Five Startup Lessons from the Book "Guardians of the Trees"
Tyler Cowen often claims that the best management books weren’t intended as management books.
The book Guardians of the Trees by Kinari Webb, M.D., falls into this category.
The book’s central theme is saving the world’s rainforests and providing healthcare for the communities there. The book is also the fascinating personal journey of the author.
However, the book details how she built a healthcare clinic and conservation foundation. Within these details, there are some great startup lessons.
Lesson 1: Startups are about testing a hypothesis. In this case, she had a very creative idea: Most illegal logging in a rainforest is because the loggers need the money for healthcare. If she could provide healthcare to these communities, it would dramatically reduce logging1. I found this creative— linking conservation with healthcare. I also found it inspiring that instead of talking about her idea, she created an organization to make it happen.
Lesson 2: Creating a successful startup is hard work. A startup is a lot of hard work. In this case, Dr. Webb even had to go to medical school! Putting that aside, she details the hard work of collecting baseline data (to help show that the mission was working), recruiting and maintaining talent, talking to the communities (see radical listening), raising money, dealing with bureaucratic paperwork, dealing with officials and leaders who wanted bribes (and not being willing to do that), doing the jobs no one wanted, learning to delegate, and many more challenges.
In addition, since this was not intentionally a business book, Dr. Webb’s journey shows how hard a startup can be on your personally. She talks about the toll it took on her relationships and the retreats she did to relieve the stress.
Lesson 3: Radical Listening. In the book, she claims that most aid organizations are too top-down: they come into a community with the answers. She doesn’t think this works. Instead, she coins the term “radical listening” to mean listening to the communities and tailoring the solutions and resources to their needs. These radical listening sessions often made her change her original hypothesis. I liken this to listening to your customers.
Lesson 4: Be creative with pricing. She wanted patients to have skin in the game. And the people in the communities didn’t want charity. However, if they just charged the full rate, people would have to cut trees to pay. Instead, they found ways to discount based on commitments not to cut trees, barter, or pay in-kind.
Lesson 5: Scaling is hard, be patient. I made this mistake throughout the book, wondering how she would scale this model. I forgot Paul Graham’s advice to “do things that don’t scale.” His point is that startups don’t just take off; they take off because the founder made them take off. Dr. Webb had to do many things that wouldn’t scale to prove the idea. She might not have had anything to scale if she spent too much time trying to scale it earlier. As the book Scaling Up Excellence reminds us, you better ensure you have excellence before scaling it.
I recently heard Webb speak, and her organization has already started to scale to other countries and is working on more coverage in Indonesia.
These startup lessons would apply to many organizations- from commercial startups to non-profits. This book shows that these two groups can learn from each other.
The book has many more details on this.