Ep375: Leonard Lee – You Will Only Succeed If You Identify the Market Opportunity First

Andrew Stotz 00:01
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community. We know that to win in investing, you must take risk but to win big, you've got to reduce it. And I bet you're exposed to investment risk right now to reduce it, go to my worst investment ever.com and download the risk reduction checklist I made specifically for you my podcast listeners. And this list is based on the lessons I've learned from all of my guests, fellow risk takers, this is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz, from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guests. Leonard Lee, then are you ready to rock?

00:42
Yes, I am totally ready to rock.

00:45
Yeah, actually, I

00:46
saw me metal,

Andrew Stotz 00:47
rock and roll. I saw you,

00:49
baby.

Andrew Stotz 00:50
I saw you tipping a glass of wine or grape juice. So I think we're really good. Oh,

Leonard Lee 00:56
it's gonna be fabulous. wine. Yeah.

Andrew Stotz 00:59
Fantastic. All right. Well, let me introduce you to the audience. Leonard Lee is a tech industry analyst and strategy consultant, solution architect and innovation coach, a startup and board advisor, a Trekkie, and musician. He is the managing director and founder of next curve, a research advisory firm based in San Diego, California, focused on providing cross domain ICT industry research and advisory services to enterprises, startups, and technology vendors looking to differentiate themselves and win in a rapidly changing digital economy. Let's take a minute and Philly further tidbits about your life. Wow,

Leonard Lee 01:41
you got a perfect, you got a down? Perfect. Thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate you having me on your show. Leonard Lee, Managing Director of next curve. And yeah, I've been in the consulting and Industry analysts game for better part of 20 years now. So I've been in the game for quite some time. Work with some of the big consulting firms and tech service providers. You know, I former managing partner at Gartner, I worked on the consulting side working with some of the biggest and baddest tech companies out there and helping them figure out where to place their bets next. So you know, this topic of investment and making the right bets is something that I'm heavily involved with, and I've been involved with for quite some time. And with at necks curve, we do a lot of startup advisory also work with many of again, the big tech companies and helping them figure out how to weather some of these, these tumultuous time that we face today, especially with the pandemic and the implications that it's had on the global economy and detect economy, and but also with startups that are looking at new opportunities and making waves in the future of our digital economy. So, again, thanks. Thank you for having me.

Andrew Stotz 03:11
Yep, that's great. I'm

Leonard Lee 03:12
looking forward to having fun with you. This is the if

Andrew Stotz 03:14
we're gonna have fun. Oh, yeah, have fun. And you know, I was on next curves website, and I saw you had this quote, if you want to be successful called consultant, you need to either be functional or technical. And that was someone that you said, my first consulting mentor said to you in 1997. And I'm just curious, like, if you could describe, you know, where your expertise lies within the space, because I think it's a lesson that is talking to my interns a lot over the last 12 months. It's like, what's your expertise? You know, you just have general education, where is your focus? So tell us a little bit about your focus

Leonard Lee 03:50
you, I'll tell you what, I'm an expert at I am an expert at being a generalist. Can you imagine that? Yeah. And you know, and a lot when I tell people that I get that reaction, but if you really look at my background, it's very diverse. I've a technical functional strategy, you know, background, so I've, you know, from a consulting perspective, I've coded I've, you know, implemented large, global eirp implementations and projects, I've done global, you know, transformation projects for Fortune 500 companies. There's a lot of diversity in my background, and actually, it's, it's counter to your typical consulting career path, right. Typically, when you go into consulting, they, you know, you get kind of pigeon holed in certain domains, where they say, look, you know, this is your path to becoming a partner be really good at this one area and then you will eventually become a partner. Well, I disregarded A lot of that simply because I'm just infinitely curious. And I think I was a generalist from the start, I wanted to learn everything and understand how all things were interconnected. And I think ultimately, that's what I'm expressing through. Next curve. And one of the reasons why I started next curve is I wanted to be able to take my the experiences, the knowledge, and the perspectives that I've developed through my career and my professional experience. And challenge this the work that I do today, with my clients that are both the large tech companies as well as startups. Interesting.

