Stop Trying to Catch Lightning in a Bottle | Bothsides of the Table. I’m sure you’ve all heard saying derived from Voltaire, “don’t let perfect be the enemy of the good” which in a way is encapsulated in the lean startup movement and the ideology of shipping a “minimum viable product” (MVP) and then learning from your customer base. Or to borrow a simple life lesson from Gretchen Rubin, “The 20-minute walk I take is better than the 3-mile run I never start. Having people over for take-out is better than never having people to an elegant dinner party.” I think about this topic of perfection being the enemy of the good often. Because I live in startup land where everybody is a perfectionist.
I think this is particularly true because every startup entrepreneur is trying to catch lightning in a bottle. I hear about it in every first product release. Life doesn’t work like that. Even in the age of MVP worship I see founders who want to bundle too many features into a release because they’re worried that customers will be unhappy if they don’t. That’s ok. The One Key to Dealing with Senior Executives: Answer the Question! I can’t tell you how many times over the years that I’ve needed to coach people to “answer the question” when dealing with senior executives. It amazes me to sit in meetings and watch people hem, haw, dodge, extemporize and do just about anything but answer the question they were asked. I have a old friend who used to say that corporate meetings were often “parallel independent conversations” due to two factors: [1] the non-answering of questions posed and [2] the non-listening that comes from people spending all their energy preparing what they want to say next.
Both are bad behaviors. But the one that will stall your career inside your company — or wreck a salescall outside of it — is not answering the question. In my career I’ve had the good fortune to meet with many senior executives. Almost without fail, they share these qualities: They are direct. So the best thing you can do in front of a senior executive is answer the question. Question: On a scale of 1-10 how is the team working? Subtle Mid-Stage Startup Pitfalls - Founders at Work posthaven. (This post is derived from a talk I gave at SV Angel's CEO Summit.) A lot has been written about the dangers that early-stage startups face. But startups face a different and equally lethal set of dangers in what we could call the mid-stage–the stage after the company has figured out what it's doing and has raised some money to go off and do it.
Because of where YC sits on the funding timeline and the volume of startups we fund, there is probably no one who has watched more companies negotiate the mid-stage than us. Twice a year we accept a batch of startups (the last one had 114 companies in it). We work with them for several months on whatever is their biggest problem, and then help them raise money from investors. After that, they go off into the world to execute their plan. And you know what? We’ve now funded more than 800 startups. It never gets any easier. The first trap is feeling that now you can relax. It doesn't get any easier.
Startups are a long haul. Why do they do this? If you aren’t getting rejected on a daily basis, your goals aren’t ambitious enough. Tech My most useful career experience was about eight years ago when I was trying to break into the world of VC-backed startups. I applied to hundreds of jobs: low-level VC roles, startups jobs, even to big tech companies. I got rejected from every single one. Big companies rejected me outright or gave me a courtesy interview before rejecting me. VCs told me they wanted someone with VC experience. The reason this period was so useful was that it helped me develop a really thick skin. One of the great things about looking for a job is that your “payoff” is almost always a max function (the best of all attempts), not an average.
Allmyapps — Story of an Almost Successful French Startup. Allmyapps — Story of an Almost Successful French Startup Since a few months, I am a free man again. After 5 years of very hard work, Allmyapps was sold at the end of 2014. It has been an incredible journey, but it has also been an incredibly tough one. The story of Allmyapps is the story of most startups: the ones that do not make it to the Unicorn club, far from it, but still fought all they could trying to get there. Allmyapps started with a big and global ambition: to become the #1 App Store for Windows PC. This post is the first step towards sharing this experience.
If you went through the slides, you may be wondering how do I feel a few months after this experience. I would not have said that right after the sale though as it’s been pretty tough to switch overnight from full pressure, full activity, max adrenaline to… nothing. Ch. Raynaud - ISAI sur Twitter : "'@paulg, @ycombinator, about adversity and ... Be Nice Or Leave. We have a sign like this in our beach house. We got it in New Orleans many years ago. I thought of that sign when I was on the phone yesterday. I was talking to a person involved in a deal I’m working on right now. He said “you guys are being awfully nice here.” For much of the rest of the day, I was thinking “are we being too nice?” I don’t want to talk about this specific deal. We learned from The Godfather that “it’s not personal, it’s business.” We know that a lot of investors, VCs included, will do what is required to make a buck.
