What does it take to build a billion-dollar business? In this talk, Founder Megan Caywood Cooper - ex-Chief Product Officer at Barclays, and recently ClearBank - explores what it takes to build a unicorn business from scratch, how to structure the product roadmap and align against other key milestones as a business, and in the process will bring this to life through referencing her own experience at Xero and Starling Bank as well as referencing other use cases in the industry.
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Build Turing Fest 2024
A Product Playbook to Building a Unicorn
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Hello. Good morning. Thank you all so much for joining me here today. It is an honor to be here having been to Bletchley Park before and seeing the amazing work that Turing and his colleagues did. And then, you know, just seeing how much it's traversed over the the last eighty years and yet how much we still have to go.
It's really exciting to be here, in that honor. So today, I'm gonna be talking about how to build a unicorn. To level set, I'm sure everyone probably knows, I thought it'd be really good to just, you know, level set on what a unicorn is.
So unicorn is a company that has at least a one billion dollar valuation by investors. Currently, there's twelve hundred of them globally. Statistically, I've seen it's about point zero zero zero zero six percent of companies become unicorns. This is people like Airbnb and Uber, all the ones that you would imagine.
And today what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna talk about ten key ingredients to building a unicorn. Before I dive into that, I'll give a quick intro to say a bit more about my background so you kind of know what right I have to talk on the subject.
So I started out my career in Silicon Valley working at a company called Intuit. They make QuickBooks and TurboTax. And I started there because it was advised to me that it was a best in class place to go to start your career if you wanted to become a world class product leader.
Because they have amazing product people you can go learn from, the best in Silicon Valley. So I went there and I started working on TurboTax to begin with, and then I went over to QuickBooks. At QuickBooks, I was very much focused on helping, the company scale it globally with a key focus here on the UK.
And then at that point, I was very early career. The key skill set I wanted to build, always knowing I wanted to be an entrepreneur, was I really wanted to build something from the ground up, see it from inception through launch and scale it.
But at Intuit, we were working on this QuickBooks payroll product for the UK. There was this new regulation coming into the UK called RTI, real time information. And it was gonna be implemented before the next tax year. So Intuit decided that actually for them, they needed to ensure they could get to market before that date.
It was very critical to do. So they bought someone here called Pay Suite, and my job suddenly changed from building this in house, to leading an integration. So I ended up reaching out to Xero, who some of you may know, they're a cloud based accounting firm.
They're also a multi billion dollar business now, but at the time they were this small scrappy startup out of New Zealand. And I knew they couldn't afford to buy anyone, so I reached out on LinkedIn. And in that, like, free message, you had, I forget how many characters, like, two hundred fifty characters or something.
I was like, if you need an expert on this from Intuit, like, let me know. And they reached out within a few hours. I ended up meeting them, and I told my boss at Intuit what I was planning to do. And my boss had come back to me, and he was like I had said to him, like, I understand why, you know, you want to buy Pay Suite, but for me, I really want the experience of building this from the ground up, so I'm gonna reach out to Xero.
So he came back to me the next day and he's like, we totally understand why you wanna go to Xero, but we're gonna try to have you sign a non compete so you can't because it's not very competitive. I like, oh god. So I reached back out to Xero.
I'm like, if we could expedite the interviewing process, if you're interested, that would be good. So I went and interviewed on Monday with like everyone. And by the end of the day, had an offer and I had put in my notice the next day.
So from like Thursday to Tuesday, I like switched jobs, like the fastest career switch in history. But at Xero, it was one of those moments when I was interviewing, there was five people around the table, like two VPs and some of the wider team.
And it was one of those interviews where I knew it was going really well because he stopped me and he was like, okay, what do we need to do to give in to you to come to Xero? And I was like, there's two things.
One, I wanna be able to own the UK product from the ground up. That's the key experience I'm wanting here. I'd spent a month in the UK doing this customer research. I'd done all this training to understand how to build it technically, and I wanted to really implement that.
