Startup GRIND - Glow and Grow
The Startup GRIND Conference in Redwood City this past week represented an energizing diversity of people and ideas. Not only did it highlight 50 innovative start ups, but there were also lots of lessons for non-profits and mature companies. Here are a few of the "glows."
Hamdi Ulukaya, founder and CEO of Chobani, talked with Steve Clemons from The Atlantic about being a 23-year old, non-English speaking, Kurdish refugee from Turkey. Using his grandmother's yogurt recipe, he and five initial staff members grew Chobani to over 2000 employees in 10 years. Ulukaya spoke passionately about the importance of corporate culture (no pun intended) and being a member of the community. He leads by example. Ulukaya has ensured that his employees own 10% of Chobani (still privately held), so they all share in Chobani's success.
Nir Eyal, author of Hooked, How to Build Habit-forming Products provided a great framework to understand why we can't resist reaching for our devices. Habit-forming products need a Trigger; either external, such as "click here," or more importantly internal, such as boredom, loneliness, awkwardness, etc. These triggers start the "habit" which lead to an Action. These Actions such as scrolling, "liking", or sending an email, then provide a Reward. And to be truly addictive, the Reward needs to be variable, like with a slot machine or your message feed on Facebook. To complete the cycle, a product extracts an Investment from the user to create the next trigger, such as, when you send a comment to a post and then look for the response.
The second to last talk by Justin Rosenstein, co-founder of Asana, challenged the audience to question their mission and to ask if they are working to help solve the world's challenges. Asana provides collaborative, task-management software and Rosenstein takes pride in enabling renewable energy and other impact enterprises to be more effective.
A "grow" for the conference would be to call out and ensure that entrepreneurs are aware of corporate social responsibility. Startups apply ideas, leverage infrastructure and drive productivity to create opportunity. By building on economic, social and environmental pillars at the beginning, companies can grow responsibility, engage their employees and be sustainable.
Startup GRIND represents 1 million entrepreneurs in 200 cities across 98 countries, creating opportunities to "glow" and "grow."