For the 110th episode of Burning Platform we host Bruce Cleveland of ForzaGroup Consulting. You may remember Bruce from his influential roles at Siebel, C3.ai and Oracle and as an investor at Wildcat Venture Partners.
You know I am constantly encouraging vendors to explore new markets – GenAI use cases, vertical edge applications, emerging countries etc. It was nice to have Bruce put guardrails around enthusiasm for new market opportunities. Good product engineering is table stakes these days – what you need in addition is what he calls “market engineering” – to include thought leadership, category creation, messaging, positioning, and storytelling.
He explains the shockingly high rate of startup failures and even that of new products of successful tech vendors. Every company goes through 3 phases - go-to-product, go-to-market, and go-to-scale. Over the last couple of decades the investor community via angel investors, incubators and accelerators has provided plenty of guidance for the go-to-product phase. Strategy firms like McKinsey can help you scale a business. The support for the third phase has been elusive.
Bruce met over a thousand startups in his time as VC and came up what he calls “slide 29”
“I would find the 29th slide of their 30 slide deck was often the financial one. Usually showing a hockey stick. I would go “you were able to go in great detail about the product, your new build, tell me about the market you're going to engineer because that's going to end up costing more than what it takes to build the product”. And so I call this slide 29, (riffing on) the famous Sydney Harris cartoon which has a bunch of math, then a miracle occurs. “So what miracle is going to occur that goes from you building the product to you having a billion dollar plus company, as an outcome”, and typically, most of the startups I started to work with didn't really have great answers to this”
He had distilled his 25 years of operating experience and a decade as a VC in his book, Traversing the Traction Gap and he summarizes the concepts in the 40 minutes below. I had interviewed him in 2019 when the book was released and you can see his passion for the topic has not waned.
My favorite part starts around 13.40 where he explains the many TLAs, pillars and metrics in the book. He also explains how they relate to the jargon of funding rounds (A, B etc.) and also to Geoffrey Moore’s “Cross the Chasm” terminology – both of which the technology world is intimately familiar with. You can download many of the infographs he uses from this site.
The conversation below is just a teaser on his font of knowledge which he will be sharing soon in a course at Stanford and through his consulting assignments. However, it is 40-minute thought-provoking primer for anyone exploring new markets. And it is a great way to present to someone like me who is always pestering vendors to talk about new use cases, verticals and global markets.
