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We wrote a new book!!! It’s called Click and it’s all about the Foundation Sprint, our new 2-day method for kicking off big projects!
We are SUPER excited to share it with you all, and this week’s episode is a deep dive into the process of writing the book and how it fits into our investing strategy.
Learn more about the book at theclickbook.com
On episode 13 of Jake & JZ, we talked about:
- How to get early access to Click
- The history of the Foundation Sprint
- Books that inspired us: Psychology of Money, Power of Habit, Building a Storybrand, The Heath Brothers’ books
- What we look for when we invest
- Why we had to share the Foundation Sprint
📩 Get an email about every episode at JakeAndJZ.com
💸 Learn more about our seed fund at Character Capital
Creators and Guests
What is Jake & JZ?
Weekly podcast about startups, design, marketing, technology… and anything else we’re thinking about. 🤓
Hosted by Jake Knapp and John Zeratsky, co-founders of Character Capital and bestselling authors of Sprint and Make Time.
JZ (00:00)
Jake, we've done about approximately a million video calls in the last couple of years since you moved into that office. one visual cue that I always lean on is over your right shoulder, there's a stack of two books, very recognizable, distinctive. There's blue sprint, there's yellow make time. And today you have completed the elementary school primary color stack and you've added a red book.
Jake (00:24)
Yeah.
JZ (00:26)
What is that red book on top of sprint and make time?
Jake (00:31)
Well, Jay-Z, I'm glad you asked that that red book is the third book in the Jake and Jay-Z trilogy. Now that is our third book. It's brand new. We have taken it from the world of ideas to the world of the physical reality. And, I think today we can, we can finally talk about it. We can finally announce it and share it with everybody. as, as you know, 15 years ago, I created the design sprint process. The design sprint worked.
JZ (00:51)
Yeah.
Jake (01:00)
So well for us at Google, at Google ventures, we ended up getting so excited about it. We thought we have to share this. We wrote a book, that book was sprint. And in the years since we've created some different sprint formats. We've used those with all kinds of different teams and they've all been effective in, whether it's a sprint for branding, a sprint for naming, a sprint for writing marketing copy, all kinds of different forms, but
None of them quite rose to the level of we need to write a book about this. Then in 2021, we started character. We started working with early stage startups. We recognized a new need. created a new format, the foundation sprint. And once again, I had this feeling we have got to share this with people. We've got to put it into a book. We've got to give a complete guide because there's so much here. There's so many new lessons here that are so powerful for anyone.
JZ (01:45)
you
Jake (01:55)
starting a project, not just a startup founder, but anybody who's trying to get the best out of their work to try to make sure that what they do ends up being meaningful for people. And so that's what the new book is all about. And it's called the click. And here's a sneak peek at the cover of click. If you're on YouTube, you'll be able to take a look at the cover here. And, it's in red. As you said, it completes the primary trilogy. had blue, we have yellow. Now we have a beautiful, a beautiful red.
JZ (02:19)
Yeah.
Yeah, the book does not come out for a few more months. It comes out in April. It takes a long time to make a book, but we, like you said, we're just so excited to have this out in the world, to have the tools and resources available to people so that you can run your own foundation sprint. We've not found it so valuable. We think you're going to find it really valuable too, that we have arranged and finagled to do basically a pre-order period. So if you pre-order the book now, you're going to get
a ton of materials and resources, really like a large percentage of what's in the book you're gonna get access to ahead of time. And then some extra stuff that we've created just for people who pre-order. And in fact, if you pre-order in the next couple of days, so literally before January 31st, which is just a couple of days away, depending on when you're watching this, you're gonna get even more stuff. You're gonna get access to some events, some really cool giveaways, some special stuff that we're doing. So.
If this sounds at all interesting, head over to theclickbook.com and check it out. You can pre-order there, you can get access. You'll be able to unlock that free stuff right away. We're super excited about this book. We're a whole podcast about it. Should we kick that off, Jake?
Jake (03:34)
We should, if you're listening, pause the podcast, pre-order the book, come back, and we're gonna tell you some behind the scenes about the creation of the book. Let's do it.