But I was like, the second thing is that I want to know that whenever I'm ready to be promoted and to grow into a new role, that that opportunity will be there. Because at Intuit, it's an incredible organization, but it's a big corporate.
So you move kind of slowly. There's certain timelines for how you're promoted, whether or not you're ready to be promoted. And so he replies like, that's fine. You know, we're a young start up. New roles are opening up all the time. We can absolutely do that.
So true to their word, about four months in, I went from being the UK lead to being promoted to being a global lead and was overseeing, all four regions of development while still leading specifically on the UK. So I worked there for a while. We we built it.
We launched it. It was really great because if any of you know Xero, you probably know Gary Turner. And I had this meeting with him and a few others from our New Zealand team in our Milton Keynes office. And I was showing him this prototype I'd worked on with our designer.
And I remember at one point, were just like, this is amazing, but there's absolutely no way you can build that before the new tax year. And I was like, I am going to build it for the new tax year. Like, we will prove it to you. We can do this.
And sure enough, we did, and we launched it in February. Xero has this big XeroCon conference. It was my first time presenting on a big stage, and it was super exciting. And afterwards, they they have this awards dinner. And I remember they were just like, alright. You're right.
You did it. And I was like, thank you very much. And so it worked out really well. So that thankfully gave me the platform I needed to win what's called an exceptional talent visa to move to the UK. So you have to prove you built a number of products.
I had authored about five patents at the time. There was a you have to have like two c levels about three and say you are in fact very talented. And so that gave me that visa to come help start Starling Bank, which is important because the other visa types like the tier two general, it's like they have to prove.
They couldn't find anyone in all of Europe, so they had to fly you in from the US and it's very difficult to get. I cannot figure out how to do that one. So I got the talent visa and then joined as part of the founding team at Starling Bank.
And so there, we had a really crazy first round of funding. We had seventy million from a billionaire, which is quite unusual. And then, we unlocked in transit tranches. So we had three million to build the bank, another fourteen million once we got the banking license with restrictions, and then we got the rest of it when the restrictions lifted.
And so we built the bank in about a year, and then within two years of launching, it had a unicorn valuation. So for those of you who probably know Starling, Monzo, RevLoot, and the space have all done quite well, on that trajectory. So with that, I'll end there, and I'll start talking about the ten key ingredients to building a business.
And the way I'm gonna do it is through a series of anecdotes from each of these parts of my career. So hopefully that framework was useful. So to dive in, the first one is wow moments. So in building a unicorn or any successful product, feature, or service, the key thing you have to do is you really have to understand the pain points and problems with the status quo.
You really have to understand what's going on and how you can solve it uniquely well, such that when the consumer uses it for the first time, or the business owner, whoever your user is, the reaction is literally a wow. It should like take their breath away.
It should be such that they can't imagine going back to the old way. So an example of this is when I was first at Intuit working on TurboTax. This was back in two thousand twelve. Mobile at the time was just like kind of in that j curve where the hockey stick was hockey sticking, but it wasn't, It was not our main channel yet, but we realized that mobile could do some really interesting things to help our customers.
And the main pain point we had at TurboTax was the entire process. Like people hate filing their taxes. There's nothing about this that people enjoy. And so we realized that for many of our users, they're what's called a simple standard filer. And so that means all they need to file their taxes is a w two and answer a few questions.
It's very straightforward. And And for those individuals, it's not like real time information in the UK. They're actually overpaying on their taxes. So their biggest paycheck each year is their tax return. So being able to quickly do this and get the return is a really big win for consumers.
So the wow moment we found is we could use mobile to let them just take a picture of the w two and answer a few questions all from an app and file their taxes in less than five minutes all from their phone, and it was a huge win.
Similarly, at Xero, they were looking at when they were starting out in New Zealand, they knew they wanted to disrupt accounting and they wanna do it with cloud software, and they could see there was one mile moment which was how accountants and bookkeepers could collaborate with small business owners, but they were looking through to find other wow moments.
