Ethan Batraski: Being a Product Leader

Fast Frontiers was thrilled to host our recent guest, Ethan Batraski, to discuss a wealth of fascinating topics. Ethan is a product guru extraordinaire and a Silicon Valley resident VC, born and raised in the Bay area.

We kicked things off by asking Ethan how he first got started on his VC journey, which currently finds him acting as an early-stage investor to special founders with breakthrough ideas.

Ethan spent 15 years as a founder and operator before getting to where he is today. But even before that, Ethan’s passions were always linked to forging new frontiers and the magic and intrigue of possibility. Of his time in school, Ethan shared that he actually started his undergrad with a focus on astrophysics. The reasoning behind this decision was the pull that these unknown and untapped possibilities placed on his mind. Specifically, Ethan recalled being most interested in “the idea that we could push the boundaries of technology [and what was possible] and unlock abilities.”

Although his straight and narrow path toward astrophysics came to a quick end when Ethan dropped out of college to tackle his first startup, this VC star never stopped moving forward and forging ahead. His consistent upward trajectory is evident today: This star is consistently on the rise.

As Ethan has achieved great success, we wanted to take the opportunity to glean some wisdom from him. We asked Ethan specifically to go back to the beginning with the early startups and share any lessons he learned that might benefit us all on our own VC journeys.

According to Ethan, too often, entrepreneurs focus more on the solution than the problem: “It’s natural to fall in love with the solution because you’re excited about the construction and the art and the science of how it came together to solve this problem. But what happens is you eventually lose sight of that problem, and then the scope of that solution ends up drifting. As you drift, the effectiveness or the application of that solution to the problem starts to be less and less obvious or apparent.”

This is a big problem. Basically, if the product is your north star and not the customer, then you’re going to go off course and end up getting lost in the proverbial weeds.

According to Ethan, “It’s hard at the early stages when you’re going through the idea phase, but it’s important that you distinctly focus on saying, ‘Here’s a problem we’re solving. This is the thing we care about,’ and that problem always has to be very customer-centric to who you’re solving it for.”

Ethan also stressed the importance of understanding the market you’re going into, and ideally, being an expert in that market. This means that you will know who your competition is, what they are producing, what target customers are available, as well as being keenly familiar with the market dynamics. You have to answer questions like: What are the driving factors that are changing that market that allow your new company to enter and take advantage as a prevailing trend? What are the gaps in the market that are being unfulfilled that my company can come in and fill? Is the market ready for my product and my solution? 

And perhaps the most critical element for success, according to Ethan, is having the right people at the start. “It’s easy to want to pull in your friends to work with your company with you or to find someone that’s also thinking about building a company and come together, then go find an idea,” Ethan shared, before cautioning that it comes down to much more than camaraderie and having a shared passion for the work.

In a nutshell, Ethan summarized just what the magic recipe that we need to focus on mastering entails: “Building a long-term, thriving company is really based on … falling in love with some problem, then getting together with people who also share that deep love and understanding of that problem, [and who] intrinsically and totally know how to go about it in order to get to the root of it.”

He added: “So often you see founders interested in a space because there’s an interesting problem set, and it draws them into it, but they don’t necessarily come from that space. And so, they might have first and second-degree understanding, but when it comes to the third and fourth degree of detail and the nuances, they just don’t have it, [which] causes them to trip up and to create a bunch of churn in the early days in trying to get the product-market fit.” According to Ethan, this creates a snag in the system, who shared that it is this season that is so pivotal to keep every single detail on course. “In those early days, it’s like a rocket on a launchpad: A one-degree change in trajectory is 100 million miles once you’re in space.”

Ethan spoke about his time at Box and Facebook, as a product leader: “I always thought about a product leader as someone who deeply understood and owned the problem of what we were trying to solve and the outcome. [I also] always believed that the product leader’s responsibility was to make the problem very clear, very finite, and then evangelize as to why this problem is the one worth solving.”

Basically, Ethan compares a product leader’s job as helping to set the north star for their company and product and prioritize and make the trade-offs needed to succeed due to their awareness of the limited resources and limited time available. In Ethan’s own words, “It’s about driving the biggest business outcomes and impact in solving important, interesting problems for our customers.”

Ethan explained how he has seen firsthand how this approach and mentality reap great rewards. Specifically, Ethan shared that “By being this very problem-focused centric product organization and engineering organization, it created empathy to who we were solving, what we were solving, why we were solving it for them.” Also, according to Ethan, “It allowed both product and engineering to feel closer.”

In conclusion, Ethan affirmed that this method “disambiguates why we’re doing something, and [also disambiguates] what is the definition of ‘done’… because if it doesn’t solve the problem, then we shouldn’t be doing it in the way that we’re doing it.”

For more wisdom and insights from Ethan, and to listen to this full podcast and many others, you can head to our website and check out seasons 1-3 of Fast Frontiers!