JZ (03:40)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Welcome to episode 13 of Jake and Jay Z, the weekly podcast about startups, design, technology, products, marketing, books, all the other stuff that we are thinking about working on, talking about together. That's Jake over there. I'm Jay Z. We are the founders of Character Capital. We are the authors of as of today, three books, Sprint, Make Time, and now Click, our brand new book and
This is our podcast. If you want to get an email every week when the new episode comes out, as well as a few other kind of cool and interesting links that we found, head over to jakeandjz.com, sign up for that email there. Jake, we talk a lot about products. We care a lot about making products that are useful, that make sense to people, that click, pun intended, with customers that really work. And books are products too.
we really want this book, our new book Click to be as helpful, as useful as possible for readers. Can you maybe kind of take us back in time to the story of first, like how you decided to write this book and then some of the things that we did to try to make it as good of a product as possible.
Jake (05:17)
Yeah, we talk in the book, one of the key ideas, obviously, for the title is click. The key concept is the notion of what happens when something clicks with the customer? What happens when you make something, you have a project, you start off, you build the thing, you get it in people's hands and then it clicks. works and products either
JZ (05:37)
It's that moment
when it's just like, it's just obvious that it meets a need and it makes sense to people.
Jake (05:43)
Yeah. Yeah. And there's obviously there's this notion of product market fit with startups. So they, this thing has a market and it's going and people are buying it's work and whatever, which is where you want to get to with anything that you do. But the idea of something clicking is it describes product market fit, but it also describes product market fit on like the molecular level of one person, one moment. It's a thing you can see happen.
JZ (06:06)
The one to one. Yeah.
Jake (06:09)
the essence of the book is how do you deliver that? you're starting off on a project, how do you make sure that you're on the right track for that? In a much more tactical sense, the foundation sprint is a thing you do before you've run design sprints, if you're already familiar with design sprints. But the most core element is like, how do you make sure that it fits? if I was to tell the story, the history of the book, it really goes back to some moments when...
we were working with founders in a design sprint or a brand sprint or just having a conversation with them just in our regular investor founder, like one-on-one kind of check-ins. And we would be talking and it it just became obvious to me that like, man, there's a thing that they need to figure out and we don't yet have a format for it, but we could.
And I think having run hundreds of design sprints and worked with so many teams in this role of facilitator, where you're trying to help them, we're trying to help them get out their best work. We kind of know, that's the thing you can make a, you can turn that into a structure and help with that. And so I started running some experiments. started running some experiments together, just sometimes adding on an activity to a design sprint at the very beginning before we'd start.
or playing with a new format that we had called the opportunity sprint at that point, which was just to help teams make decisions and trying to figure out what are the minimal number of crucial elements that you need at the beginning. And so at first it was just a few different experiments. And as we saw those click with founders where it was like, wow, that's, that's it. That's really unlocking what they need. They're saying like, my God, the end of the meeting, they're like, my God, this was like.
JZ (07:52)
Yeah.
Jake (07:58)
You know, a month, two months, like we got so much done today. Those were the subatomic elements that started to become this book. And, and so that's, that's like the very earliest stage. And then those formed into, think this observation, we've got to create a whole sprint for this moment. And that's going to be the foundation sprint. when we saw that start to work and take off, I mean, again, it's like, it's like one of those.
products that you and I have been lucky enough to be involved in from time to time over the years where you just see it, takes off because it works so well. It solves such an important problem for people. And here this problem of I need to get clear on the essential core of my strategy before I make more decisions. The foundation sprint delivers on that. And as a result, it became the sprint format that we were using most often.
with our portfolio companies even more than the design sprint. And that's the moment when I think I started to get the inkling, we have to find a better way to share this. And then it was just a matter of, we go to the trouble of writing a book? Cause you and I have been down that road twice before and we know it's not a short road.
JZ (09:11)
Yeah. So how did we translate it from a sprint? First, we came up with a foundation sprint. We felt really confident that that was working for founders. That was really helping people starting new projects, build this foundation that would set them up to get to that click moment with their customers again and again and again. How did we go from that to, okay, it's a book. Like what was the work that went into making sure that the book version of that was as good as possible?
Jake (09:39)
One of the things that's been useful to us in all kinds of different sprints and work is this notion of lightning demos. you know, lightning demos in a design sprint means literally we're going to very quickly look at a bunch of different reference points and see what works well about those and see if there are any patterns that we can learn from that we can steal and adapt to our own purposes. And it's true if you're designing a
marketing page, if you're designing a piece of software that there are interesting patterns out in the world to learn from. It's also true of books. And there were a set of books that I remember referring to when starting work on Sprint and a set of books that we looked at for, for, for Click. had a few books in mind, not least of which was Sprint. mean, we know, we know that Sprint has been an effective format for delivering this.