Andrew Stotz 05:41
And so question, by the way, I love it. Yeah, I mean, it's, it's a challenge for a young person, because, you know, I mean, if you can get into a company that will give you, you know, when I started out of university, I went to work at Pepsi, if you drive up to 110, in LA, you'll see the Torrens Pepsi plan, there was a way to parkplatz Pepsi plan, there was a Riverside. And so I ended up kind of getting in because I studied finance, but I worked in manufacturing, I was interested in statistics and statistical quality control. And so that kind of got me, you know, into an area that allowed me to move up. But also Pepsi, you know, was it was a, it was a management training program. So they had me rotating through. So the benefit of that was, yeah, I got that to see a lot of areas, but I, right, but one of the things I say to young people these days is I say, You studied accounting, don't go work in accounting. And they can watch, I studied accounting to go work in accounting, I said, you know, go work in something else, you can always go back to accounting. Yeah. But if you go into something else, and then you go into accounting, and say, Now, I want to change the marketing, and now you're five years in new career, it's a little bit harder.

Leonard Lee 06:49
Yeah. And you know, it's funny. That's what I used to advise consultants that I mentored when I worked for the big firms, I told them, Look, if you're, if you're a fixed assets guy, or gal going learn how the data base in the application works underneath that thing that you're configuring and you will, you will, you will thank me for it, understand how the different modules Connect, and then how all the different systems Connect, and then you start to get visibility to the entire process. And then eventually, you have this techno functional view of things. And then that that's really empowering a holistic view of your profession, you know, and what you do, and and that makes you much more, it makes you much more than just this particular job function or singular path that you do get pigeonholed into when you first start off, and yeah, you're making a really good point, and that it's very difficult for young people to do like what I do. Because you, you need to have the experience, you need to have gone through and made all the mistakes. And if you want to call them failures, I'm not a big failure fan, but you had to have failed, you had to had succeeded, you had to have done all these things to understand the dynamics of how things work. But then also a mass if you're lucky enough of enough knowledge and experience across many domains to be able to think holistically and perceive things holistically. And I think that that's really important, as you look at what we're probably going to be talking about investments in startups and, and, and the bets that they make, which is statistically they're not really all that great at right.

08:45
So unless you've

Leonard Lee 08:46
unless you've discovered something or someone's told you otherwise, no, no.

Andrew Stotz 08:52
I mean, it's tough. It's tough in the startup world. So I want to tell the listeners out there that we're going to take a different format for this particular interview. And the format is, you know, I've been doing some work looking into the mistakes that have been made by my guests in the area of startup. Now, some of them have been startup, people that have started companies, other ones are just people that kind of put some money into a startup. So there's a lot of perspective on gaining there. And I want to bring that out to the audience. But before I do that, I thought why not talk to you about some of the you know, most common mistakes that you've seen in startups and how you help startups to deal with those?

Leonard Lee 09:36
Yeah, I think one of the most common mistakes that startups made is simply not really understanding the market opportunity, not doing their homework. And one of the reasons why they get into this dilemma or this dis you know, very early phase issue is simply because they're looking at these big inflated numbers thinking that the market opportunity is something that it really isn't. And so this investment in understanding the ground truth of the market that they're pursuing, is often not there. And so as when I, when I speak to many, many, many startups, vast majority of them, they have a deficient understanding of the market, and what the opportunity is, and I think that's really where you start to get on that path of bad investment, you know, and why there's such a, still a challenge. And it's not that things are getting better. They, they're, it's always challenging, because technologies are always advancing, they're converging. There's all these whitespaces that continue to form. And there are no experts in those areas. And so to think that there's, let's say, you know, with edge computing that a data center hyperscale data center guy is a pro at that stuff, absolutely not, they don't know what the market opportunity is. And if you think it's a telco guy, who's building out a 5g network, they don't necessarily know either. So there's a lot of head scratching that's going on yet. There's also a lot of market hype, a lot of academic stuff that's also out there that are not necessarily promoting grounded notions. And you have a lot of startups who are basically drinking the proverbial Kool Aid. And also VCs who have this Kool Aid infused lens that are looking at these market opportunities, and not in exactly the right way. And so I think that's really where that investment starts, is when you don't really understand the market opportunity. And you are, you're investing, you're investing time that is going to be wasted, upfront, and depending on how far you progress down the funding path, you're just accumulating money, that's probably not going to generate a return.

