Book: Founders At Work

Founders At Work
interviews by
Jessica Livingston

ISBN-13: 978-1590597149

Lately, while reading, I’ve been underlining sentences and passages that are worth thinking about, sharing, or just rereading. I mark their position in a book by stickers. I don’t have to tell you how many things you can learn in this book – my copy has 53 tabs and looks like that:

Here is my read of it. In a To(Not)-Do list. Remixed.

Luck

• Get lucky. I am not kidding. One of the things I kept noticing is how everybody got lucky at some point, “we lucked out we found a great CEO”, or “that deal was total luck, came out of nowhere” etc. After all, if 1/10 startups succeed, if you do ten there is no way not to get lucky, is there? (statistically significant)
• There seems no luck, so don’t wait for it. It looks like a lot of the pivotal things happen on their own, but in reality it’s the result of your actions that you couldn’t predict. A lot of the founders seem to have ’caused’ good luck on themselves.

Qualities

• Do not give up. Jessica Livingston starts off with this point in the introduction, “In fact, I’d say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder….Perseverance is important because, in a startup, nothing goes according to plan.” Unless you are lacking motivation, you should keep that on a sticky note on your screen.
• Think unusual ideas and don’t be afraid. Here’s what Buchheit (creator of Gmail) said about the googles, “…they are very open to crazy ideas – more so than almost anyone I’ve ever met.”

Marketing

• Make your product so good so it can market itself, I wrote about it. Here is Blake Ross on it, “It turns out that marketing is just making the product good enough that people spread it on their own, and giving them ways to do that. It’s a lot easier and more natural than I thought it would be.” In that category falls the story with choosing the right market. Marc Andreessen also said it in this post.
• Hire a good PR firm. The more I think about it, write business plans, and make projections it seems that direct advertising is just not the way to go. Word of mouth with PR help can do the trick. Paul Graham Says PR worked for them.
• Do not write business plans as a guidance of what you should be doing. It seems to be more of a marketing tool, “You can easily add a couple of zeros everywhere and sell the same thing to people. Instead of 10 percent market growth you make 20 percent market growth, and you suddenly make $200 million more in the fifth year, but so what?”

Hiring

• Hire the best people you can find (even if more expensive), “I still think it’s more efficient …. if you have two really good people and a very powerful tool. That’s still better than having 20 mediocre people and inefficient tools.”
  
• Hire someone with passion/desire. From my own experience too – even if people are not good at something, when they want something badly they will go long way to achieve results.

Product

• Release early/often. It will save you a lot in the end.
• Follow your guts more than anything else. They have been exposed to all the things in your life, so they know. And your users’ guts too.
• Make research on user’s requested features. Sometimes they want one thing, and when you look closely they actually wanted something completely different but didn’t know how to explain it.

VC’s

• Learn to guess when VC’s cut you off, because they never say, “No”. It’s quite logical that they don’t want to cut their connections with you. If you do succeed they want to be with you. But not know. So let’s talk Monday about it again?
• VCs are strange birds. Here’s a quote from Currier’s interview:
  They all told me $18 million wasn’t interesting. And I’d say, “But most people will tell you $50 million, and you know they’re lying. I’m already discounting it because I’m a venture guy just like you are.” And they’d say, “Yeah, but $18 million just isn’t interesting.
  So I changed my spreadsheet to say $50 million. And they said, “OK, that’s pretty interesting.”

Help From other people

• Move to the right place. Ross again,
  One thing I didn’t know was how tightly connected everyone is in the Valley. We’ll meet someone, and then we’ll meet someone who I would never expect to even know that person, and they’ll say, “I heard you met Tony last week.”
  (Oh god, I have to do this one myself…)
• People will help you if you are pushing enough. Winblad, “I think this is something that people underestimate – that there are always people out there rooting for you.”

Tricks to get there

• Get it anyway you can – software, hardware, whatever does it. Meaning, don’t get bogged down by trying to do it one way or another. Switch, try, explore. Be flexible.
• Do it with leverage. Why do robbers use crowbars? You can do more with less. Find ways. Don’t build everything from ground up. There are free stuff you can use. Don’t create Google analytics. It’s there, use it.

Misc

• Do not kill yourself. Uhm, okay what I mean is what Winblad said, “But the majority of companies fail by self-inflicted wounds by the leadership team.”
• Setup your startup user registration to send you a text on the cell phone. Awesome idea I read in there…
• I like James Hong, so this section is just for his advices:
  • “One, do it while you are young”
  • “Two, there’s no right path”
  • “Three, even if you raise money, spend it as if it’s your own and you have none”
  • “Four, there so such thing as easy entrepreneurship”

I think it’s time to end, but this book is a fountain of precious experience. Also this is just my look at it. If there is one book you have get and read and think about, it’s this one, read it.