This link has been bookmarked by 220 people . It was first bookmarked on 02 Mar 2006, by Marian Douglas-Ungaro.
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20 May 19
vinayak joshiErr, open to almost anyone. I forgot this important stipulation from https://t.co/JYjoHfGNER https://t.co/NuAZGrpnMr
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31 Dec 17
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05 Jul 17
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What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.
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If you can't understand users, however, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. That is the single most important issue for technology startups, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else.
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The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
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I learned something valuable from that. It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use. Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people.
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A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
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16 Jan 17
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The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
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Google's plan, for example, was simply to create a search site that didn't suck. They had three new ideas: index more of the Web, use links to rank search results, and have clean, simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads. Above all, they were determined to make a site that was good to use. No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google, but the overall plan was straightforward. And while they probably have bigger ambitions now, this alone brings them a billion dollars a year.
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I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
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If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.
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Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
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What do I mean by good people? One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal? It might be hard to translate that into another language, but I think everyone in the US knows what it means. It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.
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When nerds are unbearable it's usually because they're trying too hard to seem smart. But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."
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work on stuff you like with people you like.
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You don't want mere voting; you need unanimity.
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Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. We thought so when we started ours, and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called "business" if they would be the president. But they all said no, so I had to do it myself. And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.
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People who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it.
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you have to have at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want.
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But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business?
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Stephen Hawking's editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half. When you work on making technology easier to use, you're riding that curve up instead of down. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
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Trade shows didn't pay as a way of getting new customers, but they were worth it as market research.
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The only kind of software you can build without studying users is the sort for which you are the typical user.
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Apple or Google. Everyone knows these, because they're big consumer brands. But for every startup like that, there are twenty more that operate in niche markets or live quietly down in the infrastructure.
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Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck most.
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And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software, and the crap they get in return. This imbalance equals opportunity.
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If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers. Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.
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In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper.
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It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does.
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At this stage, all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you're going to make money from it, and the resumes of the founders.
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When everyone feels they're getting a slightly bad deal, that they're doing more than they should for the amount of stock they have, the stock is optimally apportioned.
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While you're at it, you should ask what else they've signed. One of the worst things that can happen to a startup is to run into intellectual property problems. We did, and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.
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Mixed with any annoyance they might feel about being approached will be the thought: are these guys the next Google?
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What I didn't grasp at the time was that the valuation wasn't just the value of the code we'd written so far. It was also the value of our ideas, which turned out to be right, and of all the future work we'd do, which turned out to be a lot.
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I think people who are mature and experienced, with a business background, may be overrated. We used to call these guys "newscasters," because they had neat hair and spoke in deep, confident voices, and generally didn't know much more than they read on the teleprompter.
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You have more leverage negotiating with VCs than you realize. The reason is other VCs. I know a number of VCs now, and when you talk to them you realize that it's a seller's market. Even now there is too much money chasing too few good deals.
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You may wonder how much to tell VCs. And you should, because some of them may one day be funding your competitors. I think the best plan is not to be overtly secretive, but not to tell them everything either. After all, as most VCs say, they're more interested in the people than the ideas. The main reason they want to talk about your idea is to judge you, not the idea. So as long as you seem like you know what you're doing, you can probably keep a few things back from them.
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And we loved them, because when you're growing slow by word of mouth, your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.
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One of my favorite bumper stickers reads "if the people lead, the leaders will follow." Paraphrased for the Web, this becomes "get all the users, and the advertisers will follow." More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don't put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.
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The slower you burn through your funding, the more time you have to learn
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spend money slowly is to encourage a culture of cheapness
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When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm, you tend to feel rich. It's important to realize you're not. A rich company is one with large revenues. This money isn't revenue. It's money investors have given you in the hope you'll be able to generate revenues. So despite those millions in the bank, you're still poor.
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But in fact that place was the perfect space for a startup. We felt like our role was to be impudent underdogs instead of corporate stuffed shirts, and that is exactly the spirit you want.
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An apartment is also the right kind of place for developing software. Cube farms suck for that, as you've probably discovered if you've tried it.
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If I were going to start a startup today, there are only three places I'd consider doing it: on the Red Line near Central, Harvard, or Davis Squares (Kendall is too sterile); in Palo Alto on University or California Aves; and in Berkeley immediately north or south of campus. These are the only places I know that have the right kind of vibe.
