How to describe what you're working on vs. who you are

October 29, 2017

This past week marked year 4 of the Creative Startups accelerator in Albuquerque.

I went through the very first year of the program in 2014 with a local news startup, and although I'd already worked in and around startups (including a rapidly growing venture backed company in San Francisco), the experience provided a ton of knowledge about what it's like to build a business model in the early stages.

One thing that stuck with me: the toughest problem a founder faces in the early going mimics something we all face as individuals...what is your company? And who is it for?

Whether you're growing / building / experimenting as a company or as an individual, that's a central question, more broadly phrased as: Who are you? And who are you for?

Telling one story a day about the people who use what you create

April 21, 2015

Building a company from scratch is exhausting.

Entrepreneurs need various kinds of support to stay afloat —understanding friends and family, tough advisers / mentors, a good reading list to encourage contemplation, these are all important.

But the best source of support is the people actually using what you build. Their stories are the ones that open up your world when you’re thinking too narrowly, and provide inspiration to keep going. While solving a problem for one person typically doesn’t justify a stable small business or a rapidly growing startup, it’s the starting point for everything else.

On the importance of frameworks

March 24, 2015

I’ve never seen a business plan that looked like a business.

I’m not sure exactly why this is, but it probably has something to do with the fact that in the early stage of any company there are a lot of variables, and things that seem to mean one thing can easily turn out to mean something else entirely. Sort of a particle / wave duality principle, but for startups.

(A high number of people who sign up for a product trial, for example, might not be a positive sign if none of them stick around once their two weeks is up — possibly indicating that your inbound growth levers need tweaking).

For many entrepreneurs and startups, frameworks occupy a critical space — the one that arrives after “I have a bunch of ideas” but before “here’s the full plan to take over the world.”

How I think about balance as an entrepreneur

March 15, 2015

There are a lot of ways to break a startup.

An incomplete list of things that can (and often do) destroy them includes:

Inability to balance long term growth of a company / product / culture against day to day choices
Uncertainty around what’s worth measuring and what’s extra noise
Failing to minimize the biggest risk(s)
Accounting for the needs and anxieties of your investors and key partners vs. what’s important to your users and/or customers

In a recent episode of the Reboot Podcast, Fred Wilson reflected on the early days of founding a venture capital firm, and talked with his then co-founder Jerry Colonna about the heart wrenching process of being on the board of Star Media, which at one point had a $2 billion market cap before eventually going bankrupt. In particular, he talked about support he received as well as times when he wishes he’d provided more direct support to the companies he invested in.

“…when you watch a company of 500 or 1000 people go bankrupt, it was like we did not live up to our duty and obligation as a board…we knew the founders were in over their heads, and we knew they weren't really running the company properly. And we should have stepped in and done something about it and we didn’t until it was too late.”

Things look a bit different for entrepreneurs now compared to when Fred and Jerry started Flatiron Partners in 1996. If you start a company in 2015 you can find almost any information you need via a combination of YouTube, blogs, and simply punching some phrases into a search engine. Paperwork to incorporate, advice on dividing equity, and other basic structures are all easily accessible on the web.

If it’s easy to find information, why do so many startups fail?

Entrepreneurs and investors often point to growth as the number one characteristic of the health of a startup. Paul Graham’s essay on startup growth is frequently cited in blog posts, and has been rehashed by a range of people across the startup ecosystem.

But how many companies that went through rapid growth and led to an IPO or acquisition are still around 10–15 years on? Making significant revenue? Continuing to add value and/or meaning to their customers’ lives?

I don’t know the answer to these questions. But I do know growth alone isn’t enough. It must have purpose, and that purpose must be long term. Andy Baio’s painfully honest description of the fall of Upcoming.org is a too common story for startups, especially those where community is a critical building block.

In the early stages of a startup there’s no clear path, and it takes guts, grit, and heart to build something quickly. You have to get used to pulling in as much information as possible, and still not knowing if you’re making the right decision. In that environment, balance becomes critical — both for the health of the company, and of the founders and first employees.

Here are a few things I think about regularly when it comes to balance…