Hard to believe it, but Thanksgiving is practically here. Fall has flown by. Mid-terms seem like so long ago and now finals are just around the corner.
My company is up to 10 employees (wow!) and we just closed on an awesome CEO. I saw the new office when I was up last week and it's great. Plenty of open space for cubes in the middle, and some offices and meeting rooms on the edges. I am a big fan of having people sit together and work together. As one of the guys told me today, "now we actually have to build the product!"
Among the many things I love about this team is their ability to execute. They made recruiting a priority and totally focused on it -- and now, just six weeks later, they are staffed to plan. We put our minds to recruiting a great CEO -- and here we are. I have no doubt product execution and delivery to customers will be similarly successful. It's a wonderful feeling to work with a team that's "done it before."
I've been meeting with a lot of first-time entrepreneurs at Stanford. Everyone asks for advice. My first piece of advice is go read John Nesheim's High Tech Startup, which, while a little dated, has some great advice on everything from coming up with an idea to what to look for in a term sheet and a management team.
What do venture investors look for?
1) Big market
2) Great team
3) Sustainable competitive advantage
4) Customers
5) Good technology / idea
These are all critical. You have to have a big market otherwise no matter what you do or how great your team is, there just isn't that much potential for your company to be really big.
A great team not only executes flawlessly but can change direction quickly and efficiently as the market changes (and it will). Experience matters.
Sustainable competitive advantage means you can build a defensible position in the market you're going after. You are building something unique and protectable.
Customers. The vast majority of successful venture funded companies have these! You can of course have a strategy where you build a team and technology and try to get that acquired, but I don't recommend that.
Good technology / idea. There are really two approaches here. I generally look for a market need, talk to customers, try to understand the pain, and then go address that by building a unique product. The other approach is simply to have a great idea and go build, in the absence of customers. People who succeed using that approach are few and far between.
My company is up to 10 employees (wow!) and we just closed on an awesome CEO. I saw the new office when I was up last week and it's great. Plenty of open space for cubes in the middle, and some offices and meeting rooms on the edges. I am a big fan of having people sit together and work together. As one of the guys told me today, "now we actually have to build the product!"
Among the many things I love about this team is their ability to execute. They made recruiting a priority and totally focused on it -- and now, just six weeks later, they are staffed to plan. We put our minds to recruiting a great CEO -- and here we are. I have no doubt product execution and delivery to customers will be similarly successful. It's a wonderful feeling to work with a team that's "done it before."
I've been meeting with a lot of first-time entrepreneurs at Stanford. Everyone asks for advice. My first piece of advice is go read John Nesheim's High Tech Startup, which, while a little dated, has some great advice on everything from coming up with an idea to what to look for in a term sheet and a management team.
What do venture investors look for?
1) Big market
2) Great team
3) Sustainable competitive advantage
4) Customers
5) Good technology / idea
These are all critical. You have to have a big market otherwise no matter what you do or how great your team is, there just isn't that much potential for your company to be really big.
A great team not only executes flawlessly but can change direction quickly and efficiently as the market changes (and it will). Experience matters.
Sustainable competitive advantage means you can build a defensible position in the market you're going after. You are building something unique and protectable.
Customers. The vast majority of successful venture funded companies have these! You can of course have a strategy where you build a team and technology and try to get that acquired, but I don't recommend that.
Good technology / idea. There are really two approaches here. I generally look for a market need, talk to customers, try to understand the pain, and then go address that by building a unique product. The other approach is simply to have a great idea and go build, in the absence of customers. People who succeed using that approach are few and far between.
2 Comments:
Great advice. The buzz is that your CEO is a Mad Dog. High Tech Startup is a great read. Another great read is The Marketing Playbook but Zagula & Tong. Once you get the company started avoid one of the big pitfalls of most organizations: that everyone is running a different play. If you want to round out your ecletic CEO reading list, add Golf Is Not a Game of Perfect whether or not you golf. Go after a big market and have big, audacious goals. And engage customers from the earliest days of your venture to keep you grounded in reality.
Hi... remembered your blog after a long time... when a new startup idea came to my mind while I was on vacation last week :)
Now I need to order the High Tech Startup book from Amazon.
Hope you are having fun at Stanford. I decided to join the UW-TMMBA while staying put at HP.
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