about 20% of our vocabulary to communicate 80 80%. Yeah. And and on the flip side it's like 20% of people cause 80% of the problems, right? In the startup world they use this to really hone in on building a product. It's like looking at the key features that matter the most and spending our time and energy on dose. I think you can already see how this is a useful tactic to learning. It's basically just a way for us to get more bang for our buck and focus on the high impact items. If I want it to be a better basketball player, a smarter approach might be over the off season, focus on like the two to three most high impact skills that will help me make the biggest leap. Right. And focusing on those and practicing those is going to be the best use of my time. Right. And it translates to everything too, right? There's a ton of skills we could learn out there. We could learn how to sing or dance or play guitar and all those are great, but maybe we want to focus on a broader skill like learning, right? You could make the argument that being a great learner, shameless plug would be one of those 20% of skills cause it's like so versatile. It's like a skill we can use everywhere. It's just a lot of spillover. It goes to a bunch of different things. Yes. Tool number two is called the five whys. And this was a system developed by Toyota back in the day. So they would use this system to get to like the root cause of a problem. So build a car and the door falls off. Uh, the default approach or how we would normally do it would be like, we'll fix the door. Right? But what that's doing is really just like fixing the symptom of the problem. It's just the surface level issue. Right? And with the five whys, we're trying to dig a little deeper. So door falls off. Why wasn't installed properly, why the person who installed the door did it wrong? Why that person didn't have enough time or was rushed, why we didn't have enough people on the team? That's an actual solvable problem. Like, yes, fix the door, right? But like let's add someone else to the team and we're less likely to have more doors falling off later. It's, it's sort of like looking through the lens of a child, right? How do they ask why all the time and figuring it out like, yeah. And some parents get annoyed with that, but it's a useful framework to solving problems or solving the root cause of problems, not just fixing the symptom. Some of the scenarios when the five whys are most useful to us are when obstacles are in our path. So when anything comes towards us and we see some adversity and we were struggling, we don't know how to handle it, the five whys is really useful to start breaking that down from the symptom to the root cause and figuring out how to move forward. I failed my math test. Why? Maybe it's because you didn't study enough. And then why didn't I study? Well maybe, uh, I didn't have enough time allocated to study for that test or time management. Yes. And so that was two wise and it got us to more of the root causes. The problem, it's I can fix my time management skills, which will provide more time to study and hopefully the next test I'll do better. So it's not like you have to go five why's deep each time. It's just ask it until you get to the root or just something you can change something that we can change more of the root cause we can use this all over the place. Uh, it's not just about building cars, right? It's like there's a thing that happened. Let's get to a root cause that's fixable and then that thing is less likely to happen. A lot of these tools are just helping us be more efficient with where we spend our time and energy. Right. And again, this is another strategy to do that, right? We can be better. And this is how, yes. The next one I want to jump into. There's this book, it's called the lean startup. It's I think over 10 years old and it's sort of just like the blueprint of how start a company now that everyone's using and there's lots of ideas within it, but most important for us is test your assumptions before you invest a lot of time and money in them. The easiest way to think about it is the traditional way to start a businesses you like lock yourself in the basement for two years and build a product, take it to market, and then you find out like, whoops, no one really wants this. So I just wasted two years of time and money to build this product. If we're going to be lean, it's how could we test the assumption that people will like this product before wasting two years of time and money?

Speaker 2:

Would people do this when people like this? Um, how would they react to this? And you don't just assume the love it, you actually test it.

Speaker 1:

That's Sean Peery. He's a CEO of a tech startup in San Francisco.

Speaker 2:

In startups. You don't just try to build the whole product upfront. You don't just say, we have this big vision. Here's how we want to do it. You start with a prototype. You start with like a simple what we call like a quick and dirty version. It turns out that it's much easier to build something quick, simple and give, you know, put it in front of people, put it out in the wild rather than just keeping it in your little office, in your little room, in your head. It's better to put it out in the wild. See how people react to it cause that'll tell you how to change it, how to tweak it. You need that feedback, that feedback loop to make something better, faster.

Speaker 1:

