- Our third venture design principle,
prioritize progress over process,
directly addresses the pace of design and innovation
needed for new ventures.
Let's take a look at another example.
When I first met Ilya and Aaron,
their company Sensel was a pre-seed start up
just finishing up at the Stanford University
StartX Accelerator.
They came to Frog with a next generation
multitouch pressure sensing technology,
and were looking to collaborate with us
in identifying and designing for their first users
and early adopter community.
They had an amazing solution
but were unsure about what problem it solved
or for whom.
Fortunately, their technology is so powerful
and versatile that it was immediately clear
to all involved that there would be a market for it.
So what is this technology?
As you likely know, current Macbook models
have incorporated Apple's force touch
pressure sensing into the trackpad.
This is accomplished with four sensors,
one beneath each corner of the trackpad.
Remarkably, in the same area where Apple is putting
four sensors, Sensel can put approximately 5000.
As a result, their not just getting a general sense
of the force being applied,
they're getting a very high resolution,
high dynamic range, low latency force image.
It's sensitive enough that if you rest your wrist on it,
we can read your pulse.
It scans fast enough that if you hit the surface
with a drumstick, we don't just see
that there's an impact, which many sensors would miss,
we see the drumstick make contact,
sink into the surface, and rebound out.
Again, a remarkable technology
with many possible uses, but we needed to work with
Ilya and Aaron to determine which use cases
the company should pursue first,
how they should design the product
and develop their brand to support these uses,
and how they could insure uptake of the technology
among the communities they wanted to reach.
Ultimately our goal was to launch the company
through a crowdfunding campaign
to gain traction with the earliest customers.
So, we short circuited the typical process.
Rather than starting with a discovery process and so on,
we jumped ahead and prototyped what would be
the final deliverable of the entire project.
We storyboarded their crowd funding campaign.
Of course, the final video doesn't really
follow this storyboard, but that wasn't the point.
This approach enabled us to very quickly
eliminate options that were distracting us
and clouding our thinking,
get ideas out into the open that would otherwise
have surfaced much later,
preview challenges so we could reprioritize
our time accordingly,
and overall get everyone aligned.
Effectively, we did the project in a day,
and then started over again,
but this time informed and accelerated
by the exercise.
We dove into the company's strategy and brand,
and with this foundation established,
simultaneously developed their new identity,
built out interaction models
of use cases of their technology,
and developed both current and future generations
of their industrial design.
When we launched, the artists, musicians,
makers, and technologists that we identified
as our key audiences quickly carried
the crowdfunding campaign to over seven times their goal.
The press took note and covered the company everywhere
from Fast Company, Tech Crunch, and Wired
to the MIT Technology Review and CNN.
The company went on to take top honors
at the IXDA Interaction Awards,
and more importantly, continues to scale their operations.
The Sensel story highlights our third principle,
prioritize progress over process.
Rather than adhering to a rigid process,
seek and exploit opportunities to move further faster.
New venture teams should jump ahead whenever possible.