Andrew Stotz 12:23
So let's look into that for a moment. Um, yeah, I myself, and I'm sure plenty of the listeners have been on this excitement curve, where you're really excited about what you're working on. And it's amazing, and it's going to transform the world and blah, blah, blah. And then if you go and then eventually, you know, you fall down into you end up finding out that you really didn't have something there. And it all kinds of fall falls apart, maybe even before you start or a little bit after you started. And then you look back and you've got Why was I so convinced. You know, so what is it that convinces people that they've got such a great idea when you could objectively walk in and go, Whoa, whoa, whoa, wait a minute, there's nothing here or you haven't even tested it. So why do people get so convinced that there's this market opportunity? Or is it just they don't even think about that?

Leonard Lee 13:13
Well, I think there's always an appeal and an idea. And but there's a couple of things that really determine the actual value potential, the value potential of an idea, right? And the first of which is number one, market readiness. So how ready is the market for what you're looking at your idea? And the second thing is technical readiness. And one of the things that a lot of folks, a lot of startups don't really factor in quite well, are the economics, right? You have the idea first, but what you haven't done is really thought through the economics in terms of first the value to your target customer, right, who are basically going to be that market operator, they're going to collectively be that market opportunity that you're pursuing. You know, and so if you don't consider that properly, I mean, you're, you're, you're really starting off on the wrong foot. And then on the technical side, just really understanding the economics of the technology in terms of cost, right, and sometimes these great ideas, they're not economically viable. So it ends up being a timing issue. So oftentimes, we hear you know, people who have quote, unquote, who have been involved in quote, unquote, failed startups that seemed like great ideas. They just end up being timing issues sometimes right? And then maybe 10 years down the line when the technical economic And, you know, start to make sense, then there's an appeal to that target market and, and, you know, target customers that you intended to sell to. So, you know, that's again, and it goes back to this, this notion of really understanding the ground truth. So what is the state of the technology? What's the readiness of the market? And if we were to boil down to two simple principles, those are the two things that really need to be understood. And but they're also the most difficult things to get a grasp on. It seems I mean, that's just my observation. And I don't know what you've experienced or heard through the many startups that you've worked with and spoken to.

Andrew Stotz 15:48
Yeah, I think that there's that the aspect of the, you know, so Okay, we've got market opportunity. And so they're, either they're completely missing it, or they're overstating the market opportunity. And the second thing is, you know, whether it's really viable, you said, economically viable. And to me, that kind of means like, okay, yeah, maybe you found a problem in the market an opportunity. But the question is, how much are people willing to pay for the solution of that problem? Are they willing to pay $1? Or are they willing to pay $1,000? And that affects the economics

16:23
of it? Right?

Andrew Stotz 16:25
Um, you know, one of the things I'll tell it just a little story of my own experience, when the 1997 crisis hit in Thailand, where it originated, and the economy was wiped out. And our business coffee works was only just starting. And so we were b2b coffee roaster. A couple of years later, as we started to recover, we still didn't, you know, we still couldn't get the revenue up where we wanted it. And, and I, I, we had a meeting of the management team, and we just asked the question, you know, do we really believe that, you know, that this is a viable business, and whether we can really get it, you know, there. And we, our decision was actually really easy compared to the world of startups, because, basically, we said, this is coffee. You know, this is not a revolution. We're not trying to develop anything new. We're just trying to bring this product to the market. And that made the decisions so much easier. But what you're talking about is the idea of, you know, is there a market? Well, we already knew there was a market and it would grow. But then the idea is, like, you know, do we have the tech to get to that? Will the market pay for that, but we had kind of most of that already worked out? Which is what makes tech so hard?

