Pushing Vision vs. Listening to the Market with Martina Lauchengo

INTRODUCTION: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. Each day we welcome transformational executives to share their real- world experiences and practical advice about scaling yourself, your team, and your business.

Matt Blumberg: Welcome to The Daily Bolster. I'm Matt Blumberg, co- founder and CEO of Bolster, and I'm here today with Martina Lauchengco. Martina is a partner at Costanoa Venture Capital. She is also a partner at Silicon Valley Product Group and has had a storied career, if you don't mind me saying that.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you.

Matt Blumberg: Mostly in and around product marketing at some of the most iconic technology firms of our lifetime. So I am thrilled to have you here, Martina.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you, Matt.

Matt Blumberg: So the question that I wanted to ask you today for our audience is around the tension between founder vision or CEO vision and market reality. And it comes as first nature to most founders to lead with vision and try to push vision on the market. But there always comes a time where you have to listen to the market as well and let the market drive decisions in the company. And the conventional wisdom might be well, early stage, the founder is pushing, and then when it comes to incremental feature enhancements, it's more about the market. But I'm curious for your view on this. When is it right for the founder to push vision on the market? When is it right to listen to the market?

Martina Lauchengco: I have a strong point of view on this and I would actually say it is always critical to connect your vision to the market at all times. So it's not like, at this stage it's one and then another stage it's the other. I'll be specific about what I mean there. So when I was on the office team, they had a particular vision around how productivity apps like Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, the last two of which no one thought they needed because they're like, " I already have a word processor. Why would I need a spreadsheet thing for business analyst?" And presentation graphics was literally for some CEO doing a keynote. Nobody was using it. But they realized if they tied individual office worker productivity to, if you have these other tools that are already on your desk, if you know how to use one, you might actually find use in all these others. So Excel became the thing to do a lot of lists in project management. And PowerPoint is now used way more than Word is inside of companies because they tied it to office worker productivity. If you want to get the most out of your workers, if you have all of these tools on their desk and they know how to use... If they know how to use Word, they know how to use them all, then it actually could be adopted. If they'd just gone out to the world and said, " Hey, everyone should have all of these tools on their desks," people could of course inaudible say, " No, we don't believe that." So they had to couch it in a way that made the market realize that they needed this. And the way I might articulate that is right now, we're having this moment where AI is all anyone's talking about. AI is not new inaudible.

Matt Blumberg: And then some.

Martina Lauchengco: Yes. And AI is not the why. What it is, is what are people better able to do? What is the productivity enhancement that's expected now that we have this tool available to us? So if you attach into that wave of, how might I be doing my job better, and how you might be using connecting into that AI world so that people can be better and smarter because of this wave that they know they had to be taken advantage of, that is what makes people pick up their heads and pay attention. We just had a company in our portfolio, the Costanoa portfolio notable, that basically launched a ChatGPT plugin. And it wasn't about like, " Hey, we've launched this plugin. This is totally awesome." It was everyone's trying to take advantage of ChatGPT. There are all these plugins that let you actually enhance what you're doing so that you can take advantage of this incredible game- changing technology faster. And because they were the heart of this larger ecosystem and didn't just talk about themselves, they were talked about by Satya Nadella and by Sam Altman at OpenAI. And it got massively adopted so quickly because they were attaching to something that was bigger. So that's where, as long as your why is part of something that is market driven, then it makes it relevant to everyone. Your vision suddenly becomes relevant to everyone else. So my point of view is no matter where you are, attach into show why your vision is part of what is relevant to the market. And that makes it so much easier for people to pick up their heads and say, " Now I'm curious."

Matt Blumberg: And you think that's true even for the most wildly disruptive or groundbreaking things? Like if you think back to Mark Andreessen creating the first browser, there was no market. Same thing though.

Martina Lauchengco: Yeah. Tech today is a little different than it was then because it is now massively pervasive. And so it's easy to think, oh, if I have something totally disruptive and there's not this existing market, I need to create it. But you always have to insert why. Because at this point, we're displacing technologies or we're displacing the way of doing things. Where tech is already part of the picture. And so in that case, it couldn't just be like, " Hey, there's this cool thing that lets you navigate the web. Isn't that awesome?" It wasn't until there were websites that were worthy of navigating to, and people were seeing what they might be able to do with it, that it started to take off. So it really needed to be an and not an or where the necessary pieces of the ecosystem need to be in place for people to see, this is valuable to me.

Matt Blumberg: All right. Martina Lauchengco, thank you so much for joining us.

Martina Lauchengco: Thank you.