JZ (10:15)
Yeah.
Yep.
Right, yeah.
Jake (10:37)
here's this tool kit, but also here's this different way of thinking about building products. And while I wanted to not lose any of what worked well, I think about sprint, which is the hypothesis there was it's a combination of narrative and then really practical tactical steps that you can take. The thing that I wanted to do better with click was to make it an easier, faster read.
JZ (10:57)
Yeah.
Jake (11:06)
that you could get through quickly and then also provide this toolkit. So I wanted to change the balance a little bit so that as you read through, it wasn't taking you quite so much into the weeds of every step, that we would go quickly through the steps, but mostly it would be about what are the lessons? Why are you doing this sequence of steps? Because a lot of the lessons, the things we're trying to do in CLICK, figuring out...
your differentiation in a way that doesn't just give it lip service the way it usually happens, but really gets to the heart of it. Having the basic elements in place so that you can figure out what that differentiation should be making the best decision about which approach to take. lot of the lessons that help you do those things. There are lessons that could be applied even if you're not running a foundation sprint. And so one of the books that I looked to that I had read recently and thought, man, this was a such a fast read. can't believe it. Cause
JZ (11:52)
Totally.
Jake (12:01)
I don't like to read nonfiction very much. Frankly, know, business books also, just not, would prefer to read fiction. So it's really gotta be fast and breezy for me to get through. And I read the Psychology of Money, which is a huge, just massive hit book. And I thought as I read it, I was like, wow, I can see why this has been so popular. It has good ideas, but these chapters just move fast.
JZ (12:16)
It's so good. Yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (12:30)
And
I just feel like I'm being whipped through and it even is framed in the introduction as like, this is going to be a quick read. So that was one inspiration point was I want it to move that fast if possible.
JZ (12:40)
And if you haven't
read Psychology of Money, first of all, you should. And second, the structure of the book is basically that there's this overarching theme about the sort of weird and surprising psychology of how people think about money and make financial decisions. But then the book itself is like, I don't know, is it 15, 20 chapters, something like that? each one is like, just some of them are as short as just a few pages. And they've got
Jake (13:02)
Yeah, 20, I think 20, yeah.
JZ (13:07)
a really tight story, and then some kind of interesting insights and it sort of ends with like a lesson. So that was one format. That was one lightning demo. was like, could Click be a book like that? Could it be a series of short chapters, interesting stories, punchy lessons? That was one lightning demo.
Jake (13:25)
Yeah. Yeah. and that was a really, a really good high bar. I think it's helpful to work with an inspiration point or set of inspiration points that are, you know, maybe outside your grasp a bit. It's like, that's going to be hard to get to that level. That's really inspiring. You know, that's fired me up every time I'd sit down at the keyboard thinking like, how can I make it that fast? And then.
JZ (13:41)
Totally.
Yeah, one of our
lightning demos for Sprint was The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg, which is a book you should also read. it is, Charles is just such a good writer. like the book, it just pulls you in from the first page. And that was a similarly like almost intimidating high bar. Like could it be, if it could be even half as good as The Power of Habit, we would have felt like it was a special book.
Jake (13:53)
Yeah. Yeah.
So good.
Absolutely. Charles is a Pulitzer Prize winning writer, right? He's a just excellent journalist and can pull you in and just hook you. that's, yeah, that's so inspiring to see. You know, it can also be, you have to battle when you're working on something like that and you're doing the first drafts of your own work, you have to battle this feeling that like it's sort of intimidating and it's like, okay, this is not, this doesn't read like that yet and may never get there.
JZ (14:43)
Yeah.
Jake (14:46)
But you'd rather be 80 % of the way, just having clawed and scratched your way, you'd rather be 80 % of the way to the best, easiest, most fun, greatest, most impactful read ever than like, you know, beating out the crummy competition. So that was a great one. Another one that I looked at was Building a Story Brand, which is a book that I, again, just felt like the format, the...
JZ (15:02)
Right, yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (15:15)
way that Donald Miller's the author, the way that he gets just right to the heart of what's important was inspiring. It's just punchy and direct, I think, in a way that is not easy to do unless you're really being careful. And the guy's a great marketer, brand person. He knows how to write copy that gets to the heart of things.
