Sylicon valley truth is not THE truth. 57 startup lessons. I am a cofounder of RethinkDB — an open-source distributed database designed to help developers and operations teams work with unstructured data to build real-time applications.
There are already very good lists of startup lessons written by really talented, experienced people (here and here). I’d like to add another one. I learned these lessons the hard way in the past four years. If you’re starting a company, I hope you have an easier path. People If you can’t get to ramen profitability with a team of 2 – 4 within six months to a year, something’s wrong. Fundraising If you have to give away more than 15% of the company at any given fundraising round, your company didn’t germinate correctly. Markets The best products don’t get built in a vacuum. Products Product sense is everything. Marketing Product comes first. Sales Sales fix everything. Development Development speed is everything. Company administration Personal well-being Thanks to Michael Glukhovsky for reviewing this post. Ten things about being a founder I wish I knew two years ago. Lessons learned? Notes on Entrepreneurship. Startup Library.
Want to ace your YCombinator interview? Be relentlessly empathetic – Perfect Audience Retargeting and Data-Driven Marketing Blog. So you have a YCombinator interview coming up?
Congratulations. You’d like some advice from a YC alum (S ’11) about how to prepare? Happy to help. If your startup is interviewing with YC, you’re probably all set on the product side and you probably have a great team. That’s the foundation for a good interview. Where you might struggle is when they start asking about your users. Here’s an example of the sort of user-oriented questions that I see trip up many of the startups that ask me for YC interview advice. Who is your user? This sort of customer drilldown can be disorienting at first if you’re not ready for it. But if you want your startup to be great, you need to know your users.
Paul Graham has written that good startup founders are relentlessly resourceful. But another quality that the best startup founders have is that they tend to be relentlessly empathetic as well. It’s very easy to talk to users without empathy. If so, you’re in good shape! Meet our team Join our team. The only thing that matters. French execution?
Startups Anonymous. Keeping it Simple. Posted on April 5, 2013.
Filed under: startups, venture capital | 3rd time around, the learning continues. Today’s observation: as counterintuitive as it might be in the early stages of company development, I am finding myself keeping days pretty simple. I focus on one or two things in a day, and that’s kind of it. They are the one or two most important things I can possibly be thinking about, and I punt on just about everything else. Let’s make it real. There is a tendency to think that crossing everything that can be done off a list is the same thing as progress…it certainly is a visualization that you are getting shit done…and I guess that can be true, but it is certainly not optimal progress.
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