Getting2Alpha
Getting2Alpha
Tim Chang on the Rise of Transformational Tech
Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now, here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim.
Amy: Tim Chang is a polymath, a longtime burner, an accomplished musician, and a forward looking VC who invests in the positive side of technology.
As managing director for Mayfield, Tim blends his background in engineering and business development with a customer first approach to supporting breakthrough products and services.
Tim: My dad, you know, is a professor of chemistry, and I have noticed with pure scientists and researchers, they have this interesting notion of loosely held, uh, ideas, uh, but the immense curiosity and the data.
And so I, I find this interesting part of human behavior, true scientists, even if their career was built on a [00:01:00] thesis around a certain, you know, hypothesis or theorem that they came up with. The day that it's disproved by another scientist, a true scientist will say, thank goodness where my theory has been destroyed, but we're one step closer to the truth.
Whereas a lot of folks, they might find that threatening because it just means that your identity, your life's work has been assaulted, right? And so sometimes we wrap up our identity with what it is we build or our theories that we have, they don't play out to be true. It's almost like our identity has been destroyed.
Whereas the truly curious have this notion of like strong passion for what they're trying to do, but loosely held notions of what they're going after. Everything is hypothesis until proved or disproved by data.
Amy: I've worked with Tim several times. It's always a pleasure. And I'm always inspired by our interactions.
Listen in and get a taste of Tim's mind, expanding ideas about how to create deeply engaging experiences.[00:02:00]
Welcome Tim to the Getting2Alpha podcast.
Tim: Thank you. It's an honor to be here.
Amy: I'm thrilled to get to talk to you. So you've been working at the forefront of innovation, really investigating. Fascinating things for so many years. Let's take a moment for those who aren't familiar with you to wind back.
How did you first get started in design and tech? What was the spark? And then what were those pivot points where you decided what you were going to pursue along the way?
Tim: This actually dates back to 1980, 81, you know, I'm like nine years old or so. My dad brings back an Apple two computer. I said to him, dad, I want to play games.
And he said, Hey, it's, this just came out. There are no games or game companies. He checked an Apple soft manual at me and said, why don't you learn to make something? And that was my entryway into learning the program. So I didn't learn the code because, you know, this term coding wasn't a thing. I just wanted to.
and, and like little movies on the apple too. And that's how I got into it. And what started off that sensibility on the design side is, you know, we were kind of poor immigrants growing [00:03:00] up. Um, my dad was still getting his PhD and we're living in student housing and all the kids around us had these cool board games, you know, like battleship and things like that, and we couldn't afford them.
And so I would go home and try to copy them by. Drawing them on graph paper, cutting out the paper, Elmer's gluing it onto cardboard and sort of trying to make my own basically janky homebrew versions of these games. And what was fun with that was I noticed that you didn't have to just follow the same rules that came with the Milton Bradley version.
You could make your own. And so the first one I attempted was a version of Battleship where you can actually move the ships around. And, and, you know, it was so much fun because it made you have to think about how do the rules work? How do you make sure it's fair? How do you, you know, convey the right information, those sorts of things.
So maybe from an early age, it was kind of this do it yourself mentality out of necessity.
Amy: Wow. Now, where were you growing up? What town was this in?
Tim: I was an academic kid. So on the road to internship, we've lived all over. It was Irvine, Los Angeles, Seattle, Long Island, Taiwan, Vancouver, ultimately Michigan.
[00:04:00] Most, uh, mostly in East Lansing, Michigan, where my dad finally landed at Michigan State University.
Amy: Wow. And then how did that evolve into what you're doing now?
Tim: Um, lifelong love of games, entertainment, um, graphic design, posters, comic books, graphic novels, anime, manga, science fiction, um, all those sorts of things.
So that, Kind of sparked a natural resonance with engineering, especially, you know, computer science, electrical engineering, when I got to college, you know, I always grew up loving anime and manga, so I had a secret minor in Japanese, too, because I was always inspired by samurai culture and anime, manga, and also Super Mario Brothers, because when I was a kid, I got a copy of the Nintendo Famicom.
But it was all in Japanese. They hadn't localized it yet. So I couldn't read a thing of what was happening in that and they got to the end and Mario has this big message to the princess and I remember thinking someday I'm gonna go back and learn what the heck he said. Except by the time I learned Japanese my video game skills were so bad I couldn't complete the game anymore.
Amy: So then how did you navigate your way [00:05:00] into being a VC?