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They wanted to get "staffed up" as soon as possible, as if you couldn't get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title. That's big company thinking. Don't hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart. The only reason to hire someone is to do something you'd like to do but can't.
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And if the idea of starting a startup frightened me so much that I only did it out of necessity, there must be a lot of people who would be good at it but who are too intimidated to try.
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If you're the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years, then a startup makes sense.
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For a lot of people the conflict is between startups and graduate school. Grad students are just the age, and just the sort of people, to start software startups. You may worry that if you do you'll blow your chances of an academic career. But it's possible to be part of a startup and stay in grad school, especially at first. Two of our three original hackers were in grad school the whole time, and both got their degrees. There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.
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26 Oct 16
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You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
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11 Oct 16
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caused me. "Business plan" has that word "business" in it,
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19 Sep 16
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You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.
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I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups, but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
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The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.
Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route. -
What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
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For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?
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as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."
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You don't want mere voting; you need unanimity.
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You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.
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eople who don't want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it
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That is the single most important issue for technology startups, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else.
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One of the best places to do this was at trade shows.
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Indeed, you can use this as a way to generate ideas for startups: what do people who are not like you want from technology?
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08 Feb 16
gweyman"You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed."
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03 Feb 16
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s a Lisp hacker, I come from the tradition of rapid prototyping. I would not claim (at least, not here) that this is the right way to write every program, but it's certainly the right way to write software for a startup. In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.
Like most startups, we changed our plan o
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16 Nov 15
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12 Aug 15
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You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.
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Hard, but doable.
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If you want to do it, do it.
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Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?
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07 Mar 15
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04 Jul 14
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03 May 14
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26 Apr 14
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24 Feb 14
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21 Feb 14
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Build something users love, and spend less than you make.
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18 Feb 14
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10 Feb 14
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07 Feb 14
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heuristics
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en route
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tenacious
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squirming
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brusque
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schmooze
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perish
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unanimity
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roulette
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I think the reason
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esoteric
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dingy
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gimmicks
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elaborate
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How do you figure out what customers want? Watch them. One of the best places to do this was at trade shows. Trade shows didn't pay as a way of getting new customers, but they were worth it as market research. We didn't just give canned presentations at trade shows. We used to show people how to build real, working stores. Which meant we got to watch as they used our software, and talk to them about what they needed.
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perpetrated
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slums
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frontal lobe
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crosshairs
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ominous
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screeching
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gambits
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welch
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consummate
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preposterous
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onerous
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teleprompter
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We talked to a number of VCs, but eventually we ended up financing our startup entirely with angel money. The main reason was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a newscaster as part of the deal. That might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press, but what if he wanted to have a say in running the company? That would have led to disaster, because our software was so complex. We were a company whose whole m.o. was to win through better technology. The strategic decisions were mostly decisions about technology, and we didn't need any help with those.
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bucking
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proximate
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abjectly
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laboratory
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wither
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umbilical
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chinks
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sheepish
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impudent
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dreary
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right kind of vibe.
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The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people. I may be an extremist, but I think hiring people is the worst thing a company can do. To start with, people are a recurring expense, which is the worst kind. They also tend to cause you to grow out of your space, and perhaps even move to the sort of uncool office building that will make your software worse. But worst of all, they slow you down: instead of sticking your head in someone's office and checking out an idea with them, eight people have to have a meeting about it. So the fewer people you can hire, the better.
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mascot
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stranded
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prospective
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26 Nov 13
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The first thing you'll need is a few tens of thousands of dollars to pay your expenses while you develop a prototype. This is called seed capital. Because so little money is involved, raising seed capital is comparatively easy-- at least in the sense of getting a quick yes or no.
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It shouldn't take more than a couple hours, and you'll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.
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24 Nov 13
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to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible
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The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
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They all use the same simple-minded model. They seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how to do database matches instead of how dating works in the real world.
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Venture capitalists know better. If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you'll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement, most will tell you to get lost. That shows how much a mere idea is worth. The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.
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That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.
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n the MIT CS department, there seems to be a tradition of acting like a brusque know-it-all.
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It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.
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Don't make a conscious effort to schmooze; that doesn't work well with hackers.
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One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder
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Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy
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Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don't. The most important is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads "if the people lead, the leaders will follow." Paraphrased for the Web, this becomes "get all the users, and the advertisers will follow." More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don't put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.
