Remembering Clay Christensen
I wouldn’t be a VC if it weren’t for him.
Professor Clay Christensen passed away last week. I mention in my bio that interest in his work is what ultimately led me to Silicon Valley. In remembrance of Professor Christensen, I thought I’d share the details of that story.
Having started my career in finance, I came to realize that moving numbers around on spreadsheets wasn’t that interesting to me (more power to those for whom spreadsheets are interesting). Around that same time, I read Professor Christensen’s book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, and started regularly reading TechCrunch, Mashable, VentureBeat, and other online publications reporting on the innovation bubbling in Silicon Valley.
It was the confluence of Professor Christensen’s theory of disruption and the stories of emerging tech companies that led to a conversation with my wife of 5 months that I wanted to leave finance and join a tech company. Doing so would mean moving to the Bay Area, the center of gravity for the technology ecosystem and a place far away from the Southwest in which we both grew up (Oklahoma) and lived at the time (Texas). Perhaps also feeling eager for a radical transition or calling my bluff, she told me to go for it. I quit my job the following day and began a job hunt.
During my search, I came across a video of Professor Christensen sharing some of his ideas on disruption at an event for Box. In a cold email to the recruiting team, I indicated how I thought Box was emblematic of Professor Christensen’s theory of disruption since Box was disrupting enterprise content management according to this framework. Box took a chance on someone with no sales experience, landing my first job in sales and initiating my Silicon Valley quest.
But the story doesn’t stop there. Aaron Levie, co-founder and CEO of Box, is also a student of Professor Christensen’s works and interested in his ideas. Aaron and I connected on those ideas, and this connection ultimately became the basis for our relationship. We’d regularly trade book recommendations and debate business concepts during most of our interactions. These debates gave me a front-row seat to his thinking as a CEO and deeply inform how I evaluate founders today.
Professor Christensen’s theory of disruption also informs how I evaluate companies. I regularly draw upon his concepts about sustaining vs. disruptive innovations and jobs-to-be-done when considering investments. Sustaining innovations represent incremental technology improvements, whereas disruptive technologies reinvent business models, technology delivery, and markets altogether. Professor Christensen describes the market conditions that are appropriate for both. In defining the jobs-to-be-done framework, Christensen famously said, “the customer is the wrong unit of analysis” and instead favored analyzing the job the customer is trying to accomplish. I’d encourage founders to think about product development in terms of the pain the product is solving and look for opportunities to move markets into new product paradigms (much the same way that Uber did with transportation).
For those of you interested in reading any of Professor Christensen’s books, we’ll have a copy waiting for you in our office at Vertex Ventures US. If you’ve already read his works, we’ll have a conversation waiting for you in the same spirit of ideas.