To build a, know, a unicorn, a billion dollar business, you have to have multiple of these. Right? You have to, know, stack them as much as you can. And the other one they found was bank reconciliation. So that process of matching your transactions, invoices and transactions was so painful that people would report wanting to have a root canal instead of doing this.
Right? They would do it as infrequently as possible. And they found a way to gamify it and not do an auto matching in a way that the the consumer responses were crazy. They were like, I actually have went from like absolutely hating it to loving it.
I now do it daily. And so they really nailed another pain point. At Starling, it was more there were so many different things at Starling because banking was not yet competitive at all in terms of user experience with mobile. So the wow moments that we had were instead of going into a bank branch and spending, you know, an hour of your time filling out paperwork to open an account, you could open a bank account in less than three minutes from your phone, provision a card to Apple Pay,
transfer money onto it and get spending in less than five minutes. Similarly, at the time it was when transactions would come into your bank account two to three days later with some weird merchant name. And so it's like, we're gonna have it come in in real time, deduct from your balance so your balance is always accurate, and clean up all the merchant names so you actually know where your money's been going, and then categorize those transactions.
But consistently going through and trying to have this understanding of your customers, what's happening today, and being able to solve those pain points uniquely well that drives these wow moments. And the way you get to that is through deep customer empathy, really understanding your customer.
And through this, the companies I've seen to this best that grow to these multi billion dollar valuations, so they're unicorns or decacorns, they do extensive customer research. So Intuit, we would have two stages, qualitative and quantitative. When I was at TurboTax, they actually had, I think it was Wharton University who was doing a sense of like studying their research, understanding how they did their research so well.
They had this campus in San Diego and they had one entire building that was dedicated just to customer research. It was they would have a lot of those rooms where it's like two way mirrors, so the team could sit on one side and they would have the participant on the other.
And what they would do in the qualitative research is they would have this gold number which is eight people. You talk to eight people in-depth. And what you really are seeking to do in this first stage of qualitative research is just understanding the status quo for the next thing that you're building.
What whatever product or feature it is, how do they currently solve it, what does that look like, how can we improve it. So it started from their founder, Scott Cook, doing what they call follow me homes. And this is it doesn't sound a bit creepy.
It's kind of a a bit funny. But what he would do so he started QuickBooks or Quicken back in nineteen eighty eight, and he would literally watch people go to Home Depot, get the CD ROM off the shelf, go buy it, and he would follow them to the counter, be like, hey, can I go home with you and like watch you set this up?
And he would just sit there apparently, from what I'm told. He would sit there and watch them and he just wanted to see like, where are they getting confused? Like, what's going well? What's not going well? And then he would make a list of stuff to go back and work on.
By the time I joined, they're already like a huge they're like the incumbent. They're like the Barclays of like accounting software in the US. So they're very refined, but in TurboTax, they would do such extensive research. They would hook people up to galvanic skin response and heart monitors as they went through the tax software.
Galvanic Skin Response is minute amounts of sweat when you get stressed. So they're trying to see like what part of this product is still causing people anxiety and how do we double down on it and make it less stressful? Can we change the wording? Can we change the flow?
Like what is it that we need to do to improve this? And they just keep going back and back and back. Part of it is also because whenever you're doing anything impressive, whenever you're trying to do any big challenge, you're definitely gonna fail or have challenges.
So you just try to keep those failures as small as possible. So in the customer research, we would do lean experimentation. So you go in, you do the set of qualitative research with eight people, you write down all your hypotheses, how are we gonna solve?
Here's the pain points, how are we gonna try to solve them? And then you go back out and you rapidly test your hypotheses for how you think you're gonna solve it well. And then maybe it worked, maybe it didn't. And you take that back, you refine it a bit further, you go back out and you keep doing this to refine it over and over again.
And you refine it so you can have really good requirements. So that way when you're actually building, you don't spend a lot of time building something that you you don't know it's really gonna solve the problem or not. But then after you're in production, that's where they would switch into quantitative quantitative testing.
