If you are making the move from a big company to a startup, Scott Converse has a must read post up about passive-aggressive behavior titled Corporate vs. Startup behaviors.
I can’t stand passive-aggressive behavior, especially in a startup context. I’d much prefer a good argument. The value of being direct is extremely high, especially when faced with the amount of ambiguity that exists in a startup.
I’ve never really worked for a large company (even my time at AmeriData was really more of a big startup since it was growing so fast and doing so many acquisitions) so I’ve never really learned (or experienced) how to survive in a big company. Nor do I really care since I doubt I’ll ever be in that environment. However, I do care about how to map big company experience to entrepreneurial experience and Scott provides some very useful insights in his post.
At lunch today, I interviewed my dad for the TechStars gang. It was fun and he used two of my favorite Stan Feld-isms.
“Complicated Mistakes” Most people – especially engineers – understand the value of “keeping it simple.” Complicated mistakes are what happen when you don’t.
“If You Aren’t On The Edge, You Are Taking Up Too Much Space.” If you are an entrepreneur or an innovator, you are probably living this. A good life philosophy.
Not quite Yogi Berra speak, but pretty close.
Creating companies is hard. Most fail. Overnight success is rare (my favorite “overnight success stories” are the ones that take 10+ years, like iRobot or Harmonix.) While strategy plays a key part in the outcome of an entrepreneurial venture, the fundamentals matter a lot. Take the following parable that I got from a friend recently.
I was thinking about you as I drove home from my tennis match the other night. My doubles partner was clearly excited to implement what she had learned in previous doubles strategy lessons. Minutes before we stepped onto the court, she developing signals she was going to use for poaching, staying put at the net, etc. Since I had never played against our opponents before, I wasn’t initially concerned about strategy. I figured assess their strengths and weaknesses during the warm up, then play to them accordingly.
We ended up losing 6-4, 6-4 to a team that wasn’t as strong as us. One of the reasons I think we lost is because there was too much focus on strategy and not enough on fundamentals. Our opponents capitalized on some very basic mistakes and ended up taking the last four games from us to win the match.
Clearly there are worse ways to spend a Monday evening than losing a tennis match. But, as a funder/board member/sounding board/cheerleader, have you ever counseled a start-up team where there is an imbalance between strategy development vs. executing on fundamentals? How do you steer them back on course, especially after they’ve experienced defeat?
I’ve been in way too many meetings where the talk is endlessly about “strategy.” Whenever you are in an endless cycle of a “we need a strategy” or “our strategy needs to be X” type discussions, step back and think about whether or not you have a team that is capable of actually building a business.
Great strategy is useless if you don’t know how to serve, volley, and hit the ball.
What Fred said. Marc Andreessen (co-founder of Netscape, Opsware, and Ning) has been blogging up a storm and it’s awesome. His post from yesterday titled The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 1: Why not to do a startup is just awesome.
My other favorite posts include:
Wow. Marc – keep them coming!
I had the following exchange with the CEO of one of my investments the other day.
Q (Brad): It’s strange to me that only a few of the investors / board members are using Product X. Any insights?
A (CEO): I’m in two minds. One is that my investors should use Product X to be more informed. On the other hand, I’m usually very careful to get investors to use a product I’m building just because I asked them to. There are only a few investors who are potential target users in the early days. I have done it in the past, and I often get feedback that I have to deal with because I made them play with the product. My goal is to get the product to a point where they end up using it because it’s that good, and that we’re targeting their target demographic.
I thought this was a great answer. I’ve written about this before at Product Focused Venture Capital and Do Your Investors Use Your Product? I’ve always been attracted to companies that make things I can use and immerse myself in. However, I realize that this isn’t necessarily representative of the VC community and I loved the CEO’s notion that his goal was to build a product that became so compelling that his investors naturally would use it.
We had a lot of fun on Thursday at the TechStars Funding Your Startup event. A few people have written great blog summaries about it, including one from eNeighbors, Certifyre, and stopthejunkmail.com. Given the audience (> 200 people) and the response, I think David Cohen is going to do one more public TechStars event this summer.
I answer my own phone. I always have. If I’m sitting at my desk working on something and my phone rings I’ll usually pick it up, even if I don’t recognize the phone number. I know this doesn’t fit the “be hyper-productive” method of life, but I like the randomness of it.
A few minutes ago I got a random phone call from a guy in Oklahoma. He was calling (I have no idea how he found me) to raise some money for his business. He started off by saying that he needed $150k, thought he had it raised, but was looking for some venture capital. Before I had a chance to say anything he launched into a description of his business.
I was able to interrupt at some point and tell him that I didn’t think he should be bothering talking to VCs if he was only raising $150k. I started to explain and again he cut me off and started telling me how he’d proven the business worked he needed to find VCs that would invest less than $3m, and he really didn’t need much money to build the business.
This went on for a little while. At some point I got more forceful in our conversation about his financing approach. He then started pushing on the idea and explaining why it was going to be so successful. He also explained that he could raise $3m and spend it if that’s what I wanted by simply going after more markets. When I suggested that I thought that was an irrational approach, he started getting angry and explained how he’d proven things already and could go after more markets if that’s what I wanted.
I eventually managed to tell him that regardless of his financing approach, this wasn’t a market (mobile phone software) that I liked to invest in. The conversation then spun into a really weird place where he told me that he could respect an answer like that, but not the advice I was trying to give him about how to raise money since I sounded “just like another one of those VCs that just gives advice but doesn’t do anything.” He got even more indignant and told me he didn’t respect my point of view and didn’t know why he was talking to me.
I said “ok – goodbye” and hung up. While I clearly didn’t impress him, he completely blew an opportunity to get some help. While I’m not sure that any of the angel investors that I know in either the mobile phone software universe or in the Oklahoma / Texas area would be interested in his business, I could have at least made an intro for him to someone that might be relevant (which is where I would have gone with the conversation if he had let me.) Instead – he got nothing from the call while I got a blog post out of it.
ABC interviews Ben Casnocha about entrepreneurship around Ben’s book tour for My Start-Up Life: What a (Very) Young CEO Learned on His Journey Through Silicon Valley. If you’ve never met Ben, I hope you’ve at least heard me raving about him. This interview will give you a sense for the brilliance that is Ben at 19.
The cliche “rules were meant to be broken” is a common one in the world of entrepreneurship. Paul Berberian – a great entrepreneur (and dear friend) almost died yesterday when flying his airplane because he broke three of his rules of flying in a row. Paul got lucky and I very glad he’s alive.
As an investor, I’ve developed some rules. These are not absolutes – I break individual rules on a regular basis. These are not “ethical”, “moral”, or “legal” rules; rather they are functional guidelines for helping create companies that I’ve developed over 20+ years of doing this with 100+ companies. If you are an entrepreneur or executive at a company that I’m an investor in (or a co-investor with me) and have ever had to listen to me blather on about a story of something that has happened at another company to illustrate one of my points, you understand what I mean by “a rule.”
While my rules evolve over time, the core principles don’t. Paul’s post illustrated a point that I hadn’t ever really thought about. When you have a set of rules, it’s ok to break one of them, but it’s probably not ok to break two in a row and it might be fatal to break three in a row. In some recursive parallel universe, I guess that’s a rule.
As a result there are two concepts in play: one of “rules” and one of “additive rules.” (Rule_1 or Rule_2 or Rule_3) is very different from (Rule_1 and Rule_2 and Rule_3). The second case is the one that will get you intro trouble.
Being rigid and slaveishly following rules is stupid. Being flexible and breaking three of your rules in rapid succession might be fatal.