Tim: It was pretty haphazard and accidental. I didn't even know what venture capital was at the time. I started off as an engineer working for General Motors, a test driver on cars out in Asia. At night, I was hacking away. The internet had just been created, so I was trying to create like Japanese versions of Craigslist and stuff like that with friends.
I eventually got recruited to Gateway, the computer company, and accidentally fell into the marketing side because they need their product manager. Who spoke English and Japanese. So I wasn't qualified. I just inherited it battlefield promotion style. And then I got turned on in the world of business, which I never thought I would be into, but marketing was especially interesting because their marketing and tech company was the intersection of the technical side.
As well as the product thinking side and then the creative side. And so, you know, kind of scratched all the itches for me. There was some geeky tech, there was a lot of storytelling. Um, there's a lot of creativity. And so at night I'd find myself at tower records, the only English bookstore in town, reading things like Harvard business review and realizing, Oh my gosh, they're talking about stuff I deal with at work.
And that kind of led me into [00:06:00] wanting to actually learn business. So I repatriated in 99 to get an MBA at Stanford and that's how I got recruited in the venture capital industry. I just sort of accidentally happened to have the right background of, um, EE background, you know, uh, product marketing, um, engineering, uh, operational background, and got recruited into it, not knowing what I was getting myself into.
Amy: Wow. So you've now worked for several different firms and you've seen a lot of pitches. You've invested in a small handful of those pitches and you've gotten to see how things progress. What do you wish that you had known earlier that you know now about what makes innovation succeed?
Tim: And you know a couple things that ultimately a lot of it is around people people people and so You know when bcc team first it really does mean something You know team can sometimes mean what's your track record?
Were you a founder of a big hit before and that's always something people chase but for first time founders There's more of [00:07:00] an x factor that I think people are talking about when it's the team and talent they're chasing You know how you You get a lot of information even from first impressions, sometimes you can sense that X factor of people, even in the first 10, 20 minutes.
And so even though, you know, we'd like to say we rely on a lot more data analysis and whatnot, I still get the sense that just like speed dating, you know, in the first 20, 30 minutes, your gut kind of tells you if you want to work with these people or not. The other thing I wish I had known is that there are different motivations for founders to build companies.
And so there's a lot. I'm sure psychology that actually goes into it. And a very important question is, why are you building what you build? And there's a variety of reasons. They're all legit. It's just, there's different motivations, uh, different, you know, kind of mentalities for this. One person might say, I want to build a unicorn.
I'm financially oriented. One person might say, I want to be on the cover of tech crunch. Um, you know, another person might say, I just want to build this cause I want to use it. So, you know, any of those legitimate reasons, but it's really important to know. The motivations, the founders, because at the end of the day, a [00:08:00] startup company is actually nothing more than an extension and representation of the founder's values, personality, you know, culture and motivations.
Amy: So let's dig into that a little, you see a lot of teams here, a lot of pitches, and then you choose to work with a few. So what are some of these signals? You look for when investing the things that pull you in. You're talking about this gut sense of a team founders' values. What are some signals, you're listening to a pitch, you know, one of many, and you start to lean forward.
You start to get pulled in. What are those moments?
Tim: There's two or three specific ones. One is deep curiosity, kind of like a a, a pure scientist. My dad, you know, is a professor of chemistry and I have noticed with pure scientists and researchers. They have this interesting notion of loosely held ideas, but the immense curiosity and the data.
And so I find this interesting part of human behavior. True scientists, even if their career was built on a thesis around a [00:09:00] certain, you know, hypothesis or theorem that they came up with, the day that it's disproved by another scientist, a true scientist will say, thank goodness where my theory has been destroyed, but we're one step closer to the truth.
Whereas a lot of folks, they might find that threatening because. It just means that your identity, your life's work has been assaulted, right? And so sometimes we wrap up our identity with what it is we build or our theories that we have. If they don't play out to be true, it's almost like our identity has been destroyed.
Whereas the truly curious have this notion of like strong passion for what they're trying to do, but loosely held notions of what they're going after. Everything is hypothesis until proved or disproved by data. That's one element I look at. The second one is deep self awareness, uh, blind spots. Not everybody can be good at everything and it's, it's a superpower to know what you're good at, but also what you're not good at, because it means you'll hire for that.
And so, you know, those are things I look at quite deeply and a lot of them, it really does tie, I think, to self awareness.
Amy: That's great. That's really powerful. [00:10:00] So on the flip side, what are some of the red flags? that make you catch yourself short and kind of push you away. If you're listening to a pitch, meeting a team, what are some of those signals that make you stop in your tracks?