Pretend we have a website and we have this vision of creating this chat Bot that has like all these cool features. People go to the site, they can use this to build it. It might take months and tens of thousands of dollars. The traditional approach would be we invest that time and money and build a Bot. If we're going to be lean, it's how could we test that without investing time and money. It's like well just have someone act like the Bot. Like someone in the company is like chatting with the people and doing the things the BOT does. Like you can do that test tomorrow for free and learn. Do people even use this to people even care about this. So there you're testing the assumption that the people even want it exactly for free and if they want it and they like it, they all means build a Bot. There's thousands of assumptions that you could have. It's what are the most high impact risky ones, which in this scenario is do they even want this spot cause it's not assuming that they want the bot to have a male voice or a female voice. Exactly. Let's look at this. If like we're in college or high school and writing a real big high impact paper. Like it's like the majority of our grade and we have like a month to do it. Okay. What would that look like if we're going to be lean, if we're going to be lean and test, our assumptions were, well, let's, let's look at how we're not going to do it. Okay. Okay. Are the poor way to do it, right? What not to. Yeah. Okay, so if we're going to write this paper, maybe we latch on to a topic and we lock ourselves in our room for a week straight and just cranked that paper out. Do whole thing. The whole thing. Basically just pick a topic. Yeah. Right, right. The thesis, crank it out. Yeah. Okay. You're done with it. Turn it in and then you get the grade back and you took the wrong angle. The completely wrong angle. You wrote the wrong thing. Wrong argument. Yeah. Wrong topic. Right? Something was off right now, if we were going to be lean, we could do it this way. We can maybe brainstorm a couple of ideas, like five to 10 ideas. Right, and then make a brief outline. Just the general premise of a Mike, we're going to, this is our thesis and this is the angle we're going to take it with the paper. So now we've got our ideas. We could take that to our teacher, our professor, and say, Hey, these are five ideas that I was looking at for writing this final paper. Could you just give me some feedback on them? And if they seem like they're in the right direction. Mm. And then double down on that one. Double down on the one that's, she's like, yeah. Getting good feedback from the professor. Finding the angle, kind of working through the problem by getting some useful input. Right. Testing the assumption that I think this is a good topic or good argument, right? You save yourself lots of time and you're gonna end up with a better grade because that's what you're supposed to be writing about. It's a better angle. Right. Wow. Makes a lot of sense when you put it that way. Uh, wish I would've known this back in the day. This principle hits close to home because like, no exaggeration, this legit saved my life. I want to hear about this. And I'm not kidding. In a past life in college, my best friends and I came up with a business idea, we wanted to start like the chipolte lay of Sushi. That sounds delicious now like this could be a long story but it uh, it has a point. Uh Huh. So we actually won a business plan competition in college and won some money and we decided like, all right, we're doing this. And we kind of went down the traditional path of how to start a restaurant. Like we partnered with the chef and he trained us and we moved to Colorado and found a location and we were just about to sign a huge lease, really expensive location, hundreds of thousands of dollars on the line, like a 10 year guarantee. So this is a big label. Even some of our parents were going to like help back us a little bit on the game. It's like our lives are on the line and parents' lives are on the line. That's when you know it's real. And we were days away away from signing that. And Sean, my best friend in the world read the lean startup by Eric Reese. And what we realized is we are about to lay down the biggest bet of all time. Our assumption is people will eat Sushi a lot, but the truth is we had done nothing to like test that assumption. You just thought like when we did the numbers, we looked at like, look, people need to eat here, eat Sushi like twice a week. And if they do that, it works. That's like chipotle and Burrito's Mexican food. People eat it twice a week. It works. We need the same thing for us and we're about to bet half a million dollars on this and years of your life in 10 years of our life. And what we realize is like, we should probably test this before we do that. And so we came up with this approach to test the assumption. We actually found a commissary kitchen that we could rent on a week to week basis in downtown Denver. Set up a really simple website, small menu and people could go and pick what they wanted and we would deliver it to people in downtown Denver for lunch between 11 and two and there was like no upfront cost other than the food and our weekly lease at this kitchen and this allowed us to test so many things. We got to test menu items and tweak like the recipes of the Sushi rolls, but the biggest has we got to run, we got to collect so much data and look at the behavior and what we found is people weren't eating Sushi two times a week. It was more like two times a month. Whoa. Like they were loving it. We got great feedback. It was really high quality stuff, but Sushi just wasn't really on the radar. It's more of like a couple times a month thing and we learn that essentially for free. Actually we learned that lesson and made money because this was a super profitable model and this allowed us to avoid like honestly a catastrophe. We would still be on the line for that lease at this point. This is only about eight years ago, we'd still have two more years guaranteed paying into this restaurant that we were days away from signing on. Wow. He sounds like he was escaping. Yeah. It's like I'm not on this podcast if we sign that thing and so passionate about the lean startup approach and I know that's like kind of a big overarching story, but again, it's something we can use in our everyday lives when it comes to being a learner. It's like what are my assumptions, right? How can I test them? And it's making them clear and known. Right? Like this is what I'm assuming going into it and then testing them. You could honestly even deploy the 80 20 ratio of, okay, I have lots of assumptions. Right? Let's look at the maybe the riskiest or most important cause you only need to focus on, yeah, a couple of them. The most important one, it's like for the Sushi restaurant, it's like we had thousands of assumptions, right? People like a cream cheese with their salmon. It's like, okay, cool. That one doesn't really matter if they're not eating Sushi two times a week. So it's like we prioritized and then we test the riskiest ones. Thank you. So startup testing your assumptions can save your life, y'all, but also we can use it in the short run to you and how we learn how we approach problems. What are assumptions? How do we test? Okay. We've gone through the three useful principles for the tool belt. Can you handle one more? I think you have it anyway. Let's go. Last one is called practice is better than planning. Ooh, that's a good one. Now for me lately, this has been the most useful and the idea here is to solve a problem or get better at something, practicing it and taking action is going to lead to more growth and a better solution than simply planning or coming up with the perfect plan. Yeah. I actually saw an example of this that they did a, they did a study in a pottery class and they set up the class so that there were two different groups and one group assignment was to make one piece of pottery, like one face, the perfect one. So the whole semester they were focused on that than the other group was told. Make a hundred different faces. Like the group that was making one. It's the goal was to make the best like pottery thing and that we could make best face pottery thing thing. And so like Groupon was okay, you spend all semester perfecting the one right? Group Two was you do a hundred iterations, different vases, things. I'm going to triple down on that yet it's pottery things or in, and now we can't. And so what happened? So surprisingly what they found is that the best vases or pottery things came from came from the the group of students that produced a hundred throughout the course of that semester. And it kind of makes sense. The, the group that did 101 more practice, more reps, more feedback, more iterations. Like they're testing and learning every time they do it. Group one like more planning and perfecting. Again, a useful tool of how we practice stuff. Run and get good at stuff. Like planning is an important part of the process for sure. But it's easy to procrastinate with planning, but planning is a good, it feels like you're doing something caught up in the Whiteboard, uh, and like, but we would never do that with the podcast. We wouldn't spend, we buckle down and get it done. We wouldn't spend two months white burning out how to do a pike as we would just start and learn on the fly. You