To make something users love, you have to understand them. And the bigger you are, the harder that is. So I say "get big slow." The slower you burn through your funding, the more time you have to learn. -
When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm, you tend to feel rich. It's important to realize you're not. A rich company is one with large revenues. This money isn't revenue. It's money investors have given you in the hope you'll be able to generate revenues. So despite those millions in the bank, you're still poor.
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We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off. This was slightly embarrassing at the time, but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.
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So you want to be in a place where there are a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable. God help you if you actually start in that mode.
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They wanted to get "staffed up" as soon as possible, as if you couldn't get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title. That's big company thinking
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The only reason to hire someone is to do something you'd like to do but can't.
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If you ever end up running a company, you'll find the most common question people ask is how many employees you have. This is their way of weighing you. It's not just random people who ask this; even reporters do. And they're going to be a lot more impressed if the answer is a thousand than if it's ten.
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What drives people to start startups is (or should be) looking at existing technology and thinking, don't these guys realize they should be doing x, y, and z? And that's also a sign that one is a good hacker
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During this time you'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period. Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend's house for dinner. I went to visit my family twice. Otherwise I just worked.
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There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.
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[5] A friend who started a company in Germany told me they do care about the paperwork there, and that there's more of it. Which helps explain why there are not more startups in Germany.
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But you can never tell for sure which these are, so the best approach is to seem entirely open, but to fail to mention a few critical technical secrets.
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05 May 13
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08 Sep 12
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03 Sep 12
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The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
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If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you'll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.
It's very dangerous to let anyone fly under you. If you have the cheapest, easiest product, you'll own the low end. And if you don't, you're in the crosshairs of whoever does. -
There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.
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That's the key to success as a startup. There is nothing more important than understanding your business.
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The most important is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't. One of my favorite bumper stickers reads "if the people lead, the leaders will follow."
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More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don't put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do.
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When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm, you tend to feel rich. It's important to realize you're not. A rich company is one with large revenues. This money isn't revenue. It's money investors have given you in the hope you'll be able to generate revenues. So despite those millions in the bank, you're still poor.
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We felt like our role was to be impudent underdogs instead of corporate stuffed shirts, and that is exactly the spirit you want.
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make work more like home?
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You want to live at the office in a startup, so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office?
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Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together, talk over ideas, and then come back to their offices to implement them. So you want to be in a place where there are a lot of restaurants around, not some dreary office park that's a wasteland after 6:00 PM. Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable. God help you if you actually start in that mode.
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don't have a lot of meetings; don't have chunks of code that multiple people own; don't have a sales guy running the company; don't make a high-end product; don't let your code get too big; don't leave finding bugs to QA people; don't go too long between releases; don't isolate developers from users; don't move from Cambridge to Route 128; and so on. [8] But negative lessons are just as valuable as positive ones. Perhaps even more valuable: it's hard to repeat a brilliant performance, but it's straightforward to avoid errors. [9]
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Build something users love, and spend less than you make. How hard is that?
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16 Apr 12
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07 Mar 12
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to start with good people
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to spend as little money as possible
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to make something customers actually want
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you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around
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An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning.
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Venture capitalists know better.
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That shows how much a mere idea is worth.
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most will tell you to get lost
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The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.
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Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people. <!-- So let's talk about people. -->
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julius beezerYou need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
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05 Mar 12
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good people,
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customers actually want
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spend as little money as possible
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you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup around.
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look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
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For programmers
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Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?
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Ideally you want between two and four founders
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In a technology startup, which most startups are, the founders should include technical people.
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Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends.
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So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you'd do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
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It's not just startups that have to worry about this. I think most businesses that fail do it because they don't give customers what they want.
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It's more straightforward just to make the food good.
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get a version 1 out as soon as you can.
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In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.
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It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use.
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A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
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13 Feb 12
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03 Feb 12
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09 Oct 11
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28 Sep 11
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28 Aug 11
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Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner, however late, you've lost something extraordinarily valuable.
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22 Aug 11
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09 Jul 11
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You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.
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you don't need a brilliant idea to start a startup
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what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
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look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
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In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product.
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A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
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How do you figure out what customers want? Watch them.
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Which meant we got to watch as they used our software, and talk to them about what they needed.