So its conventional wisdom that being nice is a bad idea in business. I have found otherwise. I am not saying you should be overly generous or nice to a fault. It’s not the fastest way to make a buck. Career Advice: Simplifiers Go Far, Complexifiers Get Stuck. “If you can’t explain it to a six year-old, you don’t understand it yourself.” – Albert Einstein There are two types of people in business: Simplifiers: who make complex things simpleComplexifiers: who make simple things complex Quick joke Question: What does a complexifier call a simplifier?
Answer: “Boss.” Somewhere, somehow, some people decided that in business you need to make everything complicated and speak using business jargon. Well, that’s an interesting proposal and I’m not necessarily opposed to it, so let me run it up the flagpole so we can kick it around as a strawman. That’s one way of hiding behind complexity: making yourself flat-incomprehensible. The other way of hiding behind complexity is not linguistic but conceptual: always finding an upstream or bigger-picture issue that will block progress at the lower level. I’d like to cutover to the new process, but we haven’t had the training yet. When you ask for the time, some people tell you how to build a watch. Like this: A Dozen Things I’ve Learned From Marc Andreessen. Marc Andreessen is able to explain himself so well that I should have less commentary to add to the quotations in this post than usual.
But where is the fun in that? My primary task with this blog post has been assembling the quotations and placing them in an order which flows well, since understanding the earlier topics helps the reader understand ideas which come later in the list. Each set of quotations is a mash up from sources like the links identified in the notes at the bottom of this post. My transcription of video interviews may not be perfect and the text is sometimes edited to reflect the brevity required in a blog format. 1/ “The key characteristic of venture capital is that returns are a power-law distribution. So, the basic math component is that there are about 4,000 startups a year that are founded in the technology industry which would like to raise venture capital and we can invest in about 20.” Why power laws? 12/ “Software is eating the world.” Like this: On Becoming | Justin Mares.
You’ve decided you want to do something in this world. You’ve internalized the fact that you can do anything you want. How do you succeed? Let’s say your goal is to be a millionaire by age 30. What do you do? Focus on becoming the type of person that can become a millionaire at 30. Why? Because focusing on the process – rather than the outcome – increases your chances of success. Most people would say to explore your options. Now, compare this with someone who focused on becoming the type of person that can be a millionaire at 30. Smart. This is someone who – regardless of whether she achieves her goal or not – is set up to succeed. Let’s say you want to win this archery trophy. In other words, don’t focus on the outcome. This works because there are opportunities for feedback and improvement when you approach success like this.
For example, most successful people I know read a lot. Compare this to focusing entirely on your goal of $1mm by 30. He made his first million at 31. Optimization hidden costs - Xkcd. Life lesson. Willful Delusion - Startups and the Stockdale Paradox – Correlated Causation. Early when I was starting PrimaTable, a friend and mentor told me about the Stockdale Paradox. Described in Jim Collin’s Good to Great, the paradox is named after Vice Admiral Jim Stockdale, an American naval officer held captive for eight years in the Vietnam War.
Stockdale’s Paradox When asked about about how he coped with captivity and regular torture, Admiral Stockdale responded: “I never lost faith in the end of the story, I never doubted not only that I would get out, but also that I would prevail in the end and turn the experience into the defining event of my life, which, in retrospect, I would not trade.” When asked who didn’t make it home from Vietnam, Stockdale replied: “Oh, that’s easy, the optimists. Oh, they were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ Collin’s coined the Stockdale paradox as Stockdale’s summary: Startups Creating a new product is hard, creating a new company is even harder. Rate-of-learning: the most valuable startup compensation. The frothiness of today’s environment in Silicon Valley makes it easy to get sucked into a warped sense of reality. Valuations are high, capital is cheap, housing prices are skyrocketing, and RSUs are flowing like wine.
Talk of another “bubble” is rebuffed, even by those who were scarred by the Dot-com collapse of 2000. Some argue we’ve exited the installation phase of technology—which was still sputtering along at the dawn of the new millennium—and have entered what Carlota Perez calls the ‘deployment phase’ of technology. In this phase, startups move “up the stack”, switching from building core infrastructure (i.e. interstate highways) to applications that go on top of it (i.e. Teslas). Undoubtedly, changes in technology over the last 15 years have been breathtaking. One risk of living in this Gilded Age of Tech is the temptation to view your own career and compensation through a disproportionately financial lens—much as a growing company would.
