Andrew Chen tweeted a link this morning to a post called “Twitter used to be a crappy idea – 3 lessons learned“. I agree with many of Henrik’s core messages, such as staying lean and building products you love, but I got stuck on two sentences. They both tie back to the title of this post: don’t confuse crossing the …
Bull doesn’t build (and that annoying cocktail party guy)
My wife dragged me to a cocktail party last night tied to my daughter’s school and I met “that guy.” That guy (or gal) is someone who hears you have a new startup and wants to play venture capitalist. Not an interested, supportive pretend-VC, but a judgmental, “I’m smarter than you and let me show you how” pretend-VC. Over the …
Learning is about the translation, not the source
I was reading Fred Destin’s post on why entrepreneurs hate VCs, when a quote caught my eye: “Learning from mistakes is far less useful than emulating success.” It’s a message that 37Signals likes to harp on as well. I’d argue that you have an equal shot at learning from mistakes or successes, as long as you take the time to …
What is your customer acquisition strategy? (startup marketing tactics)
“What is your growth strategy?” It is a classic question from VCs to early-stage consumer Internet companies, and one often difficult to answer at such an early point in a company’s life cycle because you have not yet seen which specific tactics work best. There is usually no silver bullet answer, just a lot of hard work ahead. This post, …
Motivation and Inspiration – Dan Pink’s TED Talk
Thanks to a tumble from Hiten Shah, I just watched and loved Dan Pink’s TED talk on incentive structures and performance. Dan makes a case that monetary performance-based incentives increase productivity for mechanical tasks, but not for complex creative ones. Instead, you need to focus on three things: autonomy mastery purpose This is exceptionally true in software startups. Yes, people …
So you want to work for a startup? (the first job to seek for non-coder aspiring entrepreneurs)
At Fred Wilson’s Donors Choose event, I met a bright college senior from my alma mater who wanted to work for a startup as prep for eventually founding a company himself. Like me, he wasn’t a programmer, so the two of us discussed the best place to start. A non-coder founder has to wear a lot of hats: you will …
Startup Tools: equity and investment (cap table) model
As an entrepreneur, have you struggled to figure out what your ownership stake looks like over multiple rounds of dilution from investors and employee options? In the spirit of sharing modeling tools I use when thinking about a startup, here is an Excel spreadsheet for modeling out cap table equity and dilution across a number of capital raising rounds. There’s …
Freemium Business Model Template
Mark Suster of GRP just wrote a post on the importance of financial models, and in an effort to be helpful to new entrepreneurs finding their way around Excel, I thought I would post a business model Excel template for anyone to download and customize (bottom of post). I completely agree with Suster. The one time I told myself “I …
Paul Graham’s “What Startups Are Really Like”
Paul Graham of Y Combinator has a good essay up on “What Startups Are Really Like“. Here are his headlines with some concise additional commentary of my own. 1. Be Careful with Cofounders: hugely important because things get stressful; agree on worst case “breakup scenario” at the start and have founder stock vesting. 2. Startups Take Over Your Life: they …
Startups: hiring, careers, sales people
This week saw two interesting and related posts on startups and hiring/careers. Mark Suster wrote about who you should hire into your startup, and Chris Dixon wrote about the ideal startup career path. Mark’s message is to hire hungry, smart people who want to get to the next level in their career, not the ones who have already arrived. Chris …