Tim: Actually, one of the most powerful things to convince me is when founders know when to say, I don't know. And then an even more impressive answer than I don't know is, and here's how I might test that a lot of times. I, you know, I know we all put on a game face and we're doing our best to look like we are buttoned down and have the answers and I'm going to crush it, but you know, trying too hard to have all the answers when truthfully, most of the data is usually fuzzy and everything has a lot of hair on it is less convincing than knowing when to say, I don't know.
But, uh, also how to test for it. I think the second thing too, is when we fall in love with our mousetrap, it's settled saying when you're hammer, everything looks like a nail, you know, if we fall too much in love with the new approach that we've come up with, because it makes sense to us, it can shut off empathy for end users who might not have the same perspective.
So, you know, I get a red flag when users [00:11:00] or sorry, founders get too married to their own idea of how the world should be. As opposed to the key burning question, what does my end user want? Why aren't his or her frustrations?
Amy: That ties in so deeply with what I've learned about successful innovation. So that's, that's great triangulation and really valuable for folks to know about when they're talking to investors.
So I know you're a very product oriented person and you love games, you love products, you use a lot of products. What are some of the common mistakes that you see first time founders in particular, but all entrepreneurs making when they're in the really early stages of bringing their ideas to life?
Tim: You know, a couple common stakes.
One is over designing and over engineering. It's almost like getting too invested in your hypothesis before you've had some data to test it out. And, you know, I get why when you've thought deeply about something and you've worked out all the angles and you're seeing the 10 year vision for where it could go, you want to do it all now.
And you've, you know, designed this elegant mousetrap, but You know, [00:12:00] if you haven't bounced it off actual end users and left room for them to have their own experience and journey with it, then you might be missing out on some key insights, especially as what the end user is looking for, or, you know, their existing workflow or expectations that you're trying to change.
You know, that, that second part is expectation of changing user behavior that's baked in. That could be a common mistake as well. Again, it's back to the, this is so elegant. Why doesn't it doesn't make sense unless everybody does it this way. But you might be assuming that people are going to give up processing systems, tools, workflows, ideas they already have, and switch over to your thing.
Be taking me here to change is actually one of the trickiest things out there.
Amy: Yeah, it's so much easier if you can figure out how to piggyback onto a habit they already have.
Tim: Right, exactly.
Amy: You know, you know, and I know it's really tricky to build something that's innovative and successful. It's like walking a tightrope.
You need this almost paradoxical blend of really strong [00:13:00] vision with a smart reaction to feedback and that eager curiosity to find out what's wrong as well as what's right with your idea. So in doing this product teams get a lot of feedback along the way. From their stakeholders, from their customers, from this group of customers, not that group of customers, from all different kinds of people.
How do you help the teams that you work with identify who to listen to, who to tune out when they start getting these fire hoses of feedback?
Tim: You know, there's a couple things I've seen. Sometimes there's this, um, affinity bias where we tend to over index on people who look or talk like us and really take their feedback into account.
And, you know, VCs are guilty of this too. If we give feedback, say I would never use that, but we forget a lot of VCs live in fancy places and have nannies and all sorts of other support services that regular end users might not. Right. And then again, that's lack of empathy for, uh, maybe. More mainstream users or let's say you're aspiring to have, you know, high income earner users, [00:14:00] but the early signals are maybe it's a different type of demographic.
Maybe you've attracted, um, uh, inner urban millennials. Instead, we've had many companies that they kept on focusing on who they wanted their end users to be as opposed to who was actually adopting it. And by doing so, they were actually missing the opportunity to super serve the people gravitating towards the product.
Amy: Again, it really dovetails with what I've seen as a blind spot that keeps people from succeeding when they don't really say, who is the audience and how can, you know, how can we serve them? And sometimes people don't want to serve them. You know, because perhaps it's not a good business model?
Tim: Right. Or they don't self identify with that segment, right? You know, there's some concrete examples back in the day when boost started, peter adderton w to surfers and extreme at inner inner city youth st and at first they resisted. Put their marketing tagline around it.
And then it really exploded. Um, so as an example of embracing the users that are you're attracting, [00:15:00] I've seen some other examples to where when you have products that have multiple stakeholders, let's give an example. Let's say you have a service that is helping local merchants with loyalty in their stores.
You think your customers, the merchants or the store owner, Okay. But the actual user might be, you know, the high schooler working the counter. And if you haven't taken into account what that his or her day is like and what friction or delight you're adding to that person, you might never get adoption, even though, you know, that merchant has bought your solution.