Compounding interest on learning. A DOZEN THINGS I’VE LEARNED ABOUT BUSINESS. Ruthlessness and Grit in Startups. Startups are in a state of perpetual change. During a startup's first few years of establishing product market and winning the first set of customers, this state of change is obvious. But as a startup scales, the company must adapt by learning and reinventing. Whether it's building the processes to grow the team, creating new sales and marketing initiatives to pursue adjacent customers, developing customer success teams or handling an unforseen crisis, this process of reacting to the market and evolving the company happens at every level in each function. How does a startup team steel itself to persevere through the ups and downs? Through combination of ruthlessness and grit. You have to face yourself. As a startup grows, each role within the company will change dramatically through the arc of the business.
Grit is the disposition to pursue very long-term goals with passion and perseverance. And the key to grit is mindset. The Sure Thing. How entrepreneurs really succeed. In 1969, Ted Turner wanted to buy a television station. He was thirty years old. He had inherited a billboard business from his father, which was doing well. But he was bored, and television seemed exciting. The station in question was WJRJ, Channel 17, in Atlanta. Turner didn’t listen. What is sometimes forgotten amid the mythology, however, is that Turner wasn’t the proprietor of any old billboard company. Williams writes that Turner was “attracted to the risk” of the deal, but it seems just as plausible to say that he was attracted by the deal’s lack of risk.
In a recent study, “From Predators to Icons,” the French scholars Michel Villette and Catherine Vuillermot set out to discover what successful entrepreneurs have in common. Giovanni Agnelli, the founder of Fiat, financed his young company with the money of investors—who were “subsequently excluded from the company by a maneuver by Agnelli,” the authors point out. Was Paulson’s trade risky? Fail Fail Win: Never Give Up. On a Mission. One of the interesting things I have seen, especially in the last 10 years, is that many of the big winners in technology have been what I call “mission-driven” versus “mercenary-driven” companies. There are a lot of companies that cut corners. There are a lot of companies that have a mercenary outlook, and will dump their idealistic goal to make a business work in the short-term. We steer clear of those. We are looking for the companies who are going to be the big winners because they are going to cause a fundamental change in the world, as opposed to making a short-term grab for revenue or a short-term grab for an acquisition.
These are the founders who come in to the firm and say, “Look, I don’t care whether I make money or not, that’s not my goal. How they will make money is typically not part of the conversation. But the pattern at the moment is the stronger the ideology or mission of the company, the more successful the company. A Dozen Things I’ve Learned about Business from Bill Gates. The Two Key Skill Sets Startups Must Develop To Grow. In "Why Winning Streaks End", Rosabeth Kantar, a professor at HBS, explains the key to maintaining momentum in any company is maintaining the discipline of every day processes. Similarly, Atul Gawande's book Better echoes this idea. For surgeons, the best way to keep patients safe and healthy is ticking through a checklist before each surgery. As I've watched a handful of startups grow, the pattern I see emerging from most of them is their ability to persistently transform chaos into process.
And then continuously improve the way they do things. At the beginning, each of these companies pursued product development with something akin to Lean Startup Method. After the prototypes were built, the founders needed more help building the product and developed a process to hire engineers to grow the development team. Once in place, these processes can't remain static. For some, the word process has a strongly negative connotation. Seven Years • Dustin Curtis. Startups Are Hard. So Work More, Cry Less, And Quit All The Whining.
Willing to be misunderstood. Can-Do vs. Can’t-Do Culture. Believers vs non-believers. Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn? Are You A Pirate? The credentials trap. Are you in a startup career path or are you one and done? Why I am long on French Tech Board Observers. Generalists. The Depressing Day After You Get TechCrunched. How Well Do You Take A Punch? Program Or Be Programmed. Working smarter. The Harder I Work, The Luckier I Get. Ideas have a 2 week shelf life | Steve Corona. Occam's razor. Tenacity. The Wisest Entrepreneurs Know How to Preserve Equity. The Startup Curve. The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn. Why Do Harvard Kids Head to Wall Street? How I Graduated from Harvard, Turned Down Google, Got a Job On T. The VC And Startup Industries Must Do A Better Job Seeding A Sta. Risk and Reward Are Not Obvious.
So you want to be a junior VC? | Startable - Healy Jones' & Pras. The Career Path to Becoming a Venture Capitalist or an Entrepren. The best companies are analytical | The Equity Kicker. Gamers make faster decisions than nongamers, just as accurate. 'StarCraft' Gameplay Boosts Mental Flexibility, Says Study - Digits. You need to use social services to understand them. Long Live the Web. Why Your Startup Should Be Involved in Open Source. Technology generation gap.