JZ (15:29)
Yeah.
Jake (15:41)
And so I kept referring back to how did he set this up? You know, and especially in the early few chapters, they were so short and, really built credibility quickly in the concept. And I, I was inspired by, by how that worked. And then I always go back to, to Heath brothers books and look at those because those have been, those have been an inspiration for me since the moment I first read made to stick. And I think we've, we've.
JZ (16:01)
Yeah.
Jake (16:09)
We probably talk about these guys almost every episode, but great combination of.
JZ (16:12)
were lucky enough to
get some feedback from Dan Heath, especially in the early months of working on Click. Every time you would forward me his notes, It was so clear. It was refreshing. really was helpful. I think it really made the book a
Jake (16:30)
Yeah, that was most amazing thing. I've gotten to know Dan a little bit know, we have the same editor, same publisher, same agent. is just a really nice guy, a really cool guy who comes across in person exactly as friendly and wise and funny as he does on the page when he's writing.
JZ (16:46)
Yeah.
Jake (16:56)
And yeah, he offered to give feedback on the, on the manuscript as I was writing it and, and as we were reviewing it and trying to figure out how to shape things, make decisions about what's most important. So we got feedback from him really early on and then kind of threw out. it was, it was really powerful at to have someone who's so good at understanding the reader's perspective. I think that's something that he does so well.
to look at the raw materials of these are the elements that we think are the most important. And for him to say, you know, I think for the reader to be able to build, cause this guy's a, he's a professor. He's a lot of what he and his brother have written about involve understanding how people think and how they form knowledge how they're able to take action to make changes in their work or their lives. so it's just really kind of like, if you can get a person who's an expert on that.
And an expert writer to look at your writing when that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to help people change, you know, understand something and make changes. Wow. That was amazing. That was the, that was the most amazing ask the experts kind of a thing that we at several points in the manuscript feedback from Dan that changed the shape of the book and much for the better.
JZ (18:09)
Yeah.
Jake, what do you think about showing the inside of the book? A little bit of a sneak peek into, we've been talking about like the books that inspired us, you know, this desire to make a book that was as useful and practical as Sprint, also faster to read, more fun to read, easier to read. let's show it.
Jake (18:14)
Yeah!
JZ (18:34)
was kind of how it turned out, what it turned into.
Jake (18:36)
Yeah.
And I don't want to throw sprint under the bus. think it's a pretty fun to read book. hope I'd like to think so. But part of this was about not being satisfied with writing a book that was like a sprint sequel. We've called Click a sprint prequel because it's a, you know, the foundation sprint is something you would do before a design sprint. But I did not want this to come out. It's just, we just did that same thing again about it, you know, an adjacent topic.
JZ (18:56)
Yeah.
Right, totally.
Jake (19:05)
I really wanted to make it fresh. so part of that was, was thinking about the structure of the chapters. Part of it was even the visual format. And I wanted this book. I've always been very inspired by weight, but why, the way that he, just interweaves illustration with text and it's an impossibly high bar. He's so good, but
JZ (19:30)
Yeah,
Tim Urban, amazing, the creator of Wait But Why.
Jake (19:31)
This is Tim Urban.
Yeah, absolutely incredible. it's an impossible bar sort of to get to, but again, it's like inspiring and it pushes things here. So the number of illustrations in this book is way beyond the number in Sprint. And we can kind of take a look at that here. So this is the...
JZ (19:49)
Yeah, I love the first
page. Very rich.
Jake (19:52)
Yeah, very, very, very, very, very spare here. so
we're looking at the actual PDF of the.
JZ (19:58)
Yeah, you can
see like the crop marks in the corner as you can see like this is these are the PDFs that we review the book is moving toward production, toward being printed.
Jake (20:10)
Yeah. And as we go, through and, write comments in. I don't, this is really like in the weeds, but when we're working with the publisher, we'll like, right. You know, if, if my name, if I wanted it to have my middle name, I would say like, yeah, yeah. Like make Jake's name like way, way bigger or something like that. And then that would go to the publishers design team and editing team. And then they, you know,
JZ (20:23)
Make your name bigger.