So that's all the a b testing you see. TurboTax was renowned for this in terms of product marketing. They had actually in the last speaker, if you happen to see him where he shows the old woman and the young woman, that's notably from a class, at Harvard by a guy named Dan Arieli, who's a behavioral psychologist.
They actually had him consulting on their team, But they would tweak everything. So when you go to TurboTax dot com, based off of who you are, your age, your income, your location, any information they had about you, you would see something else. So if you're an older individual, you would see one set of pictures like older individuals on the background.
If you're younger individual, you'd see something else. They would tweak, the color of the button. If it said sign up versus start now, they would optimize these things. The placement of the button on the screen. The pricing, like how many products they displayed and the pricing of each of them, they would optimize everything and drive huge amounts of revenue.
But in for a product perspective, you could also go in and change the flow to optimize the conversion funnel to help people get through it optimally. And so you can get into, like, this really fine tuning once you start AB testing in production, which leads me to the next part, which is high performing teams.
So in doing this, a key element of solving those moments, of getting the customer research, doing that really well, from inception through launch, you need to have collaborative teams. And that means you have product, you have design, and you have engineering all working on the table at once.
So when you're seeking to understand what the customer pain points are and to solve them, particularly, I'm gonna guess most of us here at TuringFest are working on tech businesses. It's really important to have that collaboration. Something that I found working in the bigger organizations is they tend to be more siloed in a waterfall.
And so you have product who's working really on strategy and on the requirements, perfectly refine that, and then hand it over to engineering. But the best teams who do this really well are collaborative from start to finish. An example of that is when I was at Starling, we were working on we had just built consumer accounts, then we had built business accounts, and then we're focusing on our joint accounts.
And we had this meeting between product, risk, and engineering. And Sam on our engineering team asked the question of like, what do we really need to prove to the regulator to open these joint accounts for our customers? And our chief risk officer replied, he's like, well, we just really need to have proof that these two people know each other.
That's like the key thing. And so Sam was like, well, there's this Google Bluetooth Nearby API. It uses four modalities. It does use Bluetooth, but also uses high frequency sound, Wi Fi, and something else. Would that be sufficient from a regulator's perspective that these two people are within the six foot radius of each other, that they know each other?
I'm like, yeah, that would tick the box. So we built it, so now when you go into Starling and open a joint account, it takes about thirty seconds. You're just there standing by the person you want to open a bank account with or a joint account.
You click open joint account, they do as well. Your two faces show up on the screen. You both click each other's faces, agree to the terms and conditions, boom, got a join account. And it's incredible because I was a product person, I was unaware of that particular API.
So I would have started thinking through it from a traditional perspective, maybe comparing it to what exists today and just trying to figure out how to optimize it. But it's really important that you have kind of the fusion of expertise on the table so that you'll have part of one good idea, someone else will have a part of the other.
You can really make some magic happen when you have that collaborativeness. The other thing that I've seen work repeatedly well is and it's like I I won't belabor the point because it's so overdone, but is properly run agile where you do have like biweekly backlog groomings and sprint plannings.
You do demos with the whole teams. It's great for not only transparency so everyone everyone can see what everyone's been working on, but it builds this one team momentum where when everyone across your teams has visibility into what's happening and being built, can really drive a lot of good conversations and serendipity and unification in the company that's really, really good.
So collaborativeness, diversity and and agile. The next one is around building efficiently. So there's a lot of talk about how you should, focus, how you can build to optimize. When I was into it and then at zero, it was actually one of the best learning experiences because they had similar talent, similar technology, but they had a completely different build approach and one was exponentially faster.
At Intuit, what they would do, so when we were scaling globally, is they had their US team over here working on the US. And they had this other team over here working on Canada. And they had another team over here that was working on Australia.
And then when the Canada team finished, they're going work on the UK. And what that meant is everything was sequential. It took about a year per region. That's why they decided to buy PaySuite because they knew it would take them about a year per region.
They just spent a year on Canada. They were going to have to spend another year on the UK, and it was too slow. When I went to zero, we were at a standing start for New Zealand and the UK. We were rebuilding Australia in a new architecture, and we'd launched a bit in the US.
