Windsurfing problems
When I was about 15 I tried windsurfing for the first time. Since I was confident that I understood the basics of the apparatus from watching other people hold the sail in front of them and go forwards I hopped onto a windsurfer in a lake with some wind and went to sailing. As soon as I managed to get the sail catching some wind I started to realize that whatever I tried to do resulted in the windsurfer drifting downwind in the same direction. So those clever sailors must have known a trick for not only moving but also selecting and controlling the direction to move in. I had asked a friend before who mentioned that you can sail in a variety of directions into the wind since you can use some of the force goes into the direction while the rest does not. So I tried to will the windsurfer to do this by shifting my legs and twisting the board into the water at different angles but I still just drifted downwind. The unfortunate problem with this drifting downwind is that I would start in a location like the beach and dock and end-up in a location like the middle of the lake. The only way back was to paddle while sitting on the board which was both embarrassing and hard work compared to letting the wind take me home.
At the time when I was learning how to use this windsurfer the general design of a windsurfer was to have the surf board separate from a piece called the dagger board. This piece was inserted through a slot in the surfboard when the board was far enough into the water to not drag the dagger board through rocks, sand, and other hazards in shallow waters. The problem that I was having that led to the drifting randomly about was that I had left the dagger board on the beach. The result of doing this I learned after consulting an expert on why I was unable to get going in a direction of my choice.
I was thinking about this as I was losing sleep thinking about the direction of my latest software venture and obsessing about whether with the few resources we have whether we are really moving in the right direction and how to do so. The idea that I wanted to glean out of that old experience was that working on a new product in a new market with a new team is like trying to sail using the wind of opportunity (people willing to pay money for a product) in a lake (market) without knowing how to sail (sustain and grow the company in a coherent direction).
But of all the things to master the first one is how to take the opportunities available and direct the energy from them into a coherent purposeful direction. The requirement to do this is the business equivalent of a dagger board. The dagger board in a business sense is an evaluation and shaping process for how to approach opportunities where you already know where you want to go in general and then be able to take a portion of an available opportunity to move you there and leave the rest behind.
In our case we want to build out a great desktop organizer. Users have requested that in order to have a great organizer we need to integrate within their workflows. We have an OEM opportunity to help a certain type of users, public relations users, to use our product to integrate with a PR utility. The actual need from the OEM partner is only to use 10% of our product to accomplish their needs leaving the other 90% unused and also includes building out a bunch of areas in the product. So it is the equivalent of a nice breeze at about 45 degrees from our selected direction and course overall. But this is exactly what we want and it is hard to show using normal logic why that is an important way to press forwards.
The reality of sailing is that the wind rarely blows in the direction you are interested in going. If you want such luxury you should consider buying a motorboat where the force pushing the boat can be fully controlled by the driver. So finding angles that go partially in the right direction and partially nowhere are the rules of getting from point A to point B. Actually because a sail can either act like a balloon or a wing, the sailboat can go faster at 45 degrees to the wind than it can with the wind directly behind it. The reason is that with a 5 mile per hour wind behind the sail the boat can at most go 5 miles per hour. But with the wind running across the sail to create a wing there is a constant force and acceleration on the boat from the pressure differential in the wing without the issues of the wind itself creating resistance at the maximum speed.
So this is also an important area of interest with regarding setting a course with a company. The idea that you just pick a direction and select the opportunities that align with that direction is misguided. It doesn’t account for the areas where you could acquire constant acceleration, not bounded by the specific opportunity. Now there is no perfect angle with a business opportunity like 45 degrees to a sailboat but in that kernel there is the possibility to innovate by not looking only at the easiest direction. The equivalent of a wing for a product is an innovation like Dell selling direct while everyone else is selling through channels or Microsoft finding an OEM deal with IBM and then licensing the same OS to other PC manufacturers. There is a way to find within the off center opportunity a potential big gain and the available opportunities increase immensely when the acceptable angle to gather them goes beyond completely on course. So I think we need also to look at this opportunity and see whether we have a wing somewhere in it.
So I’m trying to sail off into the sunset with this latest venture and although I feel like I am drifting about in the middle of a lake I am confident that I know what a dagger board is and how it might get me where I need to go.