Amy: Exactly. That is such a great point. So I think one of the strongest things that entrepreneurs can do is really understand The daily life and the habits and the existing habits and pain points of the people who are their actual customers, which is in a nutshell, what you're advocating. That's what I hear,
Tim: especially in these service marketplace businesses, which are all the rage today, sort of Uber or Lyft of the name that one thing we found your first customers actually the worker.
So, in the [00:16:00] case of a Lyft or Uber, your real customers first, the driver, and if they're not wildly happy. They're not going to deliver a great feeling service to the end rider. So you have multiple customers and you want to sequence it right. But, you know, my advice is, boy, you know, founders, they should get in the seat and, or in the shoes of the workers and experience what a few days of that lifestyle is to actually know what the real workflow is like.
Amy: That's great. That reminds me of what I learned on, in the early days of eBay. When I was working with them, we were actually really focused on the sellers. And seller experience. I mean, we also cared about the buyers, but the work I was doing was really focused on understanding and servicing and removing friction and delighting particular sellers.
And man, they were an interesting group, right? But yeah, it's exactly the point you're making. And that's part of what's tricky about marketplaces is you really do have to think through and understand both sides and make roadmap strategic decisions about where you're going to focus when as you're bringing it to life.[00:17:00]
Tim: That's right. And that's something founders sometimes forget about is you might think you're doing a two sided marketplace, but in actuality could be a three or four sided marketplace. You just never want to ignore all the different stakeholders in the marketplace because each one of them, their centers need to be aligned to make the whole thing fly.
Amy: Looking at all the projects that you've worked on and the experiences that you have, what do you feel is your sweet spot or your superpower as a creative person? What are the things and projects that light you up the most?
Tim: This is going to sound a little out there, but I loved services and products that let every user, every person involved feel a little bit like a mini superhero and tell their story a bit better.
And what I mean by that is, let me give you an example. You go to Whole Foods and you're going to buy honey. Any of us have one or two honeys. They have 30 of them and each one of them might be, you know, 15, 20, but they all have a unique story. And so you might buy the one made by, you know, bees in Portland that [00:18:00] practice tantric yoga or whatever.
And we buy it. It's not just funny. You proudly put it on your dinner table, hoping someone will come and say, what is that honey? So that you can tell the story behind it. Cause that story resonates with you in a little way. You're telling your own personal story through that product story too. So I think one of my favorite areas is drilling in and figuring out.
Hey, how does the service or product elevate the story of the end user? You know, because, um, I feel like especially with the millennial generation, we're about experiences rather than consumption. We're about stories rather than marketing. And so, you know, how do you design for each service or purchase or transaction to allow users to, you know, feel better about their story?
Share their story, understand their own story better, shape it, something like that. It's, it's kind of like a, I don't know, I like to say we're kind of moving towards a story economy.
Amy: Wow, that's really interesting. I love that. So what are you paying attention to these days, Tim? What are you seeing that's exciting you in design and tech?
[00:19:00] There's a lot of trends going on. Which ones are you following?
Tim: Well, we're in the middle of some major platform shifts. Um, probably did post to app generation. We're potentially moving towards, you know, the messaging chatbot AI world, as well as, you know, what, what Amazon's doing with Alexa that is implementing the old Star Trek vision of do you remember computer do this?
You know, the computer is always on. It's in the cloud. It's listening, you know, we're moving towards that world. So I'm really fascinated by those kinds of like, uh, I guess we call them interface list interfaces now that are always on connecting every device, listening, collecting data around you. Um, and it's kind of bringing sci fi movies, the vision and movies like per.
Interstellar, et cetera, to real life. And so I'm really fascinated by that shift. Smart home is going to be one example of that. We've already got autonomous cars coming into the works. Now there's one area I think people aren't focusing enough on, but I actually think this notion of machine persona or machine empathy will be really important.
Human beings. We'd love to anthropomorphize our devices and technologies. So, you know, [00:20:00] it stands to reason someday somebody might even provide machine persona as a service, you know, Think a lot of nuance or something like that, you know, adaptive personas that remember you remember your interactions transactions with them.
Amy: Do you mean personas like her?
Tim: Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, many companies, they'll probably have a one size fits all personality, but the clever ones will realize, actually, some people might like a touch of sarcasm with their interface or a British accent with their device or, you know, Scarlett Johansson's voice on it, you know, whatever it is.
But it is sort of a natural evolution of where machine intelligence connected devices will meet. The human computer interface, I don't think we like one size fits all. We like things that mirror us, you know?
Amy: Wow. That is a rich and, uh, potentially minefield letter topic, you know? I mean, in gaming, we've been talking for many years about how much to make it clear who is a human and who's a bot.