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if you're developing technology for money, you're probably not going to be developing it for people like you. Indeed, you can use this as a way to generate ideas for startups: what do people who are not like you want from technology?
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Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before, the best opportunities are where things suck most. And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments. You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software, and the crap they get in return. This imbalance equals opportunity.
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If you want ideas for startups, one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers.
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Start by writing software for smaller companies, because it's easier to sell to them.
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If you build the simple, inexpensive option, you'll not only find it easier to sell at first, but you'll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.
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06 Jun 11
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24 May 11
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f you think about people you know, you'll find the animal test is easy to apply. Call the person's image to mind and imagine the sentence "so-and-so is an animal." If you laugh, they're not. You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.
For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?
That last test filters out surprisingly few people. We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart. What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude.
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17 May 11
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10 Apr 11
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start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible.
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The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now
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But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
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heuristics for generating ideas for startups
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look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck.
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Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route.
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Ideas for startups
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they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute.
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a rule for deciding who to hire. Could you describe the person as an animal?
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It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.
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a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place.
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For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?
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What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.
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But the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."
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Being friends with someone for even a couple days will tell you more than companies could ever learn in interviews.
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you may collaborate with other students, and this is the best way to get to know good hackers. The project may even grow into a startup.
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But once again, I wouldn't aim too directly at either target. Don't force things; just work on stuff you like with people you like.
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Ideally you want between two and four founders
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One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear.
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When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish.
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You don't want mere voting; you need unanimity.
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Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy
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business was no great mystery
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It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study.
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You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.
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There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard, like tax law or the pricing of derivatives, but you don't need to know about those in a startup.
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commonsense things people knew before there were business schools, or even universities.
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at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want
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A restaurant with great food can be expensive, crowded, noisy, dingy, out of the way, and even have bad service, and people will keep coming.
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You hear all kinds of reasons why startups fail. But can you think of one that had a massively popular product and still failed?
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In nearly every failed startup, the real problem was that customers didn't want the product
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The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions
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Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people.
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. A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase your sales 10%.
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The only kind of software you can build without studying users is the sort for which you are the typical user. But this is just the kind that tends to be open source: operating systems, programming languages, editors, and so on.
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17 Mar 11
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good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible
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08 Mar 11
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02 Mar 11
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08 Feb 11
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31 Jan 11
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20 Dec 10
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Don't do what we did. Before you consummate a startup, ask everyone about their previous IP history.
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The main reason was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a newscaster as part of the deal. That might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press, but what if he wanted to have a say in running the company? That would have led to disaster, because our software was so complex. We were a company whose whole m.o. was to win through better technology. The strategic decisions were mostly decisions about technology, and we didn't need any help with those.
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I was great at customer support though. Imagine talking to a customer support person who not only knew everything about the product, but would apologize abjectly if there was a bug, and then fix it immediately, while you were on the phone with them. Customers loved us. And we loved them, because when you're growing slow by word of mouth, your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.
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hat's the key to success as a startup. There is nothing more important than understanding your business. You might think that anyone in a business must, ex officio, understand it. Far from it. Google's secret weapon was simply that they understood search.
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To make something users love, you have to understand them. And the bigger you are, the harder that is. So I say "get big slow." The slower you burn through your funding, the more time you have to learn.
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03 Aug 10
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01 Aug 10
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
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31 Jul 10
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27 Jul 10
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16 Feb 10
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10 Feb 10
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13 Jan 10
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25 Aug 09
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04 Jul 09
Justin FikePhenominal insider perspective on startups. Needs translating for non-tech companies.
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19 Jun 09
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17 Feb 09
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08 Nov 08
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17 Oct 08
F Mably fail quickly enough that you can return to academic life. And if it succeeds,
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17 Sep 08
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10 Aug 08
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16 May 08
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06 May 08
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06 Apr 08
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06 Dec 07
Colin Hayhurstyou'll do little but work, because when you're not working, your competitors will be. My only leisure activities were running, which I needed to do to keep working anyway, and about fifteen minutes of reading a night. I had a girlfriend for a total of two
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09 Jul 07
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04 May 07
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09 Apr 07
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25 Mar 07
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28 Feb 07
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14 Feb 07
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21 Jan 07
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19 Jan 07
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02 Jan 07
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30 Dec 06
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18 Nov 06
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The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now. But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn't take brilliance to do better.
