9 ms·

Advice for First Time Founders

398 points by craigcannon 9y ago

bhhaskin 9y ago
Thanks! Some great advice in there. Bookface, very clever ;)
tjholowaychuk 9y ago
Wonder when we'll stop hyping the stupid startup culture
- MsMowz 9y ago
  That will never happen on hacker news, certainly.
- jonny_eh 9y ago
  Founders learning from other founders isn't hype.
- vadimberman 9y ago
  Ping pong tables, follow your dreams, all that? The article is not about it at all. It's about managerial advice, which is not only suitable for startups but for any resource-constrained company under pressure.
sillysaurus3 9y ago
A. The importance of good communication with potential and existing investors. Done effectively it significantly increases your chances of keeping the company funded, and therefore of success. Done terribly it makes you borderline un-fundable. I learned it through being lashed by PG. It helped by creating an open dialogue between our investors and us, and drove our focus and prioritization on the right things at the right time. What does good communication look like? How about bad communication?
- wellboy 9y ago
  Mostly a lot communication vs little to no communication.
- fredsters_s 9y ago
  (I wrote that answer) A few principles that may be useful: - have a regular cadence of communicating, usually monthly, usually he last day of the month - have a standard format and stick to it - numbers are better than words - preview the updates where you uncover scary stuff over the phone / in person before sending an update - always include an ask
  - anitil 9y ago
    What do you mean by 'always include an ask'? Is that to keep them engaged by having some information out of them?
    - mhluongo 9y ago
      You should always think about how your investors can help you, and ask them for it. It's about engagement, sure. But it's also about realizing that you need to better leverage your network and supporters. Investors can't help you if they don't know what you need.
    - sytse 9y ago
      We at GitLab frequently ask for help with hiring referrals and potential customer introductions.
rpedela 9y ago
I want to echo the advice about interns from David Wind. I have hired a few interns. While relatively cheap, which is attractive at an early stage, they took up a lot of my time and most of their work couldn't be used in the end. The latter was probably my fault, but the reality is that I didn't have the time to properly train/mentor them. It is better to go without interns at least in the early stages in my experience.
- dyarosla 9y ago
  Interns are great for practicing how to manage, but I agree, as anything beyond that, don’t expect much.
  - Lich 9y ago
    I think internships should be about both giving and taking. Not just simply objects to practice on. If a startup doesn't have the time and money to invest in interns no matter what the payoff is, they probably shouldn't as it is wasting time on both sides.
wellboy 9y ago
> I thought I should be like Elon Musk and tried working 100h a week and sleeping under my desk. I learned that in fact I’m not Elon Musk and found myself on the brink of a burnout a couple times. Not even Elon Musk is Elon Musk. He is doing a lot of things right, very few entrepreneurs in the world are as good as him. However, checking and writing emails at all times while playing with your kids and doing things in parallel isn't smart. As a great entepreneur you also need to be excellent in mindfulness, not being that manifests in poor private life quality (women, kids, friends), not to mention exercise. Musk mentioned himself that he doesn't know much about these things. I wonder what he came up with if became an expert in these things. > Learning how to create FOMO is the most important negotiating dynamic you can learn. FOMO = fear of missing out. Needs to be added that you need traction or big social proof to create fomo, otherwise you'll see founders running around trying to create fomo with a few hundred users, no term sheets, no revenue.
- goldenchrome 9y ago
  > As a great entepreneur you also need to be excellent in mindfulness, not being that manifests in poor private life quality (women, kids, friends) Women can be great entrepreneurs as well.
  - wellboy 9y ago
    Women can also be great scientists.
  - lozenge 9y ago
    Women can also be great friends.
postit 9y ago
My only advice to anyone founding a company Learn from the mistakes of others. Your startup won't live long enough to make them all.
staunch 9y ago
Fire quickly but take responsibility! Don't spend months torturing an employee that you know is very unlikely to work out. Fire them quickly and compensate them for the situation you find yourselves in. New hires should be be given 3 months of severance. Old hires should be given 6-18 months, depending on how long they've worked at the company. Take all that time, energy, and money you were going to spend on the Performance Improvement Plan and hand it to the employee on their way out. They will thank you for it. It's not just a gentler and kinder way to behave, it's also saves money and improves productivity.
- aidanlister 9y ago
  18 months of severance? Like, their monthly wage x 18, to let them go? What startup could possibly afford that?
