Individual Principles
Here I am reflect on my highest principles. I've noticed that the most successful and admirable people I look up to do not take credit for their success. Rather, they credit their success to a set of principles that anyone can follow. These principles are an excellent discussion topic. While I am not nearly as successful or admirable as those I've learned from, here are the principles that have served me in my career, please use them as common knowledge for working with me. These principles are a work in progress that I strive to meet everyday, often unsuccessfully. These principles orient me toward success and give me a structured process that turns failure into personal improvement. These principles are to ...
1. Listen & Learn
2. Be Honest
3. Keep Your Word
4. Right Your Wrongs
Listening and learning brings me closer to the truth. Before speaking I ask myself what is true and how can I learn as much as possible on a given subject. Once satisfied with all I have learned, while acknowledging the limits of my understanding, then I feel qualified to speak from a solid foundation about what is true on a given topic.
Telling the truth grounds my words within my knowledge and expertise. Anytime I speak and notice my words losing their grounding, I try to go back to listen and learn (principle #1) as much as possible on a given topic. Telling the truth makes it easy for me to recognize when not to speak, what questions to ask, and how to follow through on my word.
Keeping my word gives me confidence and I've noticed how it encourages others to trust me. To keep my word I must follow through on my claims with effective actions. If my actions are not effective, then I did not tell the truth (principle #2) and I need to listen and learn (principle #1). That's not to say quit easily, but the opposite as most of the required learning for following through on your word comes from seeing your word through to its end.
I believe these principles promote a culture of humility, learning, hard work, confidence, and trust. Further, I believe such a culture can lay a foundation from which we can build a flywheel of creation.
Team Flywheel
The creative process begins with a shared vision. Shared visions need to be continually discussed to promote buy in as more people become involved. This vision needs to be flexible enough to change with reality, but not too flexible that it disrupts active progress toward realizing the vision. Once teams are energized by a shared vision, then teams need the autonomy and support for turning this vision into reality.
Autonomy allows teams to move from ideas to action. With the idea of WHAT needs to be done, the details for exactly HOW to achieve this are left to the creative genius of individual contributors. Many individual contributors may not be comfortable with this at first and may make little to no progress. But with the appropriate encouragement, support, and incentives team members often flip a switch and begin making groundbreaking discoveries and progress.
Creativity is the accumulation of groundbreaking discoveries and progress the in turn push the vision forward. Unlocking the creativity within teams kickstarts an unstoppable engine that contributes to culture that is productive, energizing, and fun!
Pakira serves Global Commodities Trading through our Business Platform connecting users to 90,000+ Potential Trade Partners. We feature a search, chat and trade engine that helps businesses serve more companies with better service in less time.
The idea for Pakira began developing in college after an interview with the Forest City Trading Group (FCTG). Durring my interview I discovered that the $20T physical commodity trading Industry isn't served by technology! Despite their $6 Billion+ in revenue, FCTG's cpre technology was a over 30 year old. Given my experience running a digital exchange in college, I was hired by FCTG to help modernize their trading. But, after testing all the technology on the market and nothing met our needs – I set off to Cambridge to turn my idea into reality.
Problem Formulation
To validate if the problem we surveyed over 300 companies across the industry and discovered that over 90% of companies need help "finding new customers or vendors". This problem reached a breaking point during the Supply Chain Crisis of the Covid-19 outbreak when supply chains broke down.
After validating the problem, we began brainstorming. Our team created a vision for a Data Platform that helps companies find new Partners. Scaling down our vision to an MVP, then smaller still to an initial "MVP0" and got to work executing across departments.
Building the Team & Product
Our initial build was bootstrapped and our saving grace was Big Tech's responded to COVID – layoffs. Thanks to MIT, Harvard, Brandeis, and Northeastern we gave jobs and internships to 20+ people and worked with over 80+ students in class projects. Together we completed our initial MVP0.
After raising an Angel Round we built out our engineering team, finished the MVP, and prepped our launch.
I am so very proud of the Pakira team, all the great work they've done, and their continued success!
Launching to 1000+ Companies
Leveraging our database, LinkedIn, Industry Contacts, Conferences, and much more we began a campaign that reached 30,000 companies!
Learning from each interaction I became an expert at outreach, relationship development, onboarding, feedback collection. This experience gave me a strong intuition for how to avoid user frustration and cultivate user delight.
While most users immediately loved our product and their feedback was priceless. Leaning from each on-boarding, we gained insights, made changes, and shared these changes with our users until they were absolutely delighted.
We successfully built our platform into a complete all-in-one Trade Platform that hosts over 1,000 companies that represent $100 billion+ in revenue.
Take aways
Here are the top product design principles I learned building Pakira and their reasoning.
1. Consistency – Consistent interfaces reduced confusion and feel intuitive.
2. Simplicity – Simple designs make it easier to highlight desired actions.
3. Minimalism – Removal is the best instinct for effective product improvements.
4. Accessibility – All relevant features should be visible and accessible within 1 click.
Moving forward I believe data and technology will have an ever greater impact on enterprise and society. The biggest challenge to technology adoption for enterprises is the digitization and centralization of information around business operations. Currently the quality and development of technology far exceeds the quality and development of enterprise data. Moving forward, if organization are capable of digitizing their operations, then this will set them up for sustainable competitive advantages as we head into the this new AI era. I will continue to be working in this space and if you would like to work with me then please reach out!
Thank you!
Special thanks to the entire team at Pakira. I can only list about 35 of you here, but there are well over 150 people who helped create Pakira and we could not have done it without you. I am proud of all your hard work, thank you!
Pakira Podcasts
Community Leadership
I believe in the power of mentorship. As a child I was matched with my Big by Big Brothers Big Sisters and it changed my life. Shortly after, my single mother passed away but my Big and his wife took me into their home and continued to raised me as their son. Today I do my best to give back as a Big Brother, and board member. This has been some of the most rewarding experiences of my life.
During my 6+ years of service, I've been lucky to see this organization continue to serve kids as we grow! Today, I am proud to say BBBS of NH is one of the strongest chapters in the country and I look forward to continuing to help them serve more kids.