Robin Chase: "Make sure you are a learning company"

I'm Robin Chase, I'm co-founder and former CEO of Zipcar and recently a company I love called Venium that does vehicle network communications and I've written a book called Piers Inc. about the new collaborative economy and how it's displacing an old capitalist model. So, could you tell us some key takeaways from your talk today? So, if I think about the key takeaways that are different from when I started the talk, I think as a startup I think you want to make sure that you are learning continuously, that the reason that small companies beat out big companies is that they're really fast learners. So, you want to make sure that you are a learning company, which means that you have to be, when you see a problem you have to correct it immediately and when you see an opportunity, take it. So, being a learning company just means being very dynamic and experimenting and going fast with what you learn. The second corollary to that is something that I think of as intellectual honesty, that as the CEO and founder of a company you have a lot of stake in making it seem like everything's fantastic, like it's a great idea and it works and investing is going to be fantastic and work for it even though I don't have any money and buy it even though it's not very good yet. So, you're constantly saying how fantastic the company is, but if you want to succeed your weaknesses and your shortcomings and the company's shortcomings, again coming back to this continuous learning. So, if you are a person who lacks insight and self-reflection you won't be able to succeed. So, you really want to keep sharp on knowing, as I say, your weaknesses and your company's weaknesses so that you can keep moving ahead very quickly. So, let's talk a bit about knowing your weaknesses. What are some of your own learnings of how to get to know what a weakness is? I'd like to think it's quite obvious what your weaknesses are. I've been struck by... So I'm not an engineer and I realize I'm not an engineer. So when I have my chief technology officer I'm not going to tell him what are the right platform choices and what are the right words are. I will say here's the strategic direction and this is a priority for the company, but I'm not going to meddle in how you do it. If you think about design, a lot of CEOs like to think that they're great designers when in fact they actually know very little about design and they're crummy designers. So we sometimes see really terrible marketing campaigns or terrible communication campaigns. I think the technology piece you don't see because it just crashes. So we should know our strengths and weaknesses. So I love numbers, I'm great at numbers, I am actually good at marketing, but you have to know what you're good at and what you're not and hire. And hire to that and then trust the person that you hired. Why bother paying a person lots of your startup money and have spent a long time to get the right person when you're not going to trust them. It creates also a better team. Great. So let's also talk a bit about your new book and one of the subjects, collaborative economy. So I'm curious to hear your thoughts on how companies working in the collaborative economy. Are they always defined as sustainable or how do these two terms interrelate? So if we think about, people talk about the sharing economy and they talk about the platform economy and the gig economy. My book is called Piers Inc. because I want to draw attention to the fact that it's actually a collaboration between two parties. So if you say platform, you're forgetting the people. And if you say gig economy, you're forgetting that it's totally enabled by the platform. So I see these two things as dovetailing in this Piers Inc. fashion where each side does what it does best and leaves on the table for the other side to do what they do best and there's enough value there. If there's a lot of concern and a lot of media around how the sharing economy isn't sharing how it's doing all these bad things, I want to say that this Piers Inc. organizational structure is immoral. It is without value. It's the value that the CEOs and the investors are putting into that. How they treat workers, how they enable them to weigh in on the terms of engagement on the platform. Do they have concern for them or not? And all the things that we hate about the sharing economy and what's happening to workers, I want to say don't pin that on us. Walmart and UPS and FedEx have been trying to say that their workers aren't full time either and that they are contracts. So this is a long held issue with capitalism and with our economic markets that you can't be pinning onto the sharing economy. The growing income inequality is there profoundly and yes it can happen in the sharing economy and it happens in the regular economy. So if I think about us moving forward, what I know for sure is that companies that take this Piers Inc. organizational structure, if they're good at it, they grow faster than anyone else, they learn faster than anyone else and they do this hyper local adaptation faster than anyone else and because of that they will win. Those companies will win. So therefore everything that can become a platform is going to become a platform. Everyone is trying to outsource their labor and the company is just a platform and everything else is outside. So since that's the future, we need to apply the social values that took us a hundred years to create which says we do care about health care, we do care about social safety, we do care about workplace rules and we need to bring those values that we've already agreed upon and say they're not associated only with full time work which no longer is getting and apply those same values to this increasing freelance dynamic network that people are working in. And so I guess that is my message that we can't push this new to former work back into the old ways. Those old ways are gone. The internet exists, we can deal with many, many small parts, everyone is connected, transactions don't cost as much anymore, so we are going down this new path. But we definitely need to pay attention to what is the social contract of labor for sure. The other piece that I talked about that was by surprise to me today is I was encouraging the audience and entrepreneurs everywhere to really be focused on what is their role in making us have a sustainable climate that's a livable climate. Right now if we continue with business as usual we will all be dead in 85 years and that's not a joke and that's not an exaggeration. That is a reality. And so we are at this moment in time where we really deeply have to decarbonize our entire economy so no matter what your startup is you need to be thinking about how can you take carbon out of that and is it transportation, is it who you buy your utility electricity from, is it how you source things, but it's something that no one can be turning away from and there really is no future for your company if you don't do that because there's no future for any of us. So I really want to encourage entrepreneurs that the world is built on these new companies and we need to create the world that we want to live in which includes one that is climate friendly, that's livable and that is just as we talked about from an income equality and respect for all people way. Thank you so much. You're welcome.