US is very fragmented state by state, so we had a lot more scaling to go. And that's when their chief platform officer had the idea that instead of building sequentially, having all these different teams focusing on their own locations, that if they've all built concurrently, we would have exponential speed.
So what we would do is if one team built onboarding for the UK, they would build it for all four regions at once. Even though accounting and payroll does have local requirements, there's more in common that's different. So anywhere where we could compile the teams, we would do that.
And we launched, it took us about eight months to build what it took into about four years to build because the efficiencies were huge. And so that's where one of the key things I found is if you can get that momentum, you can build efficiently.
If you know the end you're targeting, you get huge speed. At Starling, we did the same strategy. So we were building for the consumer product first, but we knew we wanted to be be direct to consumer as well as b to b as well.
And so we built with b to b in mind at first as well. So it took us a little over a year to fully launch the consumer account, but then from the day we started writing requirements to the day we launched business accounts, it was only three months.
And then from the day we started building joint accounts to the day we launched was just three weeks. And so you get this huge gains in momentum if you build efficiently. I have a huge bias here because I know some people like to move fast and break things and hard code.
And I very much have not seen success in that in my career. So I love to build with the end of mind, build intelligently, and build strategically. The next part is deep competitor knowledge. So Intuit, they would do war games with zero, like, actually, like, thinking through, like, what are they gonna do?
How are they gonna move into this market? What advantages do they have? And how will they use that to gain advantage here? At Starling, as you know, you probably all know the story between raise your hand if you know the story between Monzo and Starling.
So some people so effectively, Anne Boden is the founder and CEO of Starling. So she's starting this up. She's this female founder. She's had this brilliant career in banking. She hires a guy named Tom Blomfield from GoCardless to join her. They start to form a team.
You can read the book or listen to the podcast. I won't go into it. But suffice to say what happens is Tom and the entire team leave to go start Monzo, her biggest competitor, and she's left standing alone. Right? So it creates a lot of tension, as you can imagine, competition.
So when I came in, was joining her post that departure to form the new founding team. And so we would constantly though be watching like, what are they doing and with what effect? They started out as a prepaid card. And so they had a bit more in market before we did.
So there was a lot we could learn. But when we went, we quickly overtook them on a few different features and services. And we were constantly reading their forums and their social media, reading our customers comments and what people were thinking. Because the reality is back to that point earlier where you're going to make mistakes and fail, the great thing is it can be other people's failures.
So as much as you can learn from what others are doing and with what effect and really internalize that and in adjacent industries as much as you can about anyone in fintech that you can learn and bring in is a huge win. So that is something that we definitely leaned into a lot as well.
The next ingredient is reducing friction to increase conversion. The power of friction is so huge, but it's like the more steps people have to take, the more you're gonna get attrition through the conversion funnel. The thing that I wanted to note here though that's quite unique is for those who are in fintech.
So typically friction conversion, there's lots of studies on this about how the small amounts of friction reduce people from taking out the product. There's actually a great TED talk by Dan Aureli if you want to deep dive into this, so I recommend that.
But in fintech, there's actually a goldilocks of friction in the process. And the story I wanted to reference is one when I was at Intuit and we were working on QuickBooks payroll and we had done this consumer research and we found our insight was people wanted to pay their employees on the same day that they ran payroll.
So what that meant is that we're like, our hypothesis is time to pie in less than five minutes. They need to be able to start using this product and pay their employee less than five minutes. Let's go. Let's try to do that. And so we achieved that.
We worked with compliance. We took out everything you absolutely did not need for the first pay run. That even included things in the US like the social security number. You need it for the second pay run, you technically don't need it for the first one.
So we're trying to make it as fast as possible. And then we put it back in and we did some rapid usability testing. What we found was conversion funnel was just as bad as the first time because people would fall out. Then when we asked like, did you why did you follow the flow?
