Oil and Water: Painful Lessons of “BlackBerry the Movie”
It was September 2023 when I finally watched the “Blackberry” movie on a long flight home. I’m an old tech business guy who actually used Blackberry. I recall how I felt when I was first given a Blackberry phone as an executive at Yahoo!
It’s stupid looking back but at the time I felt I had made it both within the organization but in the industry. It was that much of a status symbol during the mid-2000s. It was ubiquitous in executive suites throughout the Fortune 500. It was so addictive to use that we called it the “Crackberry.” This addictiveness is something I can personally attest to. It had 30% market share in North America and 50% market share globally in 2007.
Then the IPhone from Apple came out in 2007. Boy, did Research in Motion (RIM) the master company of Blackberry really mess it up despite their overwhelming lead in the market. Another long story of incumbents getting their butts kicked because of arrogance, complacency and cutting corners.
Anyways, back to the movie, it’s the story about two techies who bring on board a hard-nosed business guy Jim Balsillie to help take RIM to the next level. It’s a dramatized version of their rise from the crappy small town of Waterloo in Canada to global domination but it’s good fun.
I should say Jim Balsillie is a completely vicious a-shole with major anger management issues albeit he is damn effective. And Mike Lazaridis and Doug Fregin are naive, frigging doofuses but brilliant technical geniuses. Such a good business drama movie, watching a freewheeling tech driven startup turn into a soulless big corporation. A “pride before the fall” story.
Jim the business man, when asking them for some random phone prototype, says: “Perfect is the enemy of good.” But Mike the techie responds: “Good enough is the enemy of humanity.”
This exchange encapsulates the eternal story of culture clash in business. Suits versus creatives. Geeks (tech) versus jocks (business). Founders versus professional managers aka “Adult supervision.”
This is just so very common in startup land. Sometimes it works out. But this culture clash is the main reason so many growth stage companies spin out of control. They bring in the wrong stage of executive and leadership. It’s like when a B2B startup hires a bunch of executives from Oracle or Salesforce. It never works out most of the time.
They are just too bureaucratic, too used to having a ton of resources and unwilling to get their hands dirty. They are also extremely skilled politicians, who are great at managing up but don’t do any real work. Or great at taking credit for others' work or removing rival executives altogether. They draw the wrong lessons from their previous experiences and act without understanding the new context.
This happened at Yahoo! when I was there with a wave of horrific executives from IBM for example. Or at Zynga with a wave of Electronic Arts managers. These people calcified the culture and I can point to these companies' decline at the point of time when these specific executives joined.
Most recently & prominently in 2023, it was the clean sweep of ex-Amazon executives from Flexport when the founder returned after seeing the bloat that happened with his replacement CEO. You want to hire someone who can help you grow through the next few stages but not too far ahead.
There is a big difference between inheritors and founders and builders. Too many times founders get entranced or deceived by the credentials, or the prestige of the brand or the impressive presenting and interviewing skills of these executives. But they soon find out these people have no clue. They inherited a working system and have no idea how to build it.
If you use my quick framework of the 3 stages of companies it’s very clear. These stages are the Commando, Infantryman and Policeman phases. Don’t hire a policeman when you need an infantryman. Make sure these folks have done the job of scaling that specific stage or at least have the humility & mindset of learning.
Plus a willingness to get their hands dirty in doing basic things needed in running the day to day business. If they refuse to help out on customer service calls, booking their own travel on occasion or even stacking chairs or cleaning up after an all hands meeting, they may not be a good fit for your startup. Especially if they see these things as beneath them.
Get rid of them fast as they will ruin your culture with arrogance and entitlement. Something we’ve seen that was endemic in startup land these last 6-7 years that thankfully is disappearing fast since mid-2022. But take the lesson here that others are now learning the hard way.