Speaker 2:

know, when I first started, I was guilty of this. I would love to be up on a whiteboard and draw, draw and a great plan. It looks fantastic and the problem is every idea, it looks like$1 billion idea on a whiteboard. And then, you know, the only thing that happened to me was I took that whiteboard idea and I tried it eventually and it didn't really hold up. You know, Mike Tyson has that quote, everyone's got a plan until they get punched in the face and that's what was happening to us. We had to go out and get punched in the face. And so we realized pretty quickly that it is useful to plan because planning is just what we call thinking. Um, but thinking is not enough. You've got to also start doing and so we have a small period of time where rethink and we say, this is what we know, this is what we don't know and we're comfortable with that. And then we moved. Then we can say, great, the only way to really verify that what we know is true and find out the things we don't know is to go do it.

Speaker 1:

Practice is better than planning. It's about getting reps. That's how we get better. I think that's important because if your, if your focus is on getting better and growing, you need those reds. It's action, it's action. And Reps if you go through that process a hundred times. Yup, Yup. That's 99 more times than if you'd just done it once.

Speaker 2:

Absolutely. That's a lot. Let's say you wanted to make a call and so the first thing you do is you say, well, what's a car for, right? It's for somebody to get from point a to point B. Okay, I'm trying to go from here to there. Cool. So the car is a great, great option. Now let's say the problem is that cars takes six months to build. So you, you have two options. You either start building the car and one month one you build the wheels and the axles and month two you make the, the shale and mung three you put in the steering, you know, service. And then month four you've build the engine, whatever. I don't know how cars are made obviously, but you get the idea. Yeah, you do one step at a time. But the problem is that in month one, nobody can use your thing to go from point a to point B. It's just two wheels and an axle and month two they can't use it either because it's just a shell and then axle, right? So it takes all the way until the car's done. For somebody to even get the value from it, she'll get from point a to point B. So when you're thinking prototype, you want to say, great, I want to build a car one day. So today instead of building the first couple of wheels of the car, let me build a skateboard. Because a skateboard is a really simple way of getting from point a to point B. It's not perfect. It doesn't work everywhere. It works for short distances. It doesn't work in grass. Yeah, all those are good, cool. But it works for some people some of the time, and that's better than nothing today. So you first build the skateboard, then you build a scooter and you build a bike, then you build a motorcycle, then you build a car, and the whole time you will have become an expert on knowing what people need when they're trying to go from a to B. You'll learn all these things. You never would have learned if you had just stayed in your shop trying to build a car.

