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Joel Liu's Library tagged startup →  View Popular

Is it Time for You to Earn or to Learn?

  • Over time I took to telling people the following, “join BuildOnline because you think you’ll get great experience.  Join because you like the mission of what we’re doing.  Join because if you do a good job we’ll help you punch above your weighclass and work in a more senior role.  And if you ever feel that in the year ahead of you you don’t think that you’ll increase the value of your resume and you’re not having fun then go.  Join because we pay well but not amazing.  Stock options are the icing on the cake.  They’ll never make you rich.  Don’t join for the options.”
19 Oct 09

Patrick Collison » blog » Surprises

  • Tied to this, the realization that a good product is so much more important than first mover advantage. Obvious, but keeps surprising me. Facebook, the iPhone, Dropbox, Skype, etc., have an amazing array of failed predecessors.
24 Sep 09

Silicon Valley coming back strong and here's why... - @alexdmoore's posterous

  • New startups need waaaay less cash than before. This means a dearth of VC money is irrelevant. The charts in WSJ showing less VC going into startups is meaningless and outlines this point to a T. This is creating a huge gap in what is going on and what people think is going on. Plenty of companies are being started. Enough are.
  • It's still uncool to work for large tech companies if you are a CS major at Stanford.  You can do it, but it's not cool. This leaves the warm embrace of cool startups warm.
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10 Sep 09

5 Financial Rules for Startups

  • So … I spent more.  The money flowed like beer at a frat party.  We hired people right and left – even though we didn’t have time to orient them and put their talents to good use.  We sponsored events and went to tradeshows – even though our time would have been better spent on making individual sales calls, rather than the distractions of picking out tradeshow booths.  We spent oodles of money and, worse, time commissioning swag and marketing materials and advertising creative – even though we had little revenue coming in.  

    In the end it didn’t help the business.  While speed is important, a startup paradoxically also needs time – time to iterate on product development, time to get the team aligned with the business vision, and time to focus on closing sales.  Startups are like babies – you can’t force babies to grow up faster just by throwing money at them.
  • Be picky.  In the words of Evan Williams, a founder of Blogger and Twitter, startups have to be willing to say no – no to partnerships and unnecessary product features and the wrong employees.  More wasted money and time comes from going in too many directions than from focusing.
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08 Sep 09

Launching a start-up and having a family life: It’s possible! | VentureBeat

  • My wife and I agreed to a few rules upfront and made up the rest as went along. We agreed I was still going to do startups, and probably more than most spouses she knew what that meant.  To her credit she also understood that meant that child raising wasn’t going to be a 50/50 split; I simply wasn’t going to be home at 5 pm every night.


    In hindsight this list looks pretty organized but in reality we made it up as we went along, accompanied with all the husband and wife struggles of being married and trying to raise a family in Silicon Valley.  Here are the some of the rules that evolved that seemed to work for our family.

07 Sep 09

21世纪 - 21世纪经济报道数字报纸

  •   “利润=收入-成本，这个公式看起来非常简单，但实际上真正读懂了的人却不多。”他说：“通常，人们都倾向和喜欢去做加法，很少会意识到由加法同时带来的成本增加。”
  • 但还没开始赚钱且没有投资情况下，如何控制成本？一般情况下，大家能想到的就是使劲勒紧腰带，但老朱想出了一个主意——网讯当时有16个人，让其中8个人到外面接其它公司的生意，赚来的钱负责养公司，而剩下8个人，则负责专心致志做自己公司的产品。
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