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Joel Liu's Library tagged entrepreneurship →  View Popular, Search in Google

Mar
28
2011

  • Rather, this is when you discover a great opportunity and can quickly shift to go after it. Bad luck is what happens when your first idea doesn’t work. It doesn’t mean failure; it means you need to pursue plan B.
  • Rule #6: Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first product release.
     With my first startup, Socialnet.com, it took us nine months to launch the first product. That was a disastrous mistake. We wanted to have all the detailed functionality right away, including social controls to people could decide to connect or not with the people in their networks. We wanted everyone to “Ooh” and “Aaah” about how terrific the product was. We wasted a bunch of time and it put us months behind on more important problems that needed to be solved, such as how to get our product in the hands of millions of people. From that I learned, if you are not embarrassed by your first release, you’ve launched too late!
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Jul
11
2009

  • The most interesting part of the interview was when Mark described how his first startup took off very quickly, once he arrived at a solid concept.  Mark created ONEList and it took off overnight because it solved a fundamental pain many people were experiencing.  Making mailing lists at the time was a painful process, and ONEList made it easy.  Bloglines was another good idea because it solved a problem Mark personally was experiencing, how to keep up with the many blogs he read.  Furthermore, Mark leveraged the marketing and PR relationships he had built at ONEList to get press for Bloglines which spurred their growth.

  • One thing really stands out to me today. I wasted a lot of energy, time, and passion on trend-spotting and trying to compare my success with others. Is it really worthwhile spending time and money trying to impress each other with our supposed successes, especially in a business where real feedback can take five or ten years? We go to mixers, buy fancy offices, focus on PR, and try to one-up each other. I think it's wasteful. Instead, let's focus on building companies that matter, on creating real value for customers, and learning. In time, success will come. And if it doesn't, at least you'll have spent your time doing something intrinsically worthwhile.
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  • In the meantime, don't worry if you can't spot the trends. Neither can the rest of us (well, except for Matt Cohler).
May
3
2009

  • If I were back in high school and someone asked about my plans, I'd say that my first priority was to learn what the options were. You don't need to be in a rush to choose your life's work. What you  need to do is discover what you like. You have to work on stuff  you like if you want to be good at what you do.

    It might seem that nothing would be easier than deciding what you like, but it turns out to be hard, partly because it's hard to get an accurate picture of most jobs. Being a doctor is not the way it's portrayed on TV. Fortunately you can also watch real doctors, by volunteering in hospitals. [1]

    But there are other jobs you can't learn about, because no one is doing them yet. Most of the work I've done in the last ten years didn't exist when I was in high school. The world changes fast,  and the rate at which it changes is itself speeding up. In such a world it's not a good idea to have fixed plans.

  • What they really mean is, don't get demoralized.
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Feb
17
2008

  • It's a pattern we see over and over in technology. Initially there's some device that's very expensive and made in small quantities. Then someone discovers how to make them cheaply;  many more get built; and as a result they can be used in new ways.
  • This pattern is very old. Most of the turning points in economic history are instances of it. It happened to steel in the 1850s, and to power in the 1780s. It happened to cloth manufacture in the thirteenth century, generating the wealth that later brought about the Renaissance. Agriculture itself was an instance of this pattern.
Oct
18
2007

  • You might also think that everyone knows everything about startup funding, but that’s not the case. Recently someone sent in a question asking about the differences between angel and venture financing. With that in mind, I’ve put together a brief, introductory guide to startup funding.
Jan
6
2006

  • Several people encouraged me to write, to expand this blog and do some other things but after much thought I realized that I''m not ready for that. I love writing about business, but at the same time I don''t just want to write about business, I want to do it. Why? To learn. I''m 29, and even though I don''t equate age with knowledge or skill, I know I''m not ready for what I want my future to be. Learning is so much more intense when it has tangible consequences. I can write about what companies should do, and I can be wrong (as I often am) but I don''t learn from that the way I learn when I make a mistake such as losing a sale, losing a key employee, botching a presentation, miscalculating a strategic move, etc. 
Oct
22
2005

  • Three of the Web’s most widely read business bloggers explore answers to the timely and critical questions facing entrepreneurs today
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