“Remember there are 3 kinds of people; Those that MAKE it happen, those that WATCH it happen, and those that wonder WHAT happened. These startups are people that MAKE it happen. They should be respected and supported by those of us in the later two categories.” — Don Dodge
Don, well said.
Curiously enough, what got Segway into this problem was that the company was itself a kind of Segway. It was too easy for them; they were too successful raising money. If they’d had to grow the company gradually, by iterating through several versions they sold to real users, they’d have learned pretty quickly that people looked stupid riding them. Instead they had enough to work in secret. They had focus groups aplenty, I’m sure, but they didn’t have the people yelling insults out of cars. So they never realized they were zooming confidently down a blind alley.
— Paul Graham, YCombinator
My take:
– I agree, raising “too much” capital for an idea is poison. Having to do a lot with a little instills discipline, and forces one to be uber-resourceful, razor focused, and quite frankly a little paranoid 🙂 I’m extremely lucky to have mentors like David who have drilled this mantra into my head. We achieved a lot with little at both Lookery and Compete.com, and now Shareaholic.
– Iterative design is the way to go. All of us that create applications for which we can push updates and upgrades at-will at not much cost are blessed. Criminal not to take advantage of this gift.
– Focus groups? Community Managers (= everyone in the company) should be curating the feedback loop from in the field – talking to real users, asking them how we can improve our products, create the most value for them, and knock down the most roadblocks in the process — in short, make their lives easier.
Users first, always.
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos explaining his philosophy and commitment to the customer-service culture of Zappos:
- Obsess over customers. For Amazon, everything starts with the customer. While they pay attention to competitors, they don’t let competitors drive what they do.
- Invent. Amazon listens to customers, recognizing the need to invent solutions for them, since they can’t do it themselves. Jeff see this as a critical part of what Amazon does — invent on behalf of customers.
- Think long term. Amazon strategists try to look five years out. They don’t worry about taking actions that, while they might pay immediate dividends for customers, won’t pay off for the company or its investors for five to seven years. They have a willingness to be misunderstood, since so many people only understand short-term needs and short-term thinking.
- It’s always Day 1. There are always more opportunities to invent more for customers. It’s never over or too late.
via Dave Morgan, CEO of Simulmedia.
“When we were working on our own startup, back in the 90s, I evolved another trick for partitioning the day. I used to program from dinner till about 3 am every day, because at night no one could interrupt me. Then I’d sleep till about 11 am, and come in and work until dinner on what I called “business stuff.” I never thought of it in these terms, but in effect I had two workdays each day, one on the manager’s schedule and one on the maker’s.”
— Paul Graham, YCombinator
Wow, this is very similar to my schedule these days.
To give a fund’s investors a 20% annual return, the firm needs to triple the money raised within a six-year period, Kopelman said. For a $400 million fund, that means returning $1.2 billion to investors. Since VCs typically don’t want the risk of holding more than 20% of the companies they invest in, they have to help build a few companies with a total of $6 billion in market value. But in the past few years only a handful of companies have sold or gone public for more than $1 billion. “You sit there and say, ‘Holy crap, that model doesn’t work,’ ” said Kopelman.
What’s a venture capitalist to do? For Kopelman and other super angels, the answer is to get small. Super angels still aim for billion-dollar exits, but their model doesn’t hinge on home runs. Instead, they can profit by hitting singles and doubles and reducing their strikeouts.
— Josh Kopelman, First Round Capital in a BusinessWeek interview.