My biggest takeaway: Get a team of advisors (They had 25 advisors for a 4 person startup) who are people you want to have associated with your product. “Who’s your entourage?”
I tell my kids, what is the difference between a hero and a coward? What is the difference between being yellow and being brave? No difference. Only what you do. They both feel the same. They both fear dying and getting hurt. The man who is yellow refuses to face up to what he’s got to face. The hero is more disciplined and he fights those feelings off and he does what he has to do. But they both feel the same, the hero and the coward. People who watch you judge you on what you do, not how you feel.
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| — | Cus D’amato, legendary boxing trainer from this post by Ben Horowitz |
Hiring and Firing for Entrepreneurs by David Teten
Lots of very good relevant advice and lists other resources for how to hire at a startup.
The key here is to be a good chess player. The key to business strategy is to separate real threats from others. Blockbuster was concerned about VOD [video on demand]. They saw DVD by mail and didn’t think it was a threat. If they had launched [a Netflix-like service] a few years earlier [than 2004], they might well have won.
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| — | Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix |
A problem worth solving boils down to three questions: 1. Is it something customers want? (must-have) 2. Can it be solved? (feasible) 3. Will they pay for it? If not, who will? (viable)
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| — | Ash Maurya in “Running Lean” |
The iPad is the training wheels for HTML5.
Don’t try to be “social”: the big social platforms are created. You can’t create a social company, it’s just a checkbox. “The last 500 social companies funded by the VC community are all worthless. I’m serious.”
But this creates an opportunity: while everyone is focused on social distribution, there’s a huge opportunity to get content right with HTML5. “Let’s create a new product, the way music videos were a new product.”
Early in his political career, Julius Caesar is said to have wept upon reading a biography of Alexander the Great. When asked why, he apparently said, “Do you think, I have not just cause to weep, when I consider that Alexander at my age had conquered so many nations, and I have all this time done nothing that is memorable!”
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Earlier, to me the game meant maximizing your time and potential to get somewhere, now it meant maximizing those things to enjoy the trip.
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The answer to how you pick the destination: by asking yourself, what do I want to see grow? What do I want to build?
Yes, it turns out he became one of Foursquare’s earliest employees by cold-emailing Dennis and Naveen and selling them on what value he could add.
I think it’s interesting that he sent 8 emails before Dennis finally consented to talking more about possibly bringing Tristan on. I don’t know if Dennis at least replied with “no, thanks” or “not right now” before that 8th email, but I’m not sure I would have cold emailed someone that many times, without receiving a response, before I decided that they really weren’t interested.
One of my resolutions in 2011 is to be more bold. I think cold emailing someone past my comfort zone of “I’m really annoying this person” is a good example of boldness.
At the end of the day one must ask “What’s the worse that could happen if I send this 8th email?”
