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Paul Graham. Paul Graham may refer to: The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn. April 2006 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2006 Startup School.) The startups we've funded so far are pretty quick, but they seem quicker to learn some lessons than others. I think it's because some things about startups are kind of counterintuitive. We've now invested in enough companies that I've learned a trick for determining which points are the counterintuitive ones: they're the ones I have to keep repeating. So I'm going to number these points, and maybe with future startups I'll be able to pull off a form of Huffman coding. 1. The thing I probably repeat most is this recipe for a startup: get a version 1 out fast, then improve it based on users' reactions.

By "release early" I don't mean you should release something full of bugs, but that you should release something minimal. There are several reasons it pays to get version 1 done fast. One of the things that will surprise you if you build something popular is that you won't know your users. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. What Startups Are Really Like. October 2009 (This essay is derived from a talk at the 2009 Startup School.) I wasn't sure what to talk about at Startup School, so I decided to ask the founders of the startups we'd funded. What hadn't I written about yet? I'm in the unusual position of being able to test the essays I write about startups. I hope the ones on other topics are right, but I have no way to test them. The ones on startups get tested by about 70 people every 6 months. So I sent all the founders an email asking what surprised them about starting a startup.

I'm proud to report I got one response saying: What surprised me the most is that everything was actually fairly predictable! The bad news is that I got over 100 other responses listing the surprises they encountered. There were very clear patterns in the responses; it was remarkable how often several people had been surprised by exactly the same thing. 1.

This was the surprise mentioned by the most founders. Here's a typical reponse: 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups. October 2006 In the Q & A period after a recent talk, someone asked what made startups fail. After standing there gaping for a few seconds I realized this was kind of a trick question. It's equivalent to asking how to make a startup succeed—if you avoid every cause of failure, you succeed—and that's too big a question to answer on the fly. Afterwards I realized it could be helpful to look at the problem from this direction. If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating. And this form of list may be more useful in practice. In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want. 1.

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? What's wrong with having one founder? But even if the founder's friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he's still at a disadvantage. The last one might be the most important. 2. Why is the falloff so sharp? Startups in 13 Sentences. February 2009 One of the things I always tell startups is a principle I learned from Paul Buchheit: it's better to make a few people really happy than to make a lot of people semi-happy.

I was saying recently to a reporter that if I could only tell startups 10 things, this would be one of them. Then I thought: what would the other 9 be? When I made the list there turned out to be 13: 1. Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. 2. The reason to launch fast is not so much that it's critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven't really started working on it till you've launched. 3. This is the second half of launching fast. 4. You can envision the wealth created by a startup as a rectangle, where one side is the number of users and the other is how much you improve their lives. [2] The second dimension is the one you have most control over. 5. Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can't expect to hit that right away. 6.

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