Jake (20:35)
if they wanted to make that change, they'd make it. And then in the next round of revision, get it back. So all this stuff happens at a certain point, you're doing it in Google docs. That's how we start. And then we moved to word because that's what the publishers use for their text edits. And then when you get into the PDF, you're just making these comments on top of the PDF. And then, you know, the clock is ticking. You only have so many rounds because each round of editing the PDF, sending it back takes, it takes a while. So.
JZ (20:44)
Yeah.
it
Yeah. The tools get
more and more primitive as the book gets closer to completion. Like you start out with this really rich, like commenting, suggesting, you know, all these collaborative features of Google Docs and you end with just like drawing boxes on a, on a PDF and Adobe Acrobat.
Jake (21:06)
Yes.
Yeah.
Yeah. And at the stage we're at now where it's just about to go to press, we're sending emails with like, could you, you know? So anyway, this is, I'm just going to do a little quick view at like the table of contents here. And,
JZ (21:23)
Yeah.
Jake (21:31)
So once we get into the book itself, you'll see, there are, there are a lot of illustrations and a lot of pages like this where on, you know, two facing pages, I, I wanted the, there to be spots where, almost like half of what was on the page was an illustration for me. That's such a powerful way to understand an idea, to pair a story and.
JZ (21:47)
Yeah.
Jake (21:53)
The insights, whatever's in the writing with visuals that also show how that thing works. And so throughout there's kind of illustrations like this that are meant to show here's, here's how these concepts work. The big emphasis on some big lessons and then also some tactical things where we'll show you like here's what to do on the sticky notes, but those are not front and center. Those are just kind of sprinkled throughout.
So that's a, that's a peek inside the book and at kind of the beginnings of the book and the, I don't know, for the part for me was so fun creating it, all of these, these back and forth conversations that we got to have with Dan and also the conversations you and I got to have John. And I remember going from the stage where it was just the earliest parts of an idea.
JZ (22:21)
Yeah.
Jake (22:43)
I spent a lot of time talking to our agent, Sylvie, and trying to form, you know, what, how much do we include? How much do we keep out? Because part of the challenge is you and I have created a lot of things over the last decade and a half and figuring out which of those elements are necessary. We really wanted to make it very focused and, and as essential and useful right off the shelf as possible. So conversations about that.
JZ (23:01)
Yeah.
Jake (23:11)
conversations, I'd be walking in the forest, talking on the phone to you. We'd be figuring out like, you know, okay, in this chapter, what do you think is a good story? I remember there was a, there's a particular story that, you told me like, Hey, I've seen this movie and you've got to watch this movie. And I think this is, there's a great story here for the book. And I won't spoil it for readers by, by going into any more detail than that. But I remember thinking, God, I don't know.
JZ (23:14)
You
Jake (23:37)
Is that really? And then I was like, you made the recommendation twice, like two consecutive calls. You're like, really? Like, so okay, I'll watch the movie. And I watched the movie with my wife and it was the, it was like a genre of movie that she's not into. And we stayed up really late because it was so good. But you know, we ended up staying up till midnight, which for us is, you know, just way beyond all reasonable. And then I was like, my God, he's exactly right. And that's, you know, that was one piece that came into the book. anyway.
JZ (23:41)
You
Yeah.
Jake (24:06)
all these conversations, and then we get into, know, we're doing these Google ads that's the backstory. But I think it would be fun to tell people maybe a little bit about the, the business elements of, the strategic elements for us, how we think about what a team needs to succeed, what makes for a good business outcome for us as investors, having this really selfish way of looking at projects, which is yeah, yeah, yeah.
JZ (24:23)
Yeah.
Jake (24:32)
It doesn't matter if you write, all the sticky notes in the world, it's got to turn into something that's valuable or it just doesn't matter. And I wondered if you could talk about our framework for assessing investments and how that informed the foundation sprint and the book click.
JZ (24:41)
Yeah.
Yeah, I think talk to VC investors, if you listen to investors talk about how they decide which companies to invest in, there's a lot of pattern matching. There's a lot of like, well, this is sort of like that thing or this company shares some characteristics with some other successful companies that we've seen. of course, we do that too. We're not immune to that. There's nothing wrong with that.
when
When we decided to start our own VC firm character, and we started looking back at all the companies that we had invested in at Google Ventures that were really successful and the projects we'd been involved in before that at Google and at YouTube, started to see kind of this collection of attributes, these things that were showing up again and again. they were basically like, none of these are gonna sound
like mind blowing on their own, they're simple, but they're really, really important. They're fundamental, they're foundational. So like, who's the customer and what problem are you solving for them? Like, is it a clearly defined customer and is it an actual real problem? So that's like the starting point. Why is your solution, why is your product different from what exists in the world today? know, almost by definition, you know, people are...
