Travis Kalanik continued...

?“Super Pumped” episode three recounts the meeting with Travis Kalanik, Larry Page, and David Drummond at Google. Travis had demanded Page’s attendance as a trophy when he agreed to come to them to pitch Google Ventures. The show ran both a Travis-fantasy version, when Travis became best buds with Larry, and an approximation to what probably happened. Page asked about the optimization driving the routing functionality and Travis had almost no clue. Page’s comment was simply, “You don’t actually code do you, Taylor.” To which Travis replied, “Travis.”

I’m sure there are and will continue to be people who dump on Travis for the myriad of obvious reasons. I’d like to chime in on two less obvious, but important reasons. I don’t think Travis has to code, and neither did Larry Page who put in $257 million even after correctly asserting that Travis didn’t code. First, I believe the most fundamental skill of any manager is learning to lead a multidisciplinary team. The manager doesn’t need to have the depth of expertise in each area but must make the intellectual commitment to let no decisions remain opaque. Managers must understand the reasoning behind deeply technological decisions. Second, when disrupting industries with new innovations, managers must pay particular attention to the?kernel?of the innovation. Most real innovations are platforms that that can be configured for on application area or another. Choosing the first market that fundamentally values that kernel is crucial. Choose wrong and you may not find the resources to try a second market.

Travis once knew these lessons. In January of 1999, Travis came to my posted office hours at the UCLA Anderson School. I was teaching a graduate class “Marketing Strategy in the Digital Economy.” Travis was an undergrad at UCLA and the Director of Business Development and Strategy for Scour, Inc. started by a small group of undergraduate engineering students at UCLA. He may have been the only undergrad to do so in my five decades on the UCLA faculty. He talked about Scour.net and his experience at BCG the previous summer. He wanted help from teams in my project-oriented class. We had a nice conversation, but I wanted to see how serious he was. I assigned him homework to read two pieces: 1) “Strategic Marketing Planning for Radically New Projects,” in its final prepublication version before appearing as the lead article in the January 2000 issue of the?Journal of Marketing. The article discussed turbulent fields in terms of the classic Emery and Trist piece on “Causal Textures of Organizational Environment,” Stuart Kaufman’s work on the?edge of chaos, Judea Pearl’s work on?Bayesian networks, and a broad framework for strategic planning in the face of disruption. And 2) “Barriers to Digital Convergence,” a 100-page report mostly to work of Troy Noble, with contributions from me on the strategic-planning framework into which Troy organized 40 interviews he conducted with leaders in the fields destined to converge.?

I sent the assignment on Thursday after office hours and by the next Tuesday Travis showed reasonable evidence that he had dug into the JM paper, while admitting to being only half-way through the 100-page report. He said, “If at all possible, I'd like to have a discussion around some points you make in these articles as well as some supplementary learnings I've gained in my experience in the midst of this Digital Convergence.” As a historical curiosity I’ve appended the email stream to the end of this piece. We met again during office hours that Thursday and I subsequently allowed him to pitch Scour.net to MBA teams picking term projects. I did ask my then-teenage sons and both were very familiar with Scour.net an early multimedia search engine that pre-dated Naptser by 18 months. The pitch resulted in seven MBA students wanting to help Scour.net primarily with customer acquisition and retention. All the teams covered the essentials of managing multidisciplinary teams (Chapter 13 in?Systems Entrepreneurship?open source) and understanding the?kernel of innovation, the two mistakes I’m illustrating. The students all learned the strategic planning framework I illustrate in?https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/get-bigger-box-before-you-think-outside-lee-cooper/.

I teach that a good manager of a multidisciplinary team lets no expert decision remain opaque. Even lacking depth of expertise, a good manager must understand the reasoning behind the decisions. When Larry Page asked about the routing problem, Travis didn’t appear to have questioned the choice. They were just names to him. He didn’t even recognize the OS in OSRM stood for open source. It’s not a random detail. Page was asking about the kernel of innovation in Uber’s business model. You could say the overall information architecture, but by Uber’s time multi-sided demand systems online were old hat. Efficiently routing drivers to customers and costumers to destinations was newer. Not recognizing the kernel of innovation is always a mistake.

N.B. The series refers briefly to the history of Scour.net and in a way that didn’t comport with what I since learned. The best account is in Richard Wolpert’s book?The Soul of a Deal, specifically the chapter, “Don’t take on two 800-pound gorillas.”