Archive for 2001

If your Chief Technology Officer in your organization has not personally and directly solved a technical problem in the past six months, I would have to say that it is safe to discount every opinion they have on the best way to do something with technology.

An entrepreneur that doesn’t like to cook is an entrepreneur that does not like to deal with uncertainty.

When you need to hire someone, you should hire for one of two reasons.

Either hire that person to create value.

Or hire that person to remove risk.

If they can do both, all the better.

But be exceptionally careful that you do not reverse the equation as it is non-commutative.

P.S. “Remove value” & “Create risk”

Start-ups are not epiphanies.

I can think of no successful start-up that started with a flash of inspiration, a few weeks or months of tinkering in the metaphorical garage workshop, and then unimagined success.

Start-ups are a grind that require only one resource…

Persistence.

A Strictly No Assholes Policy is uninteresting to me. It is uninteresting in the same way that a school has a zero tolerance policy. “No assholes” has to be contextual. Someone might be having a bad day. Someone might be an asshole to that one person all the time due to some perceived slight in the past. You can only have a an effective zero tolerance policy of no asshole in a company with zero employees.

The minimum viable products I like best are a landing page that says “Coming Soon” and then we collect your email address.

You need to be marketing today for the product (or service) your start-up will launch tomorrow.

If you wait until your product is launched, it’s already too late.

Here’s the 411 on how to be create a successful start-up.

Make shit that people want to pay you for.

There. Now how hard was that?

One great lesson I have learned about investing in companies over the past decade is never put money into a company based on the name.

Prefix investing (because of an e- or an @ in front of the company name) has got to be the dumbest thing anybody has ever done.

When you have a marketing team that doesn’t want to get their hands dirty with product development decisions, what you really have is an advertising team that wants to sell product after it has been developed.

I meet few entrepreneurs who can simply get started.

I meet fewer entrepreneurs who can simply keep going.

I meet far fewer entrepreneurs who never stop.

“Describe yourself in one word.” said the VC.

“Relentlessly resourceful.” I replied.

“That’s two words.” countered the VC.

“Rule breaker.” I quipped.

“Understood. But also, still two words.”

“Disruptive influencer.” I added.

“Still two words.”

“Salesman.” I smiled.

“Finally. And why do you think you’re a salesman?”

“Because I just gave you four answers to one dumb question and you listened to all of them.”

The successful (and not so successful) entrepreneurs who reflect on their journey are the entrepreneurs that we need the most.