They're fine with the way it is, you know, like they are living their life. They are doing their job. There are always ways to make things a little bit better, but most of the time people are not going to change their behavior and they're not going to adopt a new product unless it's way better. It has to be radically different, radically better. So was that there? what is it about the team that makes them not just objectively great? You know, I think that one of the things that, that is, is so fun about the work that we do is that
There are no, there are no bad founders. are no bad people, right? Like, like every single person that we talk to is, is amazing. They're brilliant. They're, they're so ambitious. They're so impressive, but what's that, that X factor. What's that special thing that makes that team uniquely suited to build this product, to solve this problem for their customer. And then, you know, basically like, what are they going to do about it? You know, what's sort of the first step that they're going to take.
on their way to creating this solution. we saw those things show up again and again, and we use those things as we're evaluating the companies that we might invest in. at some point, and I think it was around the first time we ran Character Labs, and we had created the first version of the foundation sprint that you talked about, Jake. Around that time, we realized that we didn't just have to be
passive observers of these attributes. wasn't just like, you know, we're doing quality control on it, on an assembly line and they're sort of moving past us and we're saying that one's good, that one's bad, that one's bad, that one's good. We didn't have to just like observe them. We could, we could actually help those teams. We could help founders draw those things out, really shine a light on each of those elements, really help them figure out, okay, who is the customer? What is an important problem?
Jake (27:46)
Yeah
JZ (28:03)
Why is your solution radically different? What is special about you as a team? We know you're great, but what is unique about you? What are you going to do about it? What's that first step? And that's really what the foundation sprint was meant to draw out. And I think once we had seen some success doing that with teams, similar to how we felt about sprint and about spreading the word about the design sprint, we just felt like, man, we need...
We need everybody to know about this. We don't want to just be these like sort of, you know, tight fisted, like investors who are keeping our secrets to ourselves and, and you'll never know what we're looking for when you come to pitch us. We, we wanted to give these tools to, the world, not just to sort of, you know, startup founders, but to anybody who's working on a new project. so, that's kind of the, that's sort of the through line from
the ways that we think about investing in companies to like what we wish everybody knew about how to get started and set themselves up for success.
Jake (29:04)
There are these fundamental basic things that we use a tool that we call OATS, Opportunity Approach Team and Success So Far. That's what it stands for. O-A-T-S, Opportunity Approach Team, Success So Far, that's OATS. And we use this OATS scoring system as a way to level set when we're evaluating a startup, whether we should invest in them or not. We're going to ask a bunch of questions of ourselves on this framework and then figure out, okay, how do we sort of score them?
And when you boil those down to those simple elements that compose the opportunity and the approach and the team, and then ultimately informed the success, they are very simple things. so it seems like they've chosen the right target customer or like a really promising target customer. Does it seem like their approach is the right one and that they're
JZ (29:45)
Yeah.
Jake (29:56)
They're utilizing their special skills in a way that is going to be especially valuable to those customers and especially hard for someone else to match. Those elements, they are really simple. You know, who's your customer? What's the approach? They're very simple, but getting them precisely right is, is everything. And it's, think easy to, to look at.
JZ (30:16)
Yeah.
Jake (30:24)
those elements and say, well, you sure, of course you got to know your customer is of course. yet very few teams really do have crystal clarity about who their customer is at the beginning of a project, about what problem they're solving at the beginning of a project, about what's going to make it special to people once it's already done and they're, they're putting it into people's hands. And so we believe that that, that hypothesis of
You know, this combination of things is, is everything. And it's such a, it's such a shame. It's such a crime actually that most teams don't have a way of thinking about that and making it really clear and plain and simple and obvious. So everybody on the team is talking about the exact same founding hypothesis at the beginning, because when you don't have that teams, great teams, talented leaders, smart people.
JZ (30:55)
Yeah.
Jake (31:22)
great bond, working together, motivated. They can work hard and do great effort and come up with something that absolutely is worthless to their customers and kills the company and demoralizes the people and bites a huge chunk out of their life, having worked on something that went nowhere. And that can still happen, but if you don't start with a clear founding hypothesis, you're just, I mean, you're, just tying both hands and
JZ (31:33)
you
Yeah, waste a ton of time. Totally.