Speaker 1:

You mentioned like what not to do earlier. Right. I have another example. All right, let's hear it did a workshop with this company and a big part of our presentation is like a 90 minute segment about feedback. The research about how to give better feedback and how that can change it, a company culture and it really refines down to two simple principles to make our feedback better and we went through this with them. At the end of the day, some of the leaders in the company, we were hanging out and they're like, Yo, we love that feedback piece. We're going to spend the next 10 months planning this out and really digesting it and then we're going to roll it out. What a stupid thing to do and like the truth is it's like these are simple principles off the top of their head. In the workshop they were coming up with things to say, this is how we could do it. The idea is this. It's like, hey, the only way to get better at giving feedback is to be giving feedback and it's not going to be perfect out of the gate. Right. But through the practice in action, we're going to grow and get better versus 10 months of planning something when we already know the structure and framework today. Yeah. When they're going to have to go through that process any way back eventually. Yeah. Yeah. It's 10 months. You could have been practicing. Absolutely. If we had to, we could go all day with us and incorporate more principles and maybe we will do an episode in the future where we talk more about some of this, call that hotline if you want to hear about it. Hey, you call that hot hotline. Also call that hotline everyone. So quick summary of what we've done. We have the 80 20 principle helps us get to like the most high impact things to spend our time and energy on. Uh, the five whys helps us get to like the root causes, the problem, right? And trying to solve that or identify what it is and fix it. Testing your assumptions is just making your assumptions clear and known and then testing those before you devote tons of time and money. Right? Practice over planning. It's just getting that rough outline and then getting the reps and going through that process as much as possible. If you're interested in more information, uh, the lean startup by Eric Reese, it's great, fantastic book, like lots of case studies in there. He also has a new book called the startup way, which is how to use these tactics even if we're not in a startup. Um, he has a really interesting blog as well and producer Jack. We'll link to all of those. Absolutely. Jack, we'll drop those links. Jack, it's time to load up those questions.

Speaker 3:

Hey, Trevor is Alex. I'm from Munich, Germany, but as Tony come on Lu and I wanted to know what you can do to stay motivated each day to strive for ego. I love the new Comcast. Thank you.

Speaker 1:

A question all the way from Germany. This is a big one and it's a common question that we get a lot and so we actually devoted an entire episode to that. And that drops next Tuesday. It's about how to like stay motivated and take action. So keep an eye out on that. It's coming next week.

Speaker 3:

Hey, this is Nathan from Wyoming. I just listened to your episode about desirable difficulty and I had an interesting question when you're talking about variation. So you mentioned that when, uh, and learning a skill, it's important to make sure you vary your, how you're practicing to make sure you're not getting into an autopilot zone. But I'd be interested in hearing your comments on making sure that you don't go too far in that direction. You used the metaphor of, you know, if you're practicing putting and you spend all your time doing the same shot, that's not helpful, but surely if you did one shot you missed and then you moved that side of the question, wouldn't be helpful either. So I'd just love to hear what, where are you feel like a good middle ground is? Thanks. Bye.

Speaker 1:

Thanks Nathan. Great question. Um, the idea with a lot of this skill development, especially in like the sports world, it's like you don't have to make the shot in order to learn. The feedback on our process actually comes from kind of like how, where we miss the Putt. And so whether it goes in and out, we can learn, oh, I hit that too hard, too soft, or through the break. And so we get all that information regardless of whether we make it or not. And so it, it, it's still best to vary. Now, of course, we can vary within our skill set and there's a time and a place where we can do the same shot a few times in a row. That's fine. But the goal is if we're really trying to build the full skill, we do need to keep our brain out of autopilot.

Speaker 3:

Hey, this is Cole in Huntsville, Alabama. Um, really enjoyed the podcast so far. I'm a sociologist and I'm also a mom and a mom and a toddler. And so I have some questions about intrinsic versus extrinsic motivation, like that being fueled by those internal forces versus being motivated by carrots and sticks. So my toddler is rejecting the idea of like sticker charts and rewards and things like that, um, for some basic function, which is learning to potty train. So I'm wondering how you can take lessons about intrinsic motivation and simplify it down to its core material. Like what is this? How do we really motivate like a small cave person, which is the toddler, um, in an intrinsic way. Yeah, just curious.

Speaker 1:

Thanks so much for your question. Cool. It's a really good one. We agree that you would want to focus on intrinsic motivation and developing that. Uh, we also want to make it clear that neither of us have kids. So we, we are not the, we're not experts here, but we did do a little bit of research and we found this really cool a ted talk by Dan Pink, and he kind of talks about motivation and some of the principles that he talks about our autonomy, mastery and purpose. It's basically the building blocks of intrinsic motivation, right? So we'll put a link to that in the shownotes. Jack will do that and that might be a good starting point. We think that you might want to focus on the principals of autonomy and purpose. Uh, autonomy just means helping the kid have ownership of whatever issue it is a, and so here's kind of what we thought up. Something we think it might be fun to try would be sort of flipping the script and just asking the kid, how might you teach someone to go potty? And then just sort of see what they come up with. It's like we're flipping the script, giving them some ownership and asking for advice. How would you teach someone to do this? Right? And that might get us on the right path. Right? Uh, again, disclaimer, we have no clue what the right answer is. But if you do that, definitely let us know what happens. Uh, thanks again for calling in. Thanks so much for all of the questions. We'll see you guys next week.