I'm like, well, didn't ask me for my social security number. I know you need to ask me for this product is not built correctly. And so we're like, oh crap. People have expectations for how financial products work. So it can't just be as fast as possible.
You also have to understand if there's certain expectations that consumers have that are important for the trust of the product or be able to communicate like, you don't have to enter this now. You enter it in the second pay run, but you can put point in line kind of information to try to make it faster, but help them feel like they understand what's happening at the same time.
The next one is strong distribution hooks. Now this one's really great if you're working on something in the consumer space because everyone's like, ah consumer is so hard and the customer acquisition costs are always so high. This can be true, but there's are ways to mitigate that.
And so ideally you'll have multiple of them. A few really great examples are Robinhood in the US, Clio, formerly of the UK now of the US, and Revolut, I would suggest. So on Robinhood, if any of you are familiar, they do fee free, stock trading.
They came to market years ago in the US, and they were very, famous for building up a wait list of over a million people before they launched, which is huge. And some people now retrospectively will say like, oh, it's because they are doing fee free stock trading and that was so compelling.
But that's not actually the case. Others were actually doing it. They weren't the first. Like Zecho had already done it quite notably, but they just didn't have the same distribution hooks. They gamified this wait list, referrals, and how people moved up. They used certain behavioral economic strategies that were super powerful with how people could move up the wait list through referring friends, and they did a really, really brilliant job of it.
A few of the key things are usually around behavioral economics, so the kind of work that Dan Ariely does. Some of the things that Revolut will do is they'll, similarly, they had a wait list. The more you referred friends, the more you move up that wait list.
Sometimes there's economic incentives. So intermittent reward and lotteries are hugely addictive, but you can make people addicted to also positive financial behaviors. But Revolut has used it in terms of, and Clio as well in terms of saying like, oh, might win ten to five hundred, dollars in the US for referring a friend.
But it's like you may or may not, and it's like some unknown size. But they'll try to use these triggers to help create kind of a motivation, a lottery, and a wait list. Other hooks can be around the product differentiation. Others can be around referrals and gamified wait list, but you usually wanna look at a few of those.
The one that Xero used a bit differently was they found that in UK, New Zealand, Australia in particular, the consumer behavior was that they would actually small businesses to get their accounting software would go to the accountant to ask what to use. It was a more common approach.
So they actually targeted, their product is b to b instead of just d to c. And they found they had this amazing bookkeeper and accountant, channel model to scale. So you get one accountant and they give you your whole set of clients and that way you scale much more quickly.
This doesn't work as well in the US where small businesses tend to be of the mindset that if they can do their own build their own business, they can do their own books. So they typically use an accountant less frequently. So there can be regional differences.
But another really good way to look at distribution is can you go through a B2B route as well? Is there a way that you can scale more quickly through B2B2C to look at helping you to reach scale more quickly? The next one is well written requirements.
I have seen this on so many teams. It's fascinating how it can slow you down if you don't have by the time you're in the process of building, you're in the sprint, if you have requirements that are unclear that the developers don't understand, it still says copy TBD, there's so much churn and slowness that happens when you have to go back and forth between teams.
And this just escalates when you're in a big corporate like Barclays because there are so many processes and bureaucracy for getting things signed off. So some of the principles I have around well written requirements are they have to be very specific. They have to be very, very clear.
And they have to be what I call atomic or small and digestible. So for me, I've always loved working in Jira. But you have your Jira backlog. You have all of your tasks. Ideally, your story pointing using Fibonacci numbers, you know, one, three, five, eight, nothing.
If it's an eight or bigger, you break it down. And effectively in that, each bit that you're building should take them no more than a few hours to build. You have your acceptance criteria. It's extremely clear what you need to build. If there's a design element to it, the design is attached.
It references a confluence that gives you all the details. You can also use a user story just like help level set people on, you know, what you're trying to do. You know, as a blank, I want to blank so that I can blank.
Some people really like the given, when, then approach. But being as clear and specific as possible as to what needs to be built, any copy that needs to be refined is refined. And then also, if you happen to be in a position where you're very early stage and you're moving quickly, but you're building something, you're in a sprint.