Leonard Lee 17:42
Yeah, yeah. And that's the dome egg. You know, I'm, I don't deal too much with coffee, coffee companies or coffee startups. So I don't have much to say there I am, particularly speaking of or I'm speaking of, in particular about technology companies, which I deal with the most.

Andrew Stotz 18:00
And which is, which is I'm just saying it's it's so much harder for a tech company. Oh, yeah. Well, yeah. You know, you're trying to you know, you're creating a new space. Now, let me just ask you, if you were, if you were talking to a tech company, think about the companies that you advise, how do you and think about the listeners out there that are got their idea? And they're, you know, they're trying to figure it out? How would you advise them to understand the market opportunity? You know, you talk about the ground truth, you know, what is it that you mean by this?

Leonard Lee 18:29
Yeah, I mean, it all really boils down to learning how to ask the right questions. And so really having a group of advisors who can, you know, question the numbers, help you question numbers and get to the proper understanding of the structure of the market, right. And so when you look at, you know, oftentimes what you see in a pitch deck is some citation of a forecast and say, hey, look, you know, IoT is going to be a $1.4 trillion opportunity. And oftentimes, they're, they're assuming that that's their market opportunity. And they'll get a segment of that, right? Well, when you, that's where the problem really starts as they sit there, and they pop up this number, but they haven't really gone through the effort of understanding what does that number mean, and then understanding the market definition, how it's segmented, and then getting down to the real Tam, right, a meaningful Tam that they then present through there, jack, and one of the big red flags that I always I always look out for is whether or not these guys the the pitch team actually understands the numbers. And if they got if they have it wrong, I know that they haven't done their homework. I said, Do you know what this cloud number really means? know, what it's comprised of? And so, you know, here's the thing, um, the reason why we get excited about This idea that we have is not simply because the idea is because we think that there's a large market opportunity for it, right. And that's why we want to start a business and you know, you want to be the next unicorn, right? But the thing is, is if you haven't really gone, if your assumption is this big, lofty number, and you don't have an understanding of it, you haven't kicked the tires on it, you haven't gone through the exercise of really figuring out what that addressable market is for your products, then guess what? It becomes an engineering prototyping exercise more than a startup venture, right? This is a common mistake everybody makes so yeah, I'm do your homework. And that's a that's an important very easy, first step that a lot of people don't invest in. Oddly, I don't know why.

Andrew Stotz 20:56
So this is a you know, you've you've used an acronym that some people may or may not be familiar with. But we have like, Tam, Sam. Yeah, those types of things. When you say, Tam, can you just explain what that means to you?

Leonard Lee 21:12
Well, it's totally addressable market. So what is that market that is addressable by that particular product offering? Right, and oftentimes it some representative of the overall, you know, market opportunity for that company.

Andrew Stotz 21:33
So to make it more concrete, think about you just said, like, the Internet of Things, is going to be a trillion dollar market. And let's just say that I'm, I'm designing a thermometer or a thermostat, you know, as we've seen, come out and say, we're gonna get a piece of that trillion dollar market. Well, wait a minute, is that really the TAM for this product? Or how do you think about that?

