StartupCafe

Our Stanford REE Series picks back up with insights from design entrepreneur David Law of Speck Design, Speck Products, and many more companies he’s founded. By guest blogger Kirsty Macgregor.

“Design and build a tool that will carry an egg as far as possible – and come back on Friday with a prototype” was the brief the young David Law was given as he applied for entry to the new, collaborative degree in Product Design and Engineering run by Glasgow University and Glasgow School of Art ( back in the dawn of time).  Working on this project created a degree of engagement David hadn’t experienced in years and gave him a taste of the “can do/ hands on” mindset fostered by the course… which was critical to his development. David kicked off his keynote speech on day 2 of the conference with a deliciously deadpan  “walk through (his) memory lane of failure“ which included his first failed attempt at gaining a degree in London leading to his second, formative -and successful- effort in Glasgow.

Building on Heidi’s theme of the day before, David explored how the willingness to fail, indeed the recognition and embracing of failure as part of the entrepreneurial and, specifically in his case, design process, is crucial to success.

Amongst the gems David shared were his sense of the importance of Places to Communicate – in entrepreneurial education. Spaces such as the Stanford Loft where students can build things together help develop the “hands on” capacity shared by the all best engineers and designers. The real value of the ME101 (mechanical engineering) course at Stanford, which he sometimes teaches, is that it throws the students into the unknown….where there are no right answers- but lots of scope for ingenuity, inventiveness and spaces for them to play.

Failure, as his stories demonstrated, happens all the time in the entrepreneur/ designers’ world; the ability to prototype in quick and dirty – and cheap – ways are key to success. You need to get feedback from the market fast and be able to come back from failure quickly. In my favourite of his many quotable comments: “theory does not cover reality – building something always solves the problems – or NOT!” He flashed us through images of numerous quirky fun designs that hadn’t made it – and a few that had!

David also emphasised the importance of quantity over quality in the early phase. He starts by having his benchmark low – and gradually raises the bar. Many iterations are necessary to get to the point of success – so don’t waste too much time on the early stage. He has little time for business plans and doesn’t use venture capitalists – saying “ they aren’t helpful in my world”.

David also touched on another recurring theme of the conference – Scotland (and indeed much of Europe)’s intolerance of failure. David has only very recently started to call himself an entrepreneur. Failure in David’s thinking is” the juice of design – its where the opportunity lies”…..I need to talk to David more about this – it’s a great sounding quote – but what does it really mean…?

Speck, David’s company, is now the leading design company in the Valley, it has been in existence for about 15 years and the real success has come in the past 5…so we know that David knows about failure, the ability to persist,  and also a lot about the little used word in this presentation “SUCCESS”. Ultimately, he said, succeeding is about your ability to respond with total creativity and to do whatever it takes to hang on in and survive. That egg certainly taught him a thing or two!