  - BukhariH 9y ago
    Agreed! 18 months isn’t feasible. Even well funded Fortune 500 would refuse that. At the end of the day you have to think of this as an employee benefit to convince people to jump ship from their current employers. I personally think 3 months + 1 month for every year they’ve worked for you is attractive enough. You can make exceptions if you’re trying to poach some high level exec.
    - brianwawok 9y ago
      So I haven't had to fire that many people yet.. but you think someone that worked for me for 3 months should get 3 months severance? I think something like 2 weeks is "fair", and unemployment would kick in past that. In any case, firing stinks and is super hard. Agree it's important to get it done sooner rather than later though. Interviews are imperfect.
      - BukhariH 9y ago
        Sure, if you can find talent that’s willing to do that. But trying to convince someone who has a cushy day job at a more developed company is going to be way harder without great severence packages.
TheFullStack 9y ago
A good way to gauge a founder's (first-time founder) likelihood of success is to see how receptive they are to this list of advice. As a contract developer, I find that many many founders consider themselves the exception to the points listed in the original article which is a huge red flag. The biggest exception is probably listening to customers - I find a lot of founders insist they have to 'educate' customers which basically never works. I wrote about it at length here: https://www.turbo360.co/blog/startup-red-flags-syzdan https://www.turbo360.co/blog/startup-red-flags-syzdan
- spraak 9y ago
  Is the link supposed to be to a specific post? I just see a list of posts so I'm not sure where to read more about what you mean to share.
  - mediascreen 9y ago
    On mobile you only see the menu, the responsive layout hides the actual article.
milansuk 9y ago
Many founders talking about hiring or firing employees. I'm not from US, so I wanna ask How long trial period do startups offer? Do they pay severance package during/after trial and how much?
- dmitrygr 9y ago
  It is very uncommon in US to have trial periods. Alternate interpretation: since in most states employment is at-will and the company can fire you anytime for any or no reason, basically your entire employment can be considered a trial period.
dmitrygr 9y ago
> [...] we thought paying more to get experienced people wasn’t worth it. > we thought because we knew how to code that we didn’t need senior > engineers [...] Shouldn’t we just be able to teach ourselves? > The answer was maybe, but with a lot of wasted time along the way. A lot of startups make this mistake from what I can see
JohnHammersley 9y ago
There is a lot of really good advice in there... perhaps almost too much in the sense that it's easy to skip the ones you should pay attention to, and nod along to the ones that reinforce your existing idea of what advice you need. Putting myself in my wife's shoes for a moment, I'm pretty sure she'd say I need to listen to the advice on getting more sleep (I'm typing this at 1am in the UK). In fact, thinking about it, I am going to call it a night now! I'm a first-time founder, and lucky enough that our company (Overleaf [1]) has been going for five years now. If you haven't had enough of the advice for one evening, you can read my take on it here: https://clutter.errantscience.com/2017/07/31/reflecting-on-the-founding-growth-and-maturing-of-overleaf/ https://clutter.errantscience.com/2017/07/31/reflecting-on-t... [1] https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com
- spraak 9y ago
  My wife also added to the list the need to make love with her more often ;)
ScottBurson 9y ago
Venture investors want to hear crazy ideas, not pragmatic plans. When I first pitched investors, I was talking about how we would add customers slowly at first, because that’s how enterprise SaaS works. Honesty is always a good policy. But those pitches did not go well. I'd love to hear investors' thoughts on this one. lpolovets, are you around?
- danieltillett 9y ago
  The reason for this is a lot of investors are looking for unicorns, not businesses with a high(ish) probability of success. Well managed, slower growing businesses have a vastly larger chance of success (good for the founders), but a lower NPV. As a founder you will/should be biased towards success over NPV because of your risk concentration, but an investor can spread their risk over as many startups as they like and so only care about NPV. The only thing worse that taking investors money is going bankrupt. If you can bootstrap then bootstrap - the pain is only worse in the beginning (most of the time).