Tim: [00:21:00] Right. And PCs versus other players, right?
Amy: You can blur the line or you can decide you're not blurring the line. That's a design decision.
Tim: Yeah, that's right. That's right. And you know, AI machine learning is going to get to the point soon where you could even do facsimiles of yourself and on the other end of a chat client or a mobile app, somebody might not be able to tell if it's you or your me bot interfacing with them.
Amy: Yep. It's a tempting, slippery slope.
Tim: Absolutely. You know where we'll see this first is actually businesses are already starting to adopt these agents and slash, you know, chatbot AI machine learning type of systems so they can automate and have always on things like customer service or sales support, you know, et cetera, through, you know, chatbots or messaging interfaces or other things that start to go to the line of if you're talking to a machine or a human or both.
Amy: Well, I can't wait to see where all this goes. Wherever it goes, you're going to be in the middle of it.
Tim: Um, I'll try.
Amy: So is there anything coming up on the [00:22:00] horizon for you these days that you want to tell us about that you're excited about?
Tim: We all know how machine learning AI is sort of the new boogeyman, both good and bad, that it's very powerful and could potentially be the last innovation humankind as we know it makes, right?
And we've got jobs transitioning to automation. We've got, You know, human jobs being automated away with a lot of projections are showing 45 percent of all jobs. Even the bc job could be automated by AI in the next couple decades. So something I really think heavily about is what are new kinds of work for us to do?
You know, do we all become like the residents in Wally on the space cruiser? Once we have universal basic income, we just get Or do we find more meaning? Maybe, um, you know, one upside scenario could be in ancient Greece. There was some forms of universal basic income, allowing people to focus on developing the arts and athletics and philosophy and mathematics.
And perhaps that will free us up to pursue our own, you know, hero's journey stories of things we're passionate about, but it's, [00:23:00] it's a bit of an existential question and it's something that technology is accelerating. And so, you know, this notion of the player journey, the storytelling design, the experience design, these are all pretty important.
And these are actually new core competencies. All our companies need in addition to data science and design and UX, these are all new skills that. I don't even think these majors exist yet in school, you know, things like data ethics or, you know, user experience design or engagement design.
Amy: I call the amalgamation of design thinking, game design and systems thinking, game thinking.
Tim: Yeah, I totally agree.
Amy: Everything I see says that what you're saying is true because the people that are on the forefront that are winning in 21st century innovation, they're using those techniques.
Tim: Yeah. And you know, thank goodness. There's people like you that are in this field along with near y'all and wonderful people that are really thinking about this and implementing it.
But one of my big fears is that we're going to need thousands of you. And [00:24:00] if every company is going to be one in house, you know, the schools today aren't necessarily training people for that future yet.
Amy: Well, there's educations being upended, and there's a lot of different paths now to get educated other than your standard university path.
So I can tell you that the stuff I'm doing, the stuff NEAR is doing, the stuff Udacity is doing, there's a lot of exciting innovation that's not necessarily visible. Broadly visible happening in education. So I actually feel pretty confident that people will be able to gather those skills and implement those skills.
I just don't know that it'll look like what education looks like right now.
Tim: Exactly.
Amy: Institution wise. It's a very exciting time, but it's a very unstable time. In education, and I'm sure there'll be a lot of pain along the way, but I think we're really shifting away from the 20th century model of mechanization and sort of preparing people for factories into something that's more [00:25:00] getting at what you were talking about throughout this whole conversation, Tim, which is that Thread of having an experimental mindset, having a hypothesis that you're eager to get data for and find out if it's true or not.
That kind of mindset doesn't really come out of traditional education, but it's now coming out of the way education's being revamped. We have kids in second, third, and fourth grade running experiments. Mm-Hmm. To see what's gonna happen instead of memorizing facts.
Tim: Yeah, you're totally right and you know, the day that you ever launch a Getting the Alpha Kids Edition, I'm gonna enroll my 4-year-old Ariel right away.
Amy: Awesome. That's awesome. I look forward to helping her world be a better place for when she grows up.
Tim: Yeah, yeah, they're gonna need it. You're right, because what we're teaching in schools today may not be as relevant in 10 years or 20 years in sort of a, you know, machine automated, um, connected intelligence world.
Amy: Ah, well, we will see. So, thank you so much for taking the time [00:26:00] today to share your stories. so much. and wisdom with us. It's been a blast.
Tim: Thank you. Always a pleasure.
Amy: All right. We'll talk soon.
Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter. Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast episodes.