The Power of Positive Destruction by Merrin Seth;Adler Carlye; & Carlye Adler

Author:Merrin, Seth;Adler, Carlye; & Carlye Adler [Merrin, Seth & Adler, Carlye]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781119196440
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated
Published: 2016-11-09T00:00:00+00:00

Make It Super Simple

With enough money to build the product and a sales team to sell it, we were off to the races. We rented some nasty office space (again!) on a dingy floor with a dingy bathroom in a dingy building, with a dog grooming service in the office right next to us. It didn’t stink, but it was noisy. Every time we were on the phone there was a dog barking in the background. “What is that?” we were always asked. “Where are you?”

I didn’t want the talent we were recruiting to see our grungy office space so we invited them to lunch at a nearby saloon. (The saloon was at one point shut down because of health violations. Seems I could never escape the mice.)

Most of our hiring prospects were ex–Merrin Financial employees. Just about every single person we recruited in Liquidnet’s start-up phase came on board. It was like a reunion. But more than that: we were able to accomplish things incredibly quickly because we all knew each other, we knew the business, and we knew better than anyone else in the world how to deliver the secret sauce. Who better to know how to integrate with the OMS than those who built the OMS?

We adhered to the important lesson I learned in Silicon Valley—a mandate to make it incredibly simple. This applied to both the idea and the product. We accomplished our goal to make the system so simple that the instruction manual would fit on the back of a business card. It was a single purpose application that would find liquidity without moving the market, without intervention by the trader. It had to fit seamlessly within their existing workflow and be usable “right out of the box.” We knew that desktop real estate was valuable and scarce and decided that instead of being a full-screen application like all the others at the time, we would take up only a very little portion of the screen. We designed little “chicklets” that alerted traders to a match and appeared only if there was an opportunity to trade a large block of stock right there and then.

I hired four salespeople: I put them in a room; I gave them a script; and we role-played for days on end. We practiced—everything from a cold call to getting the meeting to having the meeting and, of course, demoing the system. We left nothing to chance. They practiced while walking around the city, standing in front of their mirrors, taping themselves and with their significant others who—to some of their dismay—could do the pitch as well as they could. But by the time we were ready to start selling, the salespeople were ready.

We set a goal: To get to a critical mass of liquidity we needed 100 firms on the system when we launched. As we were developing the system, it became very clear that we were developing faster than we were signing up clients and getting the OMS vendors to integrate with our platform.

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