Startups live or die by their ability to execute at speed

For large companies, too, the speed with which an innovation team is able to iterate has a huge impact on its odds of success.

Startups live or die by their ability to execute at speed. For large companies, too, the speed with which an innovation team is able to iterate has a huge impact on its odds of success. Generative AI makes it possible to quickly prototype AI capabilities. AI capabilities that used to take months can sometimes be built in days or hours by simply prompting a large language model. I find this speed exciting and have been thinking about how to help startups and large companies alike go faster.

I've been obsessed with speedy execution for a long time. When working on a project, I am loath to take two weeks to do something that I could do in one week. The price of moving at that pace is not that we take one week longer (which might be okay) but that we're 2x slower (which is not)!

When building an AI-powered product, there are many steps in designing, building, shipping, and scaling the product that are distinct from building the AI capability, and our ability to execute these other steps has not sped up as much as the AI part. But the speed with which we can prototype AI creates significant pressure to speed up these other steps, too. If it took 6 months to collect data, train a supervised learning algorithm, and deploy the model to the cloud, it might be okay to take 2 months to get user feedback. But if it takes a week to build a prototype, waiting 2 months for feedback seems intolerably slow!

I'd like to focus on one key step of building applications: getting user feedback. A core part of the iterative workflow of designing and building a product (popularized by Eric Ries in his book The Lean Startup) is to build a prototype (or MVP, minimum viable product), get user feedback on it, and to use that feedback to drive improvements. The faster you can move through this loop - which may require many iterations - the faster you can design a product that fits the market. This is why AI Fund, a venture studio that I lead, uses many fast, scrappy tactics to get feedback.

For B2C (business to consumer) offerings, here is a menu of some options for getting customer feedback:

1. Ask 3 friends or team members to look at the product and let you know what they think (this might take ~0.5 days).

2. Ask 10 friends or team members to take a look (~2 days).

3. Send it to 100 trusted/volunteer alpha testers (~1 week?).

4. Send it to 1,000 users to get qualitative or quantitative feedback (~2 weeks?).

5. Incorporate it into an existing product to get feedback (1 to 2 months?).

6. Roll it out to a large user base of an existing product and do rigorous A/B testing.

As we go down this list, we get (probably) more accurate feedback, but the time needed to get that feedback increases significantly. Also, the tactics at the top of the list create basically no risk, and thus it's safe to repeatedly call on them, even with preliminary ideas and prototypes.

Guest post by Andrew Ng.

Author

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