Brandon Brown hates treadmills. So he runs outside, even in the dead of winter — in fact, that is when he snags his best times. When people ask the CEO of Zodiac Interactive how he bears the brutal Long Island cold to clock a few miles, he explains that once he gets started, he has no other choice but to keep going.
“Fear of death is a positive motivator,” Brown jokes. “You just don’t have the luxury of being four miles out and saying, ‘I’ve had enough.’ I liken that to being a privately held company that’s self-funded — I really can’t imagine being in a position where I’ve committed to a large-scale project and, at some point deep in the project where the investment’s already been spent, coming up to the reality that says, ‘We can’t do this.’”
Before completely vesting Zodiac, an Emmy-award-winning developer of software for interactive television, in any opportunity, Brown validates ideas with an elaborate upfront process — and the help of his 135 employees.
Smart Business spoke to Brown about evaluating ideas from conception until fruition.
Validate the coolness. You’re almost like a sponge, and you just try to absorb as much as you can. Then use inductive and deductive reasoning to formulate what you believe is a direction and/or a trend and/or areas that represent uptick in a timeline that fits to what you’re looking to achieve.
You map it to your own business map. In my world, the business map really breaks into two categories: that which we call the tactical, which has no more than a 36-month delivery time for full monetization, and that which we call the strategic, which builds from the tactical and goes out as far as 60 months. Whatever it is you’re hearing, you always try to map it to: Which one of those two buckets does it fit into? That at least gives you a high-level timeline of how you’re going to prioritize this.
Then, of course, you look to common threads: Am I hearing this from more than one source? There, you’re going through a validation sanity check. Something can sound really cool, but if you’re only getting it from one source, you really have to question it.
Build external support. It all inevitably starts out with, ‘Yeah, that sounds cool,’ and then you go from, ‘That sounds cool,’ to, ‘That is cool.’ You make that leap by sitting back and saying, ‘OK, we’ve won it. We’re doing it. Now what do we do with it?’ It’s really the repeatability. How applicable is this to other players in this sector?
Now you go out and open dialogue around it. Have people talking about it, really now pulling information along: What do you think about something like this? Would this have value to you?
If we’ve got something and we believe it’s got legs to it and we believe it fits into a tactical bucket — we obviously focus more on the tactical side, being the size organization that we are — we will then proactively go out and solicit comment. Those sources will range from industry pundits and consultants to users of the technology.
The ideal state is where you’ll find a sponsor for the technology, capability or product that you want to develop. It’s always better to go into a business offering with a sponsor who’s got skin in the game and is prepared to embrace it once it’s available. Sometimes, you can carry that as far as literally getting advanced funding to help support the development of the business offering.
The No. 1 thing you want to try to avoid is what I call the flavor of the month. There are always those things that are very high on the hype cycle but never really go anywhere. Those can be the most dangerous things because everybody’s talking about them, but once you scratch past the surface and it’s no longer the frosting and now you’re into the cake, there’s just not enough substance for it to ever go anywhere. That’s where you really need to rely on your own research and validation. You have to really go into that sponge mode and reach out to the various sources and the various resources you have at your disposal.