Amen!
We plan to start investing carefully with about $100M slated for the U.S. My passion and my personality will make an imprint on the work we do. Our focus will be early-stage, Series A software and internet companies that have technology and innovation at their core. B2B, SaaS, cloud, big data, analytics, infrastructure, enterprise — these, in my opinion, are markets underserved by the current swarm of consumer internet investors. And these are exactly the investments that we are going to do.
The Fine Line Between Fear and Courage // ben’s blog
Every time you make the hard, correct decision you become a bit more courageous and every time you make the easy, wrong decision you become a bit more cowardly. If you are CEO, these choices will lead to a courageous or cowardly company.
Entrpreneurship Tips from Max Levchin via Quora
It’s usually better to have a cofounder than go it alone.
Being an entrepreneur is not about being in love with an idea, it’s about being in love with running a company.
Having a highly homogeneous (background, education, values, preferences, etc) very early team is better than not — cuts down on time-wasting arguments.
You can have successful teams where people hate but deeply respect each other; the opposite (love but not respect among team members) is a recipe for disaster.
If there is any doubt about hiring a candidate for your first 5-6 positions, there is no doubt — do not.
You cannot hire a cofounder.
Do not allow senior managers to develop long-term grudges against each other. You will have to arbitrate those later, a huge time sink.
All compensation information eventually becomes public, and usually eventually == very quickly.
In many cases “working from home” is not really working.
Most often, when someone wants to leave your company, you should let them. Chasing them with offerings of money and power messes up the incentives of others.
Intra-office romance is usually (but not always) bad news.
Figure out one thing each of your investors is genuinely really good at, and insist they help you with that. Among other things it will save you from their help in other areas.
Consider on occasion whether the adjective “relentless” applies to your team. If not, you probably need to step it up.
Leadership by example is the most effective type. If you expect the troops to crank through nights and weekends, better be there yourself, even if you aren’t actually involved in the task at hand. It’s a little irrational, but it inspires people.
(I’ll keep adding to this list as I think of more of these. No doubt the second batch won’t be as good as the first, and so on, but might still be useful to some people. Plus, next time I am asked to speak on this topic, I can use this article as cliff notes.)
One usually raises money on great story or great results. Raise before, or right after launching. Don’t plan to raise a few weeks after launch.
Having a large and complicated cap table is rarely a good idea. Few committed angels is better than $5k from everyone and their brother.
Board meeting should never be product strategy debates. Double true that for product tactics.
Have a cardboard box at board meetings where attendees must deposit their mobile devices at the start for the entire duration of the meeting. At the very least suggest that idea.
Serve food at board meetings.
If you have a cofounder, give them a board seat. If you can, keep one more for yourself, and leave it empty. You’ll need it later.
Cofounders (under usual circumstances) should have same amount of equity.
Raising money between May 20th and August 10th, and Nov 10th through January 15th is somewhat harder than during any other time of the year — many VCs vacation during those times.
Never, ever agree to participating preferred.
Redemption rights are actually OK (it seems to be an East Coast thing), if placed a bunch of years out. Startups shouldn’t be in a limbo for that long anyway.
If you are going for a big raise at a huge valuation, consider the resulting pref overhang (and its impact on future employee motivation) very carefully.
You are not designing for yourself, and shouldn’t be. Most people using the Web don’t understand (most of) what makes it work and don’t want to. Design for those people — there are many more of them than you.
via (60) Home – Quora.
Netflix’s Advice on Moving to Amazon Web Services
“You have to assume that the hardware and underlying services are ephemeral, unreliable and may be broken or unavailable at any point, and that the other tenants in the multi-tenant public cloud will add random congestion and variance. In reality you always had this problem at scale, even with the most reliable hardware, so cloud ready architecture is about taking the patterns you have to use at large scale, and using them at a smaller scale to leverage the lowest cost infrastructure.”
via Netflix’s Advice on Moving to Amazon Web Services – ReadWriteCloud.
It’s all your fault!
When people in my company would complain about something or other being broken such as the expense reporting process, I would joke that it was all my fault. The joke was funny, because it wasn’t really a joke. Every problem in the company was indeed my fault. As the founding CEO, every hire and every decision that the company ever made happened under my direction. Unlike a hired gun that comes in and blames all of the problems on the prior regime, there was literally nobody for me to blame.
via What’s The Most Difficult CEO Skill? Managing Your Own Psychology..
5 feature requests for OHours 2.0
Image via CrunchBase
I am a huge fan of OHours … a great idea and a natural product for a super-connector like Nate to create. I’ve used the service to attend office hours as well as to host my own.
Nate – I know you’re swamped with marshalling the NY Tech Community, kissing babies, advising startups, and leaping tall buildings in a single bound … but if you get some more bandwidth to work on OHours, here are 5 features I’d love to see…partially because I think they are cool…and partially because I think they could help turn OHours into a business. Not sure if that’s your goal, but I can dare to dream!
1) Sponsored OHours – I think you could sell sponsorships for OHours appointments with celebs, high profile members of the tech world, sports stars, etc.
2) Job seeker tools – My guess is that a decent sized chunk of people who are signing up for OHours appointments are job seekers. Why not create a recommendation engine that would pull data from LinkedIn or Twitter to suggest which OHours would be best to attend given your career goals, companies for which you’d like to work, etc?
3) Help me meet who my friends are meeting – Like LinkedIn and Facebook, OHours should recommend to me who I should follow or with whom I should schedule OHours. It should look at who my friends on have met via Ohours and use that information to suggest people I should be meeting as well.
4) Invite other Ohours members to my OHours – Anyone who is using OHours has some level of interest in open networking. When I carve out a slot for OHours meetings, OHours should prompt me to invite some other OHours members to my Ohours session. It would be a great way to foster and build the OHours community and increase overall Ohours activity.
