Startups often have to do dubious things.
I aim to combine all the things I do in a comprehensive and holistic fashion that benefits startups and the people who make them grow.
I wanted to create a toolkit which I would have wanted as an entrepreneur to use these principles of psychology in product design. Some startups totally forget the trigger. In some, the action is too complicated. Others don’t have a variable reward, which maintains mystery.
My prior stint at ‘Newsweek’ was a very different world. So it’s what it’s like to be in one of these kooky software startups as a grown up. It’s not entirely pleasant! It’s like, ‘Oh, I don’t fit.’
Most startups flame out or just muddle along. Your chances of spotting a unicorn, pre-horn, are incalculably small. But if, knowing that, you still want to toss aside your cushy job, at least listen to corporate vets who have made the transition.
In the startup work environment, you get to have a relationship with your boss, the investors, and the key members of the team. Startups are like families – you see the good, the bad and the ugly, but in the end, you’ve got each other’s back.
If you look at most successful startups, they’re run by people in their mid to late forties, who’ve gone through the trenches multiple times and had multiple failures, so they understand.
Startups often want to control the timing of their financing announcement and prefer not to reveal amounts raised for competitive reasons. If more of the Form D information was confidential rather than public, compliance rates would jump dramatically.
Startups are rapidly changing systems. If you use an annual review cycle, you aren’t getting feedback at the same pace that you need to adapt and change the business.
It’s so important for startups to get their culture right at the start. They need to feel unique and that they are on their own important mission in the world.
I think Yandex is something in between two different cultures. One originated from the old Soviet culture of the scientific institute. It was a free atmosphere of scientists, maybe too free because nobody cared about making money. Another origin is something close to what you usually see in California startups.
Landing a million-dollar investment for your startup is exhilarating. But as big as that number sounds, it doesn’t go far. Many startups just getting off the ground won’t have a CFO to monitor finances. It doesn’t take much for spending to spiral out of control.
The thing about startups is you can make it, and if it’s wrong you can remake it, and you can build a team that you want to have, a product that you want to have. You’re utterly focused on your users or your customers and their needs, and trying to figure out how to meet those needs.
The reason why we decided to put the focus on minority and women-funded startups is because this demographic of companies and founders is just underrepresented, they’re under-invested in.
It’s worth noting that everything – from the Internet to electric cars, genomic sequencing, mobile apps, and social media – were pioneered by startups, not existing companies.
All companies – and not just startups – face the same eternal challenge: resource allocation.
In order to protect against being disrupted, startups also need to recruit employees that are committed to life-long learning. The skills that made your team members valuable may not be the skills needed to take your company to the next level or to compete in emerging markets.
In technology startups, there’s a lot of winging it.
‘Bazillion Dollar Club’ follows six struggling startups trying to get their products together.
If you thought financial crises came and went, just count on them – another economic collapse, it’s almost going to be like not news any more. But for startups this is great, because it’s a perpetual driver of disruption.
What draws us to a city like San Francisco is the same thing that draws entrepreneurs, startups, and freelancers to WeWork: it’s the creative atmosphere, the technical sophistication, and the strong sense of community.
Entrepreneurship is like a computer game in which you have to master every level before achieving success. Startups repeatedly stumble and have to go back to the drawing board. The best way to skip some levels and to increase the odds of survival is to learn from others who have already played the game.
Little startups are ridiculously overfunded.
The reality is the Lean Startup method is not about cost, it is about speed. Lean startups waste less money, because they use a disciplined approach to testing new products and ideas.
The only way I know to be awesome at startups is to be obsessively focused and pegged to the floor of the deep end, gasping for air.
I’m very, very used to hearing no – repeatedly! – and through my experience founding startups, I’ve learned to view those two little letters not as a final roadblock but as a problem to be solved.
The success stories in biotechnology are mainly due to the straightforward application of design thinking in both the business and science aspects of our lean startups.
In ‘That Will Never Work,’ I give readers a clear-eyed insider’s look into how one of the least likely startups grew into one of the world’s most successful companies.
Companies that acquire startups for their intellectual property, teams, or product lines are acquiring startups that are searching for a business model. If they acquire later stage companies who already have users/customers and/or a predictable revenue stream, they are acquiring companies that are executing.
Early-stage startups are all about the founders and team.
The only rollercoasters I get on are startups.
When I first started as an angel investor, I was excited to start investing in startups – but I didn’t know much. I couldn’t tell the good ones from the bad; I didn’t understand all these venture capital terms, so I would invest somewhat blindly.
Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.
When I started to go out there and listen to different startups or different CEOs talk about how you build this company from a two-person team to a team of 500, I really just stepped back and was like, ‘Well, it’s not necessarily a business, but football has a lot of similarities to that.’
Everyone is on Facebook. It is very rare that I can’t find a startup. Out of the 72 Y Combinator startups, almost all of them were on Facebook.
Sometimes, the startup game works in your favor just because you got in at the right time and right environment. Other times, you’re a little too late entering an already crowded space. But startups with strong fundamentals withstand external conditions and come out ahead in good or bad times.
We are seeing a new wave of young biologists that are attacking old problems with new tools and fresh ideas, leading to new types of bio startups and creating a much-needed engine to drive Silicon Valley into the next century.
The Italy of my children will be at head of Europe, economically. Because Italy has all the conditions to be the country of the startups, the country of artisans and quality, and the country of the big companies.