Leonard Lee 21:56
Yeah. And so if you believe in that number, you have to work your way through the entire market model, right. So you have to look at how that how that you have to dissect that number into its different segments, and then work it all the way down, and then put energy into qualifying that particular space. Right, that segment that is representative of what it is that your product, you know, addresses in terms of, you know, that big picture, or that big number, it's a very difficult exercise. And so you know, you know, I you know, just to give you an example, I've seen some folks come in with these massive cloud numbers, and I will, after a session with me, they will realize that their actual Tam is a small fraction of the number they came in, pitching, you know, to me, or to help me kick the tires on and it simply boils down to you, you just went and got a number from a consulting firm or or a leading analyst, you know, it's not their fault is a you just did, you just took the biggest number, thinking that that's going to convince me that you know, what you're talking about, you know, and now you have to do your homework, and it's not easy work. It takes domain expertise, and especially in a lot of the whitespace. domains. It takes even more than just knowing what's out there today, you have to start to think through Okay, what is what does this market really represent? And how you might have to use three or four different types of market views to qualify that whitespace opportunity and get to that Tam that you might that might be addressable for you? And your your startup and so that's how difficult this stuff is it maybe I shouldn't have said that. This is a simple first step, but it's in most political first step that will save you from and this is good advice for VCs too. Because not like VCs are really great at this stuff either. Right? I mean, if they were they be batting, batting more than 100, huh?

Andrew Stotz 24:19
Yeah. So now let's just look at one little more aspect on this. And then we'll wrap up. The last aspect is let's just say that a startup comes to you and, and yeah, they're off track on their, on their Tam. And then you get them down to a pretty narrow market that you think okay, this is really where you guys are going to be able to compete. Now, how do they then get that product market fit? Let's say they've got kind of they kind of know where they're at with their market. And they've got their technology where they're, you know, in the early stages, how do they then kind of test that market or what are your thoughts about where they go from there?

Leonard Lee 24:59
Yeah, I mean, even before, you know, there's this whole, you know, thing about whether they call it agile, agile startup, you know?

25:13
Does that what they call it? It's agile.

Andrew Stotz 25:15
But I can't remember I have. I can't

Leonard Lee 25:17
remember either. But you get

Andrew Stotz 25:19
what I said agile anymore.

Leonard Lee 25:21
Yeah, no, I'm getting old. So I forget all these, like, you know, new vo concepts that keep coming out. But no lean startup. Yeah, this whole Lean Startup thing. You know, new, some buyers needs analysis ahead of time, because, you know, one of the issues is, startups are oftentimes started by engineers, what I've discovered is engineers, they're great at designing cool stuff, and they have great ideas, they're maybe not so great at really, you know, running the business side of things, or even understanding markets, right, that's something that tends to be a challenging thing. That's not to say that all of them are like that. There's some folks that are very savvy at it. And they're also wonderful engineers, I don't want to generalize, but it's something that I see as a common challenge among many tech companies that I've dealt with, or startups that I've dealt with. And so it's do buyers need analysis and validate your assumptions, what you think is valuable to the customer, may not actually be valuable, and and then to discover that through, you know, this whole idea of, of, you know, minimal MVP, minimal viable product, you have to go that far, to really understand whether or not your concept will resonate with the customer, there's some some early sensing that you can do before you invest a ton of money into it actually building something out. So my advice to folks would be, make sure that you're, you're always proactively vetting the idea, whatever opportunity that you get, throughout the lifecycle of, you know, building out your startup, and getting to that minimal viable product. So, yeah, okay.

Andrew Stotz 27:33
So now, if we, if I'm just reminded by one of my guests, his name is Episode 308, Andrew Miller, and he taught me this thing, he says, He calls it the toilet paper, the toilet paper method. And he says, you know, when you are using this just for this is just for ads, right? But he says, when you're when you're trying to come up with some advertising for a particular thing, just list down, you know, 10 different ideas of what you would call it, you know, what would be your, your headline, and he said, and then put them on a white piece of, you know, a white picture, you know, that's what he's calling toilet paper, and then, and then just put it out on Facebook, and then see which one of those people click the most, you know, and send it, send them to a landing page, and just see which ones people click the most. And so that was a great example of not even coming up with a minimum viable product, but just seeing when people click, and which one of these would they click on, and then, you know, developing that, and so I think that's an interesting, you know, angle for not even getting to the minimum viable product, it reminds me of another story of one of my guests, was that he was selling wine in Cambodia. And he had to go through all this process of importing, getting the license and setting up the business and all of this, and then he ended up finding out that he didn't, it didn't work, his business just fell apart. And I asked him, What would you have done differently? I said, I would have started selling, he said, I would have just gone to any wine distributor that's in there already and said, can I sell cases of wine that this guy has? And that's my way of testing, you know, before I go out and set up a business.