5) Ohours ‘prep’ – I like that the Ohours system sends a confirmation when meetings are scheduled to occur, but it would be great if that confirmation contained a little bit of overview info (pulled from LinkedIn or Twitter, perhaps the person’s last few tweets, or the like) so that I can get a quick half-page view of who I am meeting and what they have been doing lately.
What do you think? Leave me a comment below, or sign up for my next Ohours!
Related articles
- Can 1000 of Us Learn to Code? (innonate.com)
4 tactics that worked for me in my recent job search
Having just come off of a job search (I’m starting at AWS later this week!) I wanted to share some of the tactics that worked for me in scoring a job that I’m pretty darn excited about.
Let me know if you find these helpful and also if there are some tips that have worked well for you in past job searches.
1) Focus your resume on accomplishments, not roles.
Your resume is going to set the tone for the discussions you have with recruiters and hiring managers. Make sure it’s more than a list of job duties and functions. This is your chance to tout measurable accomplishments that show how you stand out from the crowd. Write about how you saved your last company $300,000 in CAPEX because you optimized an existing process, or how you ranked in the top 5% of your hiring class at your 1st job out of college. Skip the stuff that’s generic (e.g. “Developed Java applications for large financial services company”) because it’s not going to help you get interviews or stand out from the rest of the pack.
2) If you’re looking for a more entrepreneurial work environment, check in with your friendly neighborhood venture capitalist.
VCs are often a great source of information about which companies in the tech startup ecosystem are hiring. There are some nuances to identifying which startups and which VCs to approach in your job search, and David Biesel of NextView Ventures put together a great series of posts about this very topic.
VCs are also just super well connected inside and outside the startup world. It’s quite possible they know some folks within larger companies (after all, the larger companies end up buying their smaller companies) who might have a bead on some interesting roles.
Personally, I think outreach to VCs is perhaps the best way to get yourself in front of hiring managers in the tech world. My last 2 job searches were heavily influenced by awesome introductions provided by folks in the VC community, so I can’t say enough about this tip specifically.
3) Track your activities and follow up tasks in a systematic way.
I’m a firm believer that the job hunt is very much like a sales process, where you’re prospecting (finding potential opportunities), conducting a needs assessment (interviewing), following up, and closing (negotiating your compensation package and signing on the dotted line). Any professional salesperson is using a CRM of some sort (even if it’s just a spreadsheet!) to track and plan their activities, and a professional job seeker should be doing the same.
For my most recent job search, I used Highrise from 37signals to track relevant contacts as well as specific tasks related to job opportunities. Their system helped me stay disciplined about following up and staying on top of specific job opportunities. (BTW, has anyone used the Highrise APIs to develop a job seeker focused app? I think this would be really cool and useful.)
4) Avoid the front door, and use the back door when possible.
Job boards and company resume submission sites tend to be a road to nowhere when it comes to scoring an invitation to interview for a role. You’re much better off using these systems to identify which companies may be hiring, and which jobs are available. Then, you can use Google or various social networking sites (LinkedIn is great for this) to identify people you might know at the company who could potentially refer you to the hiring manager or the HR department.
If you don’t know anyone at the company, you can still use these tools to identify people who are in the group that’s doing the hiring, and maybe develop some sort of a pitch (which you could deliver via a well written email, or a phone call) with which you can use to get your foot in the door. I know this might seem a little pushy, but if you’re relying on job board or company website submissions otherwise, I don’t think you have much to lose by a more aggressive approach.
Related articles
- 10 Mistakes Job Seekers Make…And How to Avoid Them (neuromonitoring.wordpress.com)
- 11 New Websites for Your Job Search (money.usnews.com)
The Two Device Solution
Simple but bold: Only use your computer for work. Real work. The work of making something.
Have a second device, perhaps an iPad, and use it for games, web commenting, online shopping, networking… anything that doesn’t directly create valued output (no need to have an argument here about which is which, which is work and which is not… draw a line, any line, and separate the two of them. If you don’t like the results from that line, draw a new line).
Now, when you pick up the iPad, you can say to yourself, “break time.” And if you find yourself taking a lot of that break time, you’ve just learned something important.
HUGE week complete – accepted new job and ran Half Marathon
Hopefully this post makes up for the recent deficiency of original content on johngannonblog.com!
I recently accepted a Business Development Manager position with Amazon Web Services (in New York City). My initial focus will be on encouraging adoption of and identifying growth markets for Compute services, which include services like EC2, Elastic MapReduce (Hadoop), and HPC. I’m looking forward to working with all shapes and sizes of customers, and being a resource for the NY Tech community as it related to AWS. So please don’t be shy, and please reach out if you want to talk some cloud! :)
The other #winning aspect of the week was that my wife Holly and I completed the NYC Half Marathon! This was my first road race, period, and I was very happy to make it over the finish line in about 2 hours and 42 minutes. I had a few physical setbacks during my training which I was able to overcome, which made it all the sweeter to race and finish. Thanks to various generous donors, my run also raised about $1400 for Team for Kids, an organization that helps promote healthy living for kids in NYC and South Africa.
Thanks for everyone’s support on both fronts (job hunting and half marathon)!
Here’s why you should Poke the Box
Starting is a risk. Things might not work out. You could flop. But one theme of this book–and it’s a theme that you should write on a rock, imprint on your brain, and inject into your bloodstream–is that we ought to be much more concerned about mediocrity than failure. “If you can’t fail,” Seth writes, “it doesn’t count.”
via Amazon.com: Poke the Box 9781936719006: Seth Godin: Books.