Jake (31:52)
one leg, I mean, you're just like, you're, it's, so frustrating, I guess. And so the whole sort of, thing that maybe like drove this effort to get this book out more than anything, because I mean, it's two years now since we started working on it. takes forever. It takes longer now than it used to because supply chain stuff takes longer with publishing. So it's a pain and we could have just kept doing what we were doing just fine without doing this, but.
JZ (31:56)
Yeah.
Right, yeah.
Jake (32:20)
It's so frustrating to think that something so simple could be so helpful, I think, to so many folks. I hope helped to steer so many efforts into a direction where they become meaningful to their customers, meaningful to the people that we're trying to serve, rather than going in the wrong direction and ending up with something that just kind of flops, just kind of okay.
JZ (32:24)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (32:47)
And that's so, it's so frustrating to see that so disappointing. And we really think this makes a difference.
JZ (32:52)
Yeah, I think like you said, normal mode of figuring this stuff out is essentially like chaos, right? It's just sort of like have some meetings, talk about some stuff, maybe write some stuff down, but don't ever really clarify it. Don't ever really test it, you know, sort of just kind of go round and round. I think there's a lot of people out there, other investors, know, there's successful founders, you know, there's people
Jake (33:00)
It is chaos. Yeah.
JZ (33:18)
mostly well-intentioned who will try to tell you what to do, right? They'll say like, these are the kinds of markets you should focus on. This is a good product. You should build your product to do this. But yeah, we kind of felt like there was this gap, right? There was like, okay, there's chaos mode over here. There's like, here's what you should do over here, advice on what you should do. But there was no how. There was no like, if you don't wanna just like blindly copy the what, or you don't wanna just like be in chaos mode.
How do you figure these things out? We feel like we have a good recipe now for helping the founders that we work with figure those out. But we just think it's a really helpful tool. We think whether you're starting a company, a tech startup, a small business, you're launching a new project inside of a big company, inside of a nonprofit, a government, we think that you can use these techniques. You can adopt these lessons.
in the early days of that project. And it's not a guarantee that it will work, but we are very, very confident that it will give you your best possible chances of building something that people want.
Jake (34:28)
One of the things I think is so important about what you're describing is that we're not going to be prescriptive about this is, you know, go after this business or this thing or whatever. We're not going to allow things to be in chaos, but that we believe in people's intuition, whether that's a founder, whether that's, a reader who's like you said, in any kind of an organization, when people have been
doing their work and observing and getting excited about the world and curious, they have intuition that there's a need for a solution to a problem.
JZ (35:01)
Yeah,
nobody makes that leap. Nobody says, I'm going to quit my job and start a business. I'm going to stick my neck out and launch this new project inside my company. Nobody does that unless they have built intuition and conviction that they need to do it. Right? So that's there. That's the starting point. Yeah.
Jake (35:15)
Yeah. Yeah. We know that's there. And so it's kind of a
matter of getting that into the form where it has the best, the greatest chance of, of working and to do that, to take the intuition, the excitement, the energy, this just sort of like general laser beam of like something needs to happen, but actually focus it. So it hits the right spot. It, can kind of think of it as this one really big complex decision that has to be made.
going from, I have this itch, this excitement, this whatever to do something new. then what shape does that take? It's like, know, got to focus all of that into, into a beam and.
JZ (35:45)
Yeah.
Hehehehe
Yeah, it's
like, you know, sometimes movies, have those like the production, you know, whoever the production company is, they have the cool animations at the beginning of a movie that like, you know, it's like a bunch of pieces are like coming fitting together and to like form the shiny like 3D logo. Like that's the decision, the complex decision of how do I start? What do I do?
Jake (36:08)
Yeah.
Yes.
you
Yes. And at the beginning, at the very beginning of a project that happens just as at the beginning of the movie, there's some weird animation and then there's some production studio whose name you, yep. And you instantly forget their name, but like that's the key. That's this thing that's like happening at the beginning. And, yet it's sort of up till now, as far as I can tell that's just kind of invisible. Like that happens.
JZ (36:27)
Yeah.
And it makes that noise, chunk.
Yeah, totally.