And I've had this happen before where an engineer will come to me be like, oh, know that we're building it this way, but actually it would be faster and better user experience if we put it in a modal or whatever. And then you have the designer come over and you're all sitting there and you're like, yeah, actually that's better.
Then if you're having now a lot of people do more automated testing. But if you have manual testing, if you don't update the requirements, then your QA is going to struggle and there's going be more churn there. So ensuring that if requirements do change worst case scenario, make sure to update the requirements in the story like ASAP and don't leave that.
Otherwise, it'll just slow things down more. So it's really one that's really important for speed, but just high functioning and ensuring people have momentum and feel good about their work. There's another element to well written requirements and small and digestible stories, which is just around helping people feel like they're making progress.
If you have something that takes too long to do or that you have to keep going back and forth to clarify information on, It just slows things down and it kind of reduces the speed and the vibe, I guess, of the team, you could say.
The next one is timing. So this one, there's also a really great TED Talk on this, so I won't belabor this too much. But I found it fascinating, so I want to share this because I've seen this very much in my career as well.
But there's this fascinating research they did where they looked at of the most successful companies, of the unicorns, what was it that made them a unicorn? Was it their vision, the idea that they had? Was it their business model? Was it their funding and investor?
Was it the team? No. None of those things were the defining factor, was actually the timing of it. So they found that there was basically YouTube that came to market before YouTube, it's just it was the technology was a bit immature and it failed.
And they go through in the Ted talk, won't belabor it here, it's very interesting to watch, Where they go through and they look at a number of different case studies where one came to market, thing, and Instagram before Instagram failed. YouTube before YouTube failed.
And the timing is a critical factor. And so what I've seen in the company I have now, Kaywood, it's a wealth tech. But one of the key reasons why I'm starting it now is the maturity of the technology and AI and APIs is just now mature enough to really land this successfully in a way that you couldn't even a few years ago.
So you can look at the technology maturity or the consumer maturity. How has the market changed to give people an increasing need for your product or market? And the last one, it's a bit of on the softer side, but I think it's so critical.
So I wanted to add it in, but it's a winning mindset. And it's not just a winning mindset, but it's grit. And building anything, there are going to be so many challenges and that you can't predict. And the companies I've seen be the most successful and the teams I've seen be most successful are those who are continually resilient and stick with it despite the challenges.
I think sometimes on the outside looking in, it's that classic thing where people look like the overnight success. They make it all look super easy, but that's never the case. The ones who are successful, it's not like they're just brilliant in getting everything right and they don't have challenges.
It's just that they stick with it and they keep trying. And they find ways to mitigate it by moving faster, finding ways to fail smaller, and being able to keep going. I had a friend, a designer on my team at Xero who he went to Airbnb and after his first week at Airbnb, he calls me up on like Friday night and he's just telling me how his first week had been.
And he's like Megan, you're never gonna believe it. On Friday, we have this all hands and we get up and literally CEO says, okay, who has failed this week? Someone tell me about what you failed this week. Because apparently at the time was like a weekly routine they did.
Someone would get up and be like, so this week I failed at doing this. I thought this and we tried to test it and it completely failed and everyone would clap. And so it's that thing where it's like you're trying to build this resilience muscle, figuring out ways to take on challenges, keep mistakes small, understand that if you're pushing the envelope and doing something different enough and innovative enough, challenges come up.
But trying to figure out a way to make that work for you in terms of lean experimentation, in of being gritty and resilient. And I really think at this point in my career when it comes to winning, it's eighty percent psychology and twenty percent mechanics.
And in terms of the team dynamics, you know, especially in a small small startup where you're building a unicorn from scratch, Making sure everyone's really bought into the vision, has that conviction, has that kind of high energy and the passion for the product, so that they can take that on has been so important.
So with that, I'll end here. I am a minute early, so I think I caught us up on time for the last one. But thank you so much for your time today, and I appreciate you coming to my talk.