When You Change the World and No One Notices — Collaborative Fund. Do you know what’s happening in this picture? Literally one of the most important events in human history. But here’s the most amazing part of the story: Hardly anyone paid attention at the time. Wilbur and Orville Wright conquered flight on December 17th, 1903. Few inventions were as transformational over the next century. It took four days to travel from New York to Los Angeles in 1900, by train. By the 1930s it could be done in 17 hours, by air. Unlike, say, mapping the genome, a lay person could instantly grasp the marvel of human flight. But days, months, even years after the Wright’s first flight, hardly anyone noticed. Here’s the front page of The New York Times the day after the first flight. Two days after. Three days later, when the Wrights were on their fourth flight, one of which lasted nearly a minute.
This goes on. The Library of Congress, where I found these papers, reveals two amazing details. That was a year after the Wright’s first flight. Jeff Bezos once said:
Dat Ventures. Updated: The Best Of The Rest: MBA Startups That Just Missed The Top 100 - Page 2 of 3. Newly Updated: The Top 100 MBA Startups Of 2015 - Page 3 of 6. Naming_Domain. Why We Don’t Negotiate Salary and Neither Should You | Magoosh. EmailEmail I’m Bhavin Parikh, the CEO of Magoosh, and I don’t negotiate salaries. Non-negotiable salaries aren’t about selfishness; they’re not about being a greedy, money-hoarding CEO.
They’re about setting a tone for your business and your relationships with employees, maintaining a culture of fairness and respect, and ultimately contributing to the well-being of your company for the long term. Magoosh is proof of that. Our company maintains a healthy and happy culture; we have had zero employee turnover in our five-year lifetime. We’ve also been quite successful with an acceptance rate of over 90% on more than 30 job offers. Taking a hard stance and saying no to salary negotiation was a scary decision for me, as it would be for any founder or CEO. What’s the problem with negotiating? First, let’s be clear. As a CEO, I often find myself in positions where I could negotiate salaries for a quick win, especially when it comes to starting pay.
How about a real life example? What Founders Should Know Before They Raise VC and Why We Chose Not To | Magoosh. EmailEmail It’s an exciting time for startups and aspiring business founders. With investors pumping so much money into the industry it’s easy to see why. We’re hearing more and more about “unicorns” valued at over a billion dollars and companies spending enormous sums to acquire other businesses. The numbers look amazing. But not all funding rounds and acquisitions are cause for celebration.
Although not every deal ends like this one, it should act as a cautionary tale for founders to remind them that raising lots of money doesn’t necessarily mean there will be a big payoff. Fundraising at Magoosh At Magoosh, we raised a seed round of funding in 2011 (and some more in 2012), ~$750K total. Some might call us a lifestyle business, though our early investors should hopefully see a >10x return on their investment. At some point, we may choose to raise a larger round of funding. I recognize that some companies don’t have the luxury of this choice. VC Economics and Expectations VC Strategy. Pitch Perfect - Keep it Simple, Stupid. After talking about how to get ready to start raising money for your startup, and the importance of story telling and the demo, now its time to wrap that into the big scary pitch deck.
Before you start to build your deck, ask yourself (and be honest): Are you a successful sales person? Do you rely on your words? If so, then make the deck support those words. Are you less sure of yourself? Then make the deck tell the story. How do you know which you are? Next time you are eating in a busy restaurant, stop your server and pitch your company.
Regardless, here is a great exercise: Using 6 sides and no more than 15 words per slide, tell your story. We learned to simplify our story and we learned how to create six killer slides. What should those six slides contain: Here is my formula, but remember your mileage my vary depending on how you want to tell your story: Show that there is a problem “In the US, the number of comic books purchased at comic book stores has dropped. Like this: Chamath Palihapitiya - how we put Facebook on the path to 1 billion users. Zero to Product/Market Fit (Presentation) LARGE x RARE == DIFFERENT: Why scaling companies is harder than it looks by. Something interesting happens when you run more than 1,000 servers, as we do at WP Engine. Suppose I told you that on average our servers experience one fatal failure every three years.
The kernel panics (the Linux equivalent of the Blue Screen of Death), or both the main and redundant power supply fails, or some other rare event that causes outage. Does that sound like a bad batting average? Think about the laptops and desktops you’ve owned. Some last longer than others, but it’s probably something like 2-4 years before the OS locks up or a battery can’t hold a charge anymore.
So, even if our servers are more hardy than your MacBook Pro, they’re taking 100x the beating, so one failure every three years seems pretty reasonable. Windows NT crashed. But remember, we have 1,000 servers. “Well sure,” you say, “that’s normal as you grow. The insight is that that scale causes rare events to become regular. Things as rare as, well, you know… The usual response to this is “automate everything.” How To Interview Your Users And Get Useful Feedback.
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Azerbaijan. Competitions. Startup Library. Technology Trends: Why do I always feel like I’m too late for all the startup trends, how can I be at the front of the trends, executing. How To Get Your First 1,000 Users. Vinicius Vacanti is co-founder and CEO of Yipit. Next posts on how to acquire users for free and how to raise a Series A.
Don’t miss them by subscribing via email or via twitter. The good news is that it’s easier than you think to get 1,000 people to try your site. The bad news is that it’s really hard to get those people to turn into users, users that create an account, users that come back repeatedly and users that tell their friends about your site.
This post is about how to get 1,000 people to try your site so you can find out what isn’t working, iterate and keep trying to build a site that people, other than your mom, actually come back to. I’ll write a future post on how to retain those users. Get Yourself a Domain Name and a Splash Page You should set up your splash page today. Once you get your domain name, you should use a service like unbounce to create a simple splash page. The goal of the splash page is to collect email addresses from visitors. Add Link to Your Email Signature. Is Your Social Venture Really Worth Scaling? - Paul Bloom. By Paul Bloom | 9:17 AM August 13, 2012 Although scaling is the holy grail for most social entrepreneurs, not everyone should attempt it.
In a previous post, I outlined the key capabilities I’ve found to be present in the social ventures that are able to reach sizeable impact (which can be remembered with the acronym SCALERS—they are Staffing, Communicating, Alliance-Building, Lobbying, Earnings-Generation, Replicating, and Stimulating Market Forces).
Before a social entrepreneur gets to work building those capabilities, however, it makes sense to ask the question: Is this venture really ready to scale? Readiness for scaling first means having a program or idea that succeeds logically. Readiness also depends, however, on being able to point to success in practice. How do you gather hard evidence of effectiveness? World Bicycle Relief has used both of these approaches to evaluate its programs to distribute basic, functional bicycles in poor African countries.
The 10 Mistakes I've made...so you don't have to.