Jake (36:48)
But it just sort of happens off stage in one person's brain or spread across a bunch of like open ended conversations. It's chaos. So we wanted to create a tool for making that decision. That's what this is and what something that makes me so excited about the book, about getting it out in people's hands, man, we've had a crazy opportunity for these past years where we get the chance to.
time and time and time again to be in the room, whether that's a physical room or a virtual room with founders, with brilliant engineers, brilliant product people, brilliant designers who are taking this big leap to do this new thing. And they're wrestling with that big decision of what's the form of this, or they're wrestling with all kinds of different decisions. And with us in the room as you know, their investor, we're just trying to help them make a good decision, but we get to see.
JZ (37:24)
Yeah.
Jake (37:46)
the dynamics of how people make decisions. And I've read a lot of books about the, you know, bias and the kinds of decisions and irrational behavior and all that. And John, you've read a lot of books about that and there's overlap. We've read some of the same books and some different books and we think about it a lot.
JZ (38:00)
Yeah.
And the other cool thing
is we often get to see not immediately, but because of how long we've been doing this, we get to see how things turn out. So if we go back and we do this and we do this a little bit and click, if we go back to some of the companies that we worked with at Google Ventures that we invested in, we saw what their process was of making that complex decision or series of decisions and how that played out. That feels unique too. A lot of times when you hear about this stuff or you read about this stuff or you try it on your own,
Jake (38:11)
Yes. Yeah.
JZ (38:33)
you don't have the benefit of seeing how it turns out in the end.
Jake (38:37)
Absolutely. And you can do a great research. You can run studies. You can read about case studies, whatever, but unless you have the chance to just do it and do it and do it. we've had that chance, which is really cool. That chance has helped us to see what is difficult about that click, click, click, click, click moment, that part when everything's kind of forming in the beginning. What's hard? Where does it...
JZ (38:50)
Yeah. Yeah.
Jake (39:07)
become very difficult as the decision maker to have confidence that you're doing the right thing. Where is it difficult for a team of three or four or five people to get to one conclusion without burning up all of their energy, having a long conversation? And we introduced a lot of tactics for this with the design sprint and in the sprint book. And we know from talking to folks, it's been adopted all around the world. We know those methods work well.
In Click, we have an even more sophisticated method for making an even bigger decision about the approach that you're going to take for your project. And so the sequence of activities that happen in the foundation sprint and the way in which we help teams visualize what's one perspective look like, what's another perspective look like through really tactical steps, know, really like literally like, here's what you do next. Here's what you do next. But.
JZ (39:44)
Yeah.
Yeah.
Jake (40:04)
I mean, honestly, like I'm proud of it. I think it's going to be a really, a really useful tool to get in many, many, many more people's hands. And it's, it's exciting because I, again, I feel like we kind of had to share it because we've been so lucky to get this chance to, to experiment in real time, see the long-term results and then say like, okay, this works or this would have helped somebody if they had been able to do this and
JZ (40:18)
Right.
Jake (40:33)
kind of stretch out that part of the decision a little longer or do a few more iterations on this part. And we've put that all into the recipe that's in click.
JZ (40:41)
Cool. So yeah, our new book is called Click. It is about how to make what people want. We believe that it is the best guide. It's our best guide. It's our best tools and techniques for what you should do at the beginning of a new project, beginning of starting a company, getting something off the ground, kicking off any kind of big endeavor. And our recipe for that, our format for that is the foundation sprint. Again, we just think this is...
So helpful, we've seen it work really well with the companies we work with. We've used it a ton on our own projects, our own stuff that we're doing both, you know, in the work sphere and, personally, click doesn't come out until April, but we are doing a pretty ridiculous, a pre-order bonus. So if you buy the book before it comes out, if you pre-order it, you're going to get a bunch of resources, tools, guides are sort of our principle with this is like,
We want you to be able to run a foundation sprint before the book comes out with these resources that we're making available. And if you're listening to this at the end of January, buy the book in the next couple of days, there's even sort of another level of some live events, some cool giveaways, some really, really special stuff that we're offering. So go to theclickbook.com, check it out. We can't wait for you to get access to this stuff.
Hopefully you can tell how excited we are about it. And not just because it took two years, but because we think it's really, really good. We're proud of it. We're excited about it. Lots more to come.
Jake (42:09)
You
Thanks for listening, you guys. We'll see you next time.
JZ (42:18)
Yeah, this has been episode 13 of Jake and Jay Z. Thanks everybody. Talk to you soon.