Jeremy Gollehon's List: Startup Success Stories & Strategies

• More than the products, Libin has developed a great culture at his company. When I was reading his interview with the New York Times, I was struck by the similarities in our two companies, including  our approach to technology. There is one little thing he said that to me is the sign of a great CEO

   

  The most important baseline skill for any position is communication. We want you to be able to explain what you mean; we want you to be articulate. That cuts out a lot of people, because a lot of people are probably pretty good technically, but if you don’t have excellent communication skills it’s going to be very frustrating for you and for other people. Other than that, then there’s just a core set of skills for the position.

   

  This little insight tells everything about the company – open, clear and concise communication means that you are always managing expectations, another one of Libin’s management philosophies. From those close to Libin say that those two qualities have earned him a lot of room from his investors who know that he is going to come through.

• This logic is ingrained in our brain: It’s more costly to miss the sign of a threat than to miss the sign of opportunity.
• Evolution via natural selection shaped the human brain over millions of years to achieve a simple goal: stay alive long enough to reproduce and raise offspring. As a result, we react faster, stronger, and harder to threats and unpleasantness than to opportunities and pleasures. There’s a red alert in our brain for bad things, but no green alert for equivalently good things. Sticks get our attention and carrots do not, because avoiding sticks is what mattered to staying alive.
• soft assets—knowledge, connections, and experiences—matter more when you’re younger.
• Working with someone with little relevant experience but high learning clock speed.
   Fast learners make up for their inexperience in spades. The flip side of inexperience often is hustle, energy, and a willingness to learn.
   - Taking a chance on a smart, scrappy person just out of college
   - Partnering with someone mid-flight in a career who’s pivoting into a new industry and feeling re-energized by the challenges
• If the media, or people in your industry, talk a lot about the riskiness of a certain job or career path, it probably isn’t as risky as most believe, and that means there’s less competition for landing the opportunity.
   - Starting a company
   - Working in a high tech industry
• As Tim says, “Uncertainty and the prospect of failure can be very scary noises in the shadows. Most people will choose unhappiness over uncertainty.
• For my first job after grad school, Apple hired me into their user experience group. Shortly after starting on the job, I learned that product/market fit—the focus of product management—actually mattered more than user experience or design. You can develop great and important user interfaces, and Apple certainly did, but if customers don’t need or want the product, they won’t buy.
• You can develop great and important user interfaces, and Apple certainly did, but if customers don’t need or want the product, they won’t buy.

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• So what happened next? In the past 24 hours I’ve heard three different guys say something to the affect of, “She? She is worth a billion? Huh. I guess anyone can be worth a billion.” As soon as someone says that they are scratched off my list of people I want to spend time with. I only like to be around positive people who celebrate success.

• If you have an idea: don’t focus on the money. Don’t focus on how you will make a living. Do this:

   
   
  • Build your product
   
  • Sell it to a customer
   
  • Start shipping
   
  • Then quit your job.

• To partner up I have to like the person like a brother, because we’ll face so many problems. The value of a company is the sum of the problems you solve together
• Sitting in two different rooms at Ek’s apartment, the pair yelled out possible titles for a music site—without even yet knowing what it would do—when Ek misheard one of Lorentzon’s suggestions. He typed the word “Spotify” into Google. There were zero hits (today: 64 million).
• “We bet our personal fortunes, and sometimes we bet the entire company,” says Ek. “We led with our conviction rather than rational, because rational said it was impossible.”

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• I believe that while money is a relatively poor motivation for people (because good people will work well regardless and poor people won't improve because of it), we will certainly lose the right type of people (i.e., motivated and capable) if they are not well paid. Besides, it would undermine the esprit de corps that comes from sharing the benefits and treating people well.

• My job as CEO, I now realize, is easy. All I have to do is recruit superstars. Of course, it's more than that: They need fair salaries, meaningful equity stakes, and most importantly, the authority to make decisions. To make this happen, I had to accept three difficult principles: 1. As a leader, I have meaningful weaknesses which will become an obstacle to growth; 2. the company is better off hiring those weaknesses, which means I need to hire people better than me and then give them equity and power; and 3. although I love my job, my goal ultimately is to make the company safe for my departure. It may take 10 years, but I must work toward that every day.

  The funny part is that once I accepted these principles, it gave me the humility I needed to inspire key recruits to join. In their eyes, I saw not only excitement for the equity we offered, but the earnest belief that they would be entrusted to do their jobs with my counsel, if they sought it, but without unwanted meddling. By accepting and acknowledging my own weaknesses, I was able to prove the naysayers wrong and hire winners from both worlds. I now begin my conversations with potential recruits with a sentence that always brings a smile: I am not good at what you do, and I need your help.

• The average and median age of company  founders when they started their current companies was 40
• 69.9 percent of respondents indicated they  were married when they launched their first business.
• 59.7 percent of respondents indicated they had at least one  child when they launched their first business
• The majority of respondents (75.4 percent) had worked as  employees at other companies for more than six years before launching their own  companies

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• "for pragmatist customers, the first freedom in a rapidly shifting market is order and security. That can only come from rallying around a clear market leader. Once the apparent leader-to-be emerges, pragmatists will support that company, virtually regardless of how arrogant, unresponsive, or overpriced it is."
• You have to trust your employees to do things that you used to be able to do yourself, and nobody does them better than you.
• Somewhere, there's someone out there who is taking more risks than you, and that person's business is growing faster than yours, and that person's business may one day come to dominate your industry while yours withers away.
• I've been working on the assumption that a product naturally creates demand for itself and the sales team just helps fulfill that demand. But I've realized that I have things backward.

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• solve a real problem for people.

• End users do think about jobs that they want to get done and what combination of suppliers can fulfill those jobs.