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look at something people are trying to do, and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn't suck
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Ideas for startups are worth something, certainly, but the trouble is, they're not transferrable. They're not something you could hand to someone else to execute. Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
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someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive
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a salesperson who just won't take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till 4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something is two millimeters out of place
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You don't need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies, but you need it in a startup.
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For programmers we had three additional tests. Was the person genuinely smart? If so, could they actually get things done? And finally, since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities, could we stand to have them around?
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What we couldn't stand were people with a lot of attitude. But most of those weren't truly smart, so our third test was largely a restatement of the first
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the smarter they are, the less pressure they feel to act smart. So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like "I don't know," "Maybe you're right," and "I don't understand x well enough."
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No one dared put on attitude around Robert, because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.
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It's no coincidence that startups start around universities, because that's where smart people meet. It's not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them. They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same
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Don't force things; just work on stuff you like with people you like.
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Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology, because they don't know what the options are, or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business people try to hire hackers, they can't tell which ones are good
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And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It's not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.
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There's nothing about knowing how to program that prevents hackers from understanding users, or about not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.
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a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks
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In a startup, your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way, and your first priority should be to figure out where. The only way to do that is to try implementing them.
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the best opportunities are where things suck most
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To be self-funding, you have to start as a consulting company, and it's hard to switch from that to a product company.
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After all, as most VCs say, they're more interested in the people than the ideas. The main reason they want to talk about your idea is to judge you, not the idea.
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During the Bubble many startups tried to "get big fast." Ideally this meant getting a lot of customers fast. But it was easy for the meaning to slide over into hiring a lot of people fast.
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You can come along at any point and make something better, and users will gradually seep over to you. As if to emphasize the point, Google never did any advertising. They're like dealers; they sell the stuff, but they know better than to use it themselves.
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The competitors Google buried would have done better to spend those millions improving their software
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Unless you're in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent, spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage.
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when you're growing slow by word of mouth, your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves. There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you.
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Once you get big (in users or employees) it gets hard to change your product.
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There is nothing more important than understanding your business.
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they are an important fraction, because they are the page views that Web sessions start with.
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The most important is that you should put users before advertisers, even though the advertisers are paying and users aren't.
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12 Nov 06
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20 Oct 06
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09 Oct 06
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03 Oct 06
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11 Sep 06
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30 Aug 06
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29 Aug 06
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
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What matters is not ideas, but the people who have them. Good people can fix bad ideas, but good ideas can't save bad people.
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If you can't understand users, however, you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can. That is the single most important issue for technology startups, and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else.
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don't have a lot of meetings; don't have chunks of code that multiple people own; don't have a sales guy running the company; don't make a high-end product; don't let your code get too big; don't leave finding bugs to QA people; don't go too long between releases; don't isolate developers from users;
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It's worth trying very, very hard to make technology easy to use.
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The first thing you'll need is a few tens of thousands of dollars to pay your expenses while you develop a prototype. This is called seed capital
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In nearly every startup that fails, the proximate cause is running out of money.
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There is nothing more valuable, in the early stages of a startup, than smart users. If you listen to them, they'll tell you exactly how to make a winning product. And not only will they give you this advice for free, they'll pay you
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That's the key to success as a startup. There is nothing more important than understanding your business.
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More generally, design your product to please users first, and then think about how to make money from it. If you don't put users first, you leave a gap for competitors who do
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The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people
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When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm, you tend to feel rich. It's important to realize you're not. A rich company is one with large revenues
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08 Aug 06
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21 Jul 06
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10 Jun 06
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06 Dec 05
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16 Aug 05
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06 Jul 05
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16 May 05
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16 Apr 05
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08 Apr 05
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06 Apr 05
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Like most startups, we changed our plan on the fly. At first we expected our customers to be Web consultants. But it turned out they didn't like us, because our software was easy to use and we hosted the site. It would be too easy for clients to fire them. We also thought we'd be able to sign up a lot of catalog companies, because selling online was a natural extension of their existing business. But in 1996 that was a hard sell. The middle managers we talked to at catalog companies saw the Web not as an opportunity, but as something that meant more work for them.
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04 Apr 05
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01 Apr 05
David EykPractical advice for starting a new technology company.
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28 Mar 05
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