Episode 7: June 1-15: Corporate Restructuring

(This post is a continuation of my prior posts on the transition from Riya 1.0 to what comes next. The previous episodes are:
6 ,
5 , 4 , 3 , 2 , 1 .

Adam Lindemann writes on my blog here

Munjal. I really admired what you were trying to do both as an entpreneneur and a product developer and I am completely disappointed with both the new version and the change of strategy. I just don't agree with your thinking at all. Your comments about flexibility are noted but I think that you should have stuck to your guns and not just shifted with the wind (or the change in ussage statistics). In my book the flexibility you have shown was not courageous, sticking to your simple and original concept and being patient enough to invest the time and money in educating people about this would have been. I know that it is in vogue to listen to everybody and be responsive in real time but nothing great was ever built that way. You were an individual Munjal, who had some of the best forward thinking minds on your side, now you are at risk of being subsumed into the mire of collective mediocrity. Munjal - listen by all means - but don't forget who you are and don't forget your original concept for Riya - because it was divine.

Adam's passionate but balanced response made me pause when I read it. When you have users as great as him it makes changing strategies even harder.

It didn't stop there. Just because a CEO says turn right doesn't mean a comany turns right. Just after the board meeting we talked to the team about changing direction and most seemed to agree. Then slowly I heard bits and pieces of troubling concerns from key members. "Should we turn change strategies? Was the question I heard.

On June 2nd we put out the last Riya 1.0 major release we would do for a while.

Azhar wrote in email "

We rolled out the new build on Friday June 2nd. Congrats to everyone!!!!! + Special Thanks to RK who took over the charge of building out Software Validation and Release Engineering Group a few days ago and is primarily responsible for working with Dhiraj and others to roll out this build.

This only made things worse as the team was confused by the strategy and this legacy release.

Next we reviewed the landscape and realized that there were a few sites on the web that had prototypes of various forms of visual search. These sites were more demos than actual sites (in that they tended to only work on 50K images or so) but nonetheless it was clear we weren't alone.

By June 10th I was fed up and stressed out. I intuitively believed this new direction was correct but not all of the train was turning right.

I normally grind my teeth when I sleep if I'm really stressed and this time it was so bad I a headache from the tense jaw muscles shooting into my head. I spoke with Azhar and Burak and we all realized we were all really really stressed.

We realized that turning a company's direction this drastically was hard and eventhough we were the founders if we still only three people amongst 45 (this is one of the reasons I believe a company should not grow over 50 until has has found it's main business).

So we decided to have yet another company meeting ( we had already had two this week alone). This was kind of a "come to god" meeting. We opened the following:

"Team we three are really stressed and scared. This is the most stressed we've ever been in the history of Riya. We are scared because our 1.0 product didn't get us to where we wanted to go and yet we are not executing our Riya 2.0 strategy. It is the worst of both worlds." This was followed by a long pause. People looked shell shocked that the three of us were genuinely scared we would fail. This was a side we had never shown before. We said that we were going to pursue this and we needed their support to pull this off. If anyone was not on this "bus", they should get off now rather than slow us down.

The team rallied to support us. It was very touching. Neelesh (who is self confident and outspoken) spoke first. Don't worry guys we'll get there. Others chimed in. The rest of the meeting we talked about how we were going to win at this new strategy. Interestingly no one chose ot leave as a result of wanting to get off the bus (then and even over the last 5 months not a single employee has quit who was there on that day).

The next day I took the day off. It was Deven's 2nd Birthday. His party wasn't for a few days but I wanted to spend some time with him. We had a good day together going to the Children's
Discovery museum. Here is a photo of him blowing out his candles. I'm not sure how I would have gotten through this period without the life balance of seeing his happy little face every evening.

After that company it seemed like a whole new company. The office was humming again. People working late and in rapid fire we starting making a ton of decisions that shifted our focus

a) We started the search for a VP of Business Development to help us get distribution since search engines are not naturally viral
b) We divided our reserach efforts into three areas of image similarity: face similarity, object similarity, and scene similarity and assigned team members to each.
c) We outlined what Riya 2.0 would need in terms of a marketing team (not more just launch and pray for us...;-). We knew this time we needed both blogging and great search marketing folks. We crafted a 5 person team around this.
d) We looked at hiring key UI talent that we desperately needed (I even looked at buying Zooomr not for the site or technology but just for Kristopher Tate - who is a very talented designer. Of course the savvy Ron Conway managed to use this to sugget Zooomr was in play. Ultimately it didn't make sense to buy a company for just 1 guy - since I wasn't interested in the site).
e) The schedule got set and everyone started working away on Riya 2.0.

Finally we circled back with all the bloggers and reporters who had written about us and told them about our new strategy. This turned out to be really important. Michael and Matt wrote some great articles. This public broadcast was not so much for the outside world but rather for us. Sometimes one you tell others what you are doing you then have to do it...;-).

Now we were finally off. For those of you changing directions or restructuring - my lesson is that it takes time. We did it in the month which is still very fast but slower than if you were three people.

Comments

[Markus]

Interesting read, thanks for sharing.

But stating that Kristopher Tate "is a very talented designer" is hilarious.

I mean, you have seen the color scheme, logo and UI over at Zooomr.com right? I'm sorry, but pages like the one below make me want to gouge out my eyeballs. Talk about "design diarrhea":

http://beta.zooomr.com/photos/thomashawk/177138

Are you sure you didn't mean that he's a talented *developer* ? Because I certainly wouldn't argue with that.

;-)