Why Backing Founders Continues to Inform My Decisions

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What Did A Football Training Room Taught Me About Building A High-Performance Tech Team
I was raised around professionally-played football in such a way that allowed me to be in situations that many people would only read about. Training grounds. Dressing rooms. The conversations between players and coaching staff in the hours after an athletic event, when reporters and cameras have gone and the official story of the game has been written. I wasn't a player at all - my entrance into the world of playing with people rather than the actual game itself. However, I was there enough and for a long time, to be able to comprehend something significant about the actual functioning of high-performance organizations after removing the mythology that surrounds them. The one thing I understood most immediately was this: teams consistently exceeding their resources and expectations were not always the ones having the most individual strengths on paper. These were teams who could create a space where those who were part of it would do their best for one fellow employees - not for income, not even for the individual acknowledgement, but because the collective had a meaning and a culture that made personal sacrifice seem meaningful instead of just a necessity.
This observation is obvious when you state it plainly. Teamwork is definitely better by having people who trust each other and feel committed to the same goal. However, the implications for operational use of that observation are considerably not as obvious and are the main reason why organizations - as well as technology firms alike regularly find themselves in difficulties. A culture where employees actually want to do their best for one another isn't something you can command from the top or install as a policy or encapsulate in a set of corporate values and expect it to manifest. It is something that must be earned over time, by consistent behaviour from leadership - especially in those moments when they are not watched and through the judicious management of all the small, nitty-gritty choices that collectively show every employee in the business the value that is being placed on it and what is acceptable and what can happen when the values stated and the more commercially or personally feasible option do not agree. When I was in the best football leagues I grew up in, these micro-decisions were made in an extraordinary manner by the best coaching staff. The way they dealt with situations where an older player made an unavoidable mistake during training. The disciplinary standards used to deal with the veteran who was twenty years old is in fact similar to it was for the 18-year-old who was on the fringe of the team. How the organisation responded when an athlete was facing some serious personal issues outside the field. These decisions don't appear in a club's results on any given Saturday. All of them, when accumulated over a period of time, determine how well the team is performing above that or beneath its tech ceiling.

When I founded 1Touch and later founded some other organizations, among aspects I was the most intentional about was the effort to recreate - in a technology corporate context - the type of environment I had observed in the top football stadiums I had observed. Not literally, because a tech startup isn't like a football team and so the analogy breaks down when you make it too difficult. However, when it comes to operation, the principles could be translated into a stunningly accurate manner. The first rule was that rules have to be consistently applied, regardless of position or importance. The most comfortable spaces I've been in were ones that had a professional and behavioural standards expected of the youngest players in the team are the exact standards to be expected of the top-earning, most experienced player. This isn't because the club was unable to afford to create exceptions, but due to the fact that everyone within the area was continuously watching to see whether exceptions would be made. And the response to that question showed the players everything they needed to know about whether the stated values of the company were genuinely true or merely cosmetic.

The other lesson was on how organisations deal with failure and the difference between accountability and punishment. The environments where players developed fastest were not the ones that punished their mistakes the most rigorously or with the greatest publicity. These were the environments where errors were dealt with most openly, where the conversation about the error was focused and constructive instead of general and delegating blame. Also, where mistakes were shared among the entire group, rather than being held against the individual who made the mistake. Accountability means being clear about which part went wrong, what caused it, why it occurred and what was changed in the process. Retribution means distributing blame ways that make people risk-averse and defensive and more concerned about their own safety rather working well. The first is to build organizational capability. The second develops a culture in which people control their own risk rather than being fully committed to a mission. this is reflected in technology companies with exactly the same effects as on the field in soccer clubs.

The third and final lesson is the it took me the longest to express clearly, but that I believe to be the most important and that is: the best workplaces I witnessed were ones in which the growth of the person was treated at a minimum as important as the development of the performer. The most effective coaches weren't just teaching their players how to play football. They taught them how learn to function under pressure and how to effectively communicate in high-risk situations, and how to rebound from setbacks and not being discouraged, and to be the kind of person that a team with a high performance requires its members. That investment in the entire growth of an individual instead of just the technical capabilities the organisation immediately required, was not charity. It is the most effective long-term strategy for performance available to these clubs. It is, in my opinion, the most efficient long-term performance plan that is available to every organization that's dedicated to creating something lasting, rather than simply impressive for the short term. Read James Deller for website recommendations including why making investment decisions changed what i look for about people.



