Christiane Lemieux - Frictionless: Why the Future of Everything Will Be Fast, Fluid, and Made Just for You

From Christiane:

For Isabelle and William, with whom I want to spend every moment of frictionless found time.

From Duff:

For Joey and Marguerite, who make it all so easy.

When I was putting the finishing touches on this book in late 2019, the stock market was at record highs. It had also been recently overrun by unicorns. In start-up parlance, a unicorn is a privately held company thats valued at more than $1 billion. All in the span of a few months, several unicorns had tapped the public markets, including Lyft, Uber, Pinterest, Beyond Meat, and Zoom. While the spectacular collapse of the impending IPO of coworking juggernaut WeWork certainly put a chill in the market for new offerings as the year came to a close, that companys singular problems werent going to permanently snuff out investor interest in healthy, fast-growing companies in the years ahead. Unicorns arent going extinct. But from this point forth, it looks like they may actually have to build real businesseswith real profit margins. Thats a good thing.

I launched my second startup, called The Inside, in the summer of 2018, and though my reason for doing so wasnt simply to try and create something worth a billion dollars, I, like many of my peers, watched in amazement as the founders of those unicorns saw their years of hard work ratified with meaningful public market valuations. It was, in a word, highly motivating.

But I was already motivated: the book you hold in your hands is a compilation of some of the most interesting conversations Ive had in my life. At the very same time that I was trying to get my new company off the ground, I was interviewing dozens of start-up founders, academics, and experts of other varieties. In the process, I received a wide-ranging education in entrepreneurshipmore than anyone deserves without having to pay for it.

One result of it all was that I found myself writing a different kind of book than Id originally intended. I didnt start with a thesis and then confirm it via interviews. Rather, I let the conversations shape the thesis itself.

Thats where Frictionless comes in. After I analyzed the content of more than six dozen lengthy interviews, I realized that while they were very different on the surface, they were all connected by a conceptual tissue called frictionlessness underneath. How so? Pretty much every single person that I spoke to was trying to reduce friction somewhereand by that, I mean everywhere.

Some of them are reducing friction in their own business models in order to give themselves a competitive advantage. Others are offering a reduction in friction to their customers as a way to improve the customer experience and make the sale (and the one after that). And others are trying to figure out how to run companieshow theyre organized, how to help them growso that we can all do a better job of staying out of our own way. Two final groups have set their sights on reducing friction on micro-and macro-levels. Those in the first are focused on helping every one of us live better lives, and those in the second are focused on trying to remove friction at a system-wide level, ironing out the bottlenecks in some of the most important realms where our lives intersect.

What are we doing at The Inside? We are digitizing the interior design process. By that I mean we are bringing a custom home-decorating experience, a process formerly reserved for people with means, to all consumers via technology. We saw potential to help customers bring their Pinterest boards to life. That is where The Inside comes in. We want to become the home brand of the Instagram generation. After all, why would you share a photo of a home that is lifted from page 27 of that big catalog you got in the mail when you could curate and design the space of your dreams and then share it with the world? Along with my cofounder, Britt Bunn, and the rest of our scrappy team, were trying to reshape the entire industry, in large part by setting new standards for sustainable manufacturing and dragging a reluctant supply chain online. In the age of Amazon, custom furniture is one of the last of the consumer goods holdouts, the last industry to accept that consumers have moved online as well as the last to capitalize on all that the digital era has to offer in terms of design, manufacture, customer experience, delivery, and the rest of it.

I sold my first company, DwellStudio, to Wayfair in 2013 and spent two years as Wayfairs executive creative director before heading out on my own once again. Heres the crazy part: after spending nearly fifteen years building DwellStudio into a legitimate business, I could have written quite the playbook for someone looking to do the same kind of thing. I am so relieved that I didnt, because the only thing it would be good for at this point would be starting a fire. There is no place now or in the future for that business model. In the span of just a single decade, it became defunct.

Why? Because everything has changed. Some of those changes have to do with technology (e.g., cloud computing), some with culture, and some with the Great Recession. No matter what the sources of change, the ways we think and do everything in business todaysetting up a corporate structure, customer acquisition, communications (both internal and external), managing the supply chainare all new.

I didnt want this book to be about me, though. Im quite serious about that. Rather, I wanted it to be about the lessons themselveswhat Im learning each and every day about how to create a frictionless enterprise. To that end, I decided to base it not around my story but around a fascinating group of people much more interesting than me.

My coauthor, Duff McDonald, whom I have known for nearly thirty years, has written several bestselling business books. Ive written two of my own, about design. But both of us agree that this one stands apart for the sheer number of great insights it has provided us. We hope you enjoy reading it as much as we enjoyed writing it.

And so, with the aim of a frictionless reading experience for you, dear reader, were just going to get down to it without further ado.

Christiane Lemieux

The more I have thought about frictionlessness and talked about it with other people, the more I have realized that its not just a choice that entrepreneurs can make. Its an imperative.

Of course, the forces of frictionlessness are not confined to the land of startups. Incumbent businesses must strive for frictionlessness as well to have any hope of survival. All businesses need to reduce friction if theyre going to compete.

The same goes for each and every one of us, whether thats in how we, as individuals, react to the changing business landscape or how we strive to eliminate friction in the hopes of living more fruitful, healthy, and ultimately happy lives.

Were talking about an ontological change here, folks: we have entered a new era, and frictionlessness is the state of being that were all aiming for, whether its as individuals, as groups of people working together, or in the institutions in which we put our collective faith.

Every single one of the people in the pages that follow understands that a tectonic shift has taken place in the digital era, and it has to do with time.

Before the Internet came along, before it seeped into pretty much every aspect of our lives, we used to have to dedicate a set amount of time to all the various activities of any given day. This was particularly true for women, because of the domestic bondage that most mothers (including working mothers) found themselves in. Whether it was grocery shopping, bill paying, banking, or scheduling, there was no way around giving up a certain amount of time.