All Annotations of How to Start a Startup[Preview]

saved by54 people, first bySérgio Carvalho on 2006-03-02, last byEric Ingargiola on 2008-08-13

• the market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an nda.
• People
  
  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.
  
  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.
• 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?
• 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;
• the number of your employees is a choice
  between seeming impressive, and being impressive
• A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn't just increase
  your sales 10%. It's more likely to double your sales.
• People
  
  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.
  
  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.
  
• 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.
• 
• If there is one message I'd like to get across about startups,
  that's it. There is no magically difficult step that requires
  brilliance to solve.
  
• 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.
• 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.
  >
• There is no magically difficult step that requires
  brilliance to solve.
• In particular, you don't need a brilliant
  idea to start a startup
  around. 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• Online dating is a valuable
  business now, and it might be worth a hundred times as much if it
  worked.
• An idea for a startup, however, is only a beginning. A lot of
  would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the
  initial idea, and from that point all you have to do is execute.
  Venture capitalists know better.
• 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.
• There are plenty of other areas that are just as backward as search
  was before Google. 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.
• 
  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.
• If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each
  person with an MBA, you'll learn something important about business school. You
  don't even hit an MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are
  only four MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of
  people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison,
  Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business
  tend to come from technology, not business. 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.
• Restaurants with great food seem to prosper no matter what. 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.
• Financially, a startup is like a pass/fail course. The way to get
  rich from a startup is to maximize the company's chances of succeeding,
  not to maximize the amount of stock you retain. So if you can trade
  stock for something that improves your odds, it's probably a smart
  move.
  
• 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. 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.
• "if the people lead, the
  leaders will follow."
• . 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.
  >
• 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.
• If you want to do it, do it. Starting a startup is not the great
  mystery it seems from outside. It's not something you have to know
  about "business" to do. Build something users love, and spend less
  than you make. How hard is that?

• on 2006-04-28 Dolphin278
  Удачная статья по тому, как начинать новый бизнес
• on 2006-07-25 Billthemarmet
  Excellent articles for hackers and start-up wannabees.
• on 2006-07-31 Wenxin
  good article on the points to keep in mind when you are starting a new business. It is simple and to the point.