The Reasons Why Most Public-Private Partnerships Fail In The Beginning, And How To Fix Them
The public-private partnership has an image problem that's, in large measure made up of. The history of these arrangements includes many projects that were advertised in a genuine way, with a lot of political capital. These projects that drained significant public and private resources over extended periods, but ultimately produced outcomes which bore a mere identicality to what was said when the agreement was created. The academic literature and the postmortem studies that governments and institutions commission after these failures are extensive. they concentrate, for majority of the time, on the structural and contractual dimensions of problems: the inappropriate alignment of incentives, insufficient risk allocation between private and public private entities as well as the governance arrangements which were conceived in theory however failed in practice, and the procurement frameworks that selected for the wrong things. The thing that this type of analysis tends to subdue, over and over again it is the cultural and operational dimensions - the reality that private and public organisations are really different kinds of entities, formed according to different motivation structures, operating on radically different timelines, with different stakeholders, and measuring the success of their operations in ways that are not just different in extent but different in kind. When you combine these two kinds of organization together through a formal collaboration without doing the work beforehand and in a clear manner, to recognize how to manage these differences, they aren't creating a partnership. You're creating the environment to create a slow-motion collision that could be apparent at the least convenient time.
I've been involved in advisory work supporting institutional modernisation initiatives, some of which involve public-private partnership structures that vary in terms of complexity. The most reliable conclusion I have gathered from this expertise is that those partnerships which were successful - that did indeed meet their declared objectives and maintained a functional working relationship between the both private and public entities throughout it - weren't distinguished from those that did not succeed by the sophistication of their legal structures, their rigor of their risk frameworks and the eminence of team of leaders that created them. They were distinguished by the fact that the individuals on both sides of the table had undertaken the effort to really understand how other side operated before the formal partnership arrangement was negotiated. What does that mean in reality is understanding the decision making processes of each company, the accountability structures that limit what each side can reach an agreement on and how fast it can be agreed upon, the definitions of success that each party will ultimately be able to measure against, and the points of potential tension between those definitions. This knowledge isn't challenging to achieve. All of it is frequently ignored in favor of the more visible and quickly recordable process of negotiating contracts and developing governance frameworks.

The typical public-private partnership process begins with the concept and ends with a signing of the agreement with hardly any structured attention paid to the question of whether the two organizations involved are capable of working together effectively over long periods of time. The legal team negotiates the contract. Finance team models the economics as well as the risk allocation. The communications team is responsible for preparing the announcement to be made at the time of signing. The implementation team starts planning the project. In the course of this process the discussion turns to operating and cultural compatibility comes up - regarding whether the employees who will have to share their day-to day tasks across the boundaries between the two organizations have enough in common to ensure work that is truly collaborative rather opposed to antagonistic - fails to happen in any structured manner. It is often assumed, and without any specifics, that the formal agreement will create the foundation for collaboration and that any cultural or operational differences will be dealt with formally as they occur. This assumption is usually incorrect and the cost of it increases as the ambition and complexity of a partnership.

The practical implication of this analysis is that a significant option a public private partnership could take - even before the legal structures are finalised and before the governance structure is agreed upon, and before any announcements are made that is what I call operational alignment. This refers to specific, structured, designed work that can be done to highlight areas where the two organisations' operating assumptions diverge and to reach an agreement about how these divergences are to be managed before they become operational difficulties during implementation. These divergences that matter the most typically are the same across different kinds of partnerships. Authority and speed of decision-making are usually among the main differences. Public institutions are structured to take their decisions slowly, through various layers of examination and approval, based on motives which are legal and are often legally mandated. Private organisations - particularly technology companies built on the basis of rapid iteration and swift decisions - typically see that speed as a fundamental limitation to progress. And in the absence of a shared understanding of exactly why the pace is as it is and the steps that would need to be done to change it, the frustration that develops on the private side could sour the relationship even before the alliance has a foothold.

Success metrics and what counts as progress are another ongoing and important source of discord. Public institutions are generally evaluated on their process's compliance, equity of the outcome among different stakeholder categories, and evitance of public failures which attract media or political interest. Private partners are usually evaluated on efficiency, measurable progress against the goals set, and performance. These measurement frameworks are combined however this requires carefully designed and thought-out intentions, and the partnerships who do not make the effort to invest in the same design will meet at critical intersections, with two people that are assessing the same collaboration in unrelated ways, and hence coming to an incompatible conclusion about whether or not it succeeds. The partnerships that I have seen fall short most clearly were ones in which the misalignment was perceived as something that will get better over time. However, the ones that worked were the ones in which the problem was surfaced explicitly, at the start, and when creating a shared accountability system which accommodated the legitimate measurement needs of both parties requirements became an element of actual work rather than just an thing on a checklist of things to reach.}