Leonard Lee 29:17
Yeah, exactly. And and and, you know, these steps are great risk mitigation steps, right? Because the last thing you want to do is invest a ton of money and then just come to this realizing, oh, crap, how can we didn't think about this earlier? You know, and they end up being fairly easy steps. So this, this whole idea of, you know, aggressively getting to the MVP, and then showing a customer? Yeah, okay, I kind of get it. But there's a lot of things that you can do upfront to de risk, the early investments. So that's, that's what I would suggest seeing the risk Converse guy that I am, as I mentioned, we've had some

Andrew Stotz 30:02
discussions about it. Okay, so let's now wrap it up by just saying, okay, the listeners heard a lot, they've learned a lot. They're thinking about it, they've got a start up. What one action would you recommend that they take to make sure that they're successful? Yeah,

Leonard Lee 30:20
I call it flatten the curve. So some of you might be familiar with the Gartner hype cycle. Rule number one, always, number one, if you're getting into a hyped market, understand the state of the technology, understand the state of the market, get ahead of it, there's value all there's always value, it just might not be what you think it is.

30:48
and

Leonard Lee 30:49
find a home for your idea. You know, whether it's early or it's later in the cycle, but you know, the thing is, is that you only have some so many resources and capital to give it a successful first go.

31:06
Get

Leonard Lee 31:08
knowledgeable about your market opportunity, and then target your investments. And then you have a higher probability of being successful. And also, you'll make a hell of a lot more sense. When you come in and put in pitch your idea,

Andrew Stotz 31:21
more likely, you're going to be able to raise money. Yeah,

31:24
there you go. There you go.

Andrew Stotz 31:26
All right. Last question. What's your number one goal for the next 12 months?

Leonard Lee 31:32
You got to be safe and healthy.

Andrew Stotz 31:36
That's very good. You've done well, so far.

Leonard Lee 31:39
That was right, right off the top of my head. How's that?

Andrew Stotz 31:42
I know,

Leonard Lee 31:43
this podcast is all about being safe, and safe and healthy and helping as many startups as I can, you know, succeed.

Andrew Stotz 31:53
So where's the best place for people to reach out to you? Is it LinkedIn is what? Wherever? Yeah,

Leonard Lee 31:59
well, yeah, I have quite a large audience on LinkedIn. And I'm a friendly guy. So feel free to reach out to me if there's any startups out there who want to get into some of these whitespace tech opportunities out there. Give me a jingle and happy to help out and advise and yeah, just look me up Leonard Lee, and next curve and my, my profile should pop up.

Andrew Stotz 32:28
That's a great, I'll have the links in the show notes. So for the listeners out there and you want to follow it up, just click on the links. Alright, listeners, there you have it. Another discussion about loss and winning. My number one goal for the next 12 months is to help my listeners reduce risk in their life. So go to my worst investment ever.com right now and download the risk reduction checklist and see how you measure up. As we conclude. Leonard, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for sharing your knowledge with the audience. Do you have any parting words?

Leonard Lee 33:10
much? No. Thank you, other than Thank you so much, and I hope that the audience got something out of it. And I really appreciate the opportunity to speak to your audience.

Andrew Stotz 33:21
Fantastic. Well, that's a wrap on another great discussion to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. I'll see you on the upside.