- lpolovets 9y ago
  Each investor is different, but I personally think the ideal pitch is a big vision combined with a pragmatic plan for the first couple of years. If the vision is not that big, then that won't excite most (Silicon Valley) investors. However, "big vision" is not the same as "crazy vision." A big vision could be "we're going to replace an old incumbent in a $5b industry." A crazy vision could be "we're going to build an amazing piece of technology that very few people think is possible." The crazy vision only works if you have a lot of credibility. One of the only personal examples I have of backing a crazy vision is with Rigetti Quantum Computing (a YC company). The founder, Chad Rigetti, set out to build a quantum computer from the ground up. This is an extremely ambitious goal, but when I spoke to a few Caltech quantum physicists, they said that Chad was one of the 2-3 best people in the world for building a QC. That was a very strong testimonial. On the planning side, I prefer pragmatic plans and start rolling my eyes if someone's plans sound completely unrealistic. I've seen so many pitch decks with a predicted revenue ramp up that looks like: "$500k sales this year, $4m next year, and $50m in year 3." I've been investing for five years and I've never personally seen a company ramp up that quickly. What I do want to see though is that if customer acquisition is slow/deliberate, then there's a good reason for that. Example of a good reason: "I'm working with 3 pilot customers for the next 6 months and focusing on learning and iteration and understanding exactly where their biggest pain points are. I'm intentionally not focused on getting new customers." Example of a poor reason: "I'm not good at sales but don't want to hire anyone because I think salespeople are overrated. I expect to get 3 pilot customers by myself in the next 6 months, and I think that should be enough to make investors happy." On an unrelated note, I'm happy to answer any other questions folks have. My background is that I was a sw engineer for 10 years, then moved to seed stage investing about 5 years ago.
danieltillett 9y ago
The one thing I have learnt is it is never too early to fire. The only exception is if you haven’t been clear with your expectations. The one counterintuitive piece of advice is don’t overpay (I made this mistake in version 1 of my company). Pay above the average the employee could earn elsewhere, but not too much over. You want to pay enough that no one leaves to get a pay rise, but not so much that they can’t get a similar salary elsewhere. A smart unhappy employee that feels they can’t leave can cause a lot of damage in ways that are hard to identify and fix. Edit. I think I was unclear about what I meant by average pay - it is not the average for the job title, but the average the employee could earn in the industry. These two numbers are close most of the time, but with high performers they will be significantly different.
- dman 9y ago
  I hope that your philosophy of compensation is well understood by your employees. I would hate to be an employee who goes over and above work wise in such a setup.
  - danieltillett 9y ago
    Why? It would only be bad if your effort was not recognised by me and compensated accordingly. This would be bad management. Your pay should be determined by what you can earn elsewhere and if you are an employee that performs above average then you will likely be paid more than the average employee elsewhere. Being able to reward high performance is one of the great things about having a smaller business. In big companies or the public sector this is often not possible, but if I want to pay someone more I can.
    - dman 9y ago
      There is a subtle issue that comes into play here a. High performance employee who works at employer A has already given ample evidence of going over and above usual metrics of efficiency. b. High performance employee decides to go into the market and shop around but other prospective employers have to largely take the employee on their word and their portfolio about their performance. Since these prospective employers have not yet witnessed the said over achievements, rationally speaking they would apply a slight discount. c. Given the above, the existing employer can use the information asymmetry wrt to other employers to their advantage. They can as a pricing strategy apply the same discount to the employees compensation that other prospective employers would. What do you think about the idea about slightly overpaying for your high performance employees. This way when they go and look around they realise that they are valued.
shrumm 9y ago
Aesthetics really matter in the early stage. Spend time and/or money early on nailing a cool logo and beautiful slide template. It really matters. Even copying other beautiful stuff is fine. For getting our first 3/10/100 clients, the fact that we looked and sounded totally pro meant a lot. We seemed like a larger more innovative company because of it. Great advice all round but the above really spoke to me. Most advice talks about failing fast, getting to market asap etc. It's just as important to make sure what you DO ship / put out there is polished.
charris0 9y ago
I liked the advice by Garros Li – Edusight (IK12) > 1. If you plan on having cofounders, you need to determine how decisions will be made before starting a company together. Titles and vague “roles/responsibilities” won’t be enough. Play out scenarios to hash out decisions and set the right expectations, ask tough questions, and don’t let ego get in the way. It got me thinking of something like the 'Co-founder compatibility test' I wonder if anyone already has a good set of example scenarios and questions to reveal this compatibility/incompatibility between people in decision making / expectations / virtues. Many questions could come from challenging moments with co-founders and teammates in one's own experience. I can think of a few already. If we compiled a list of these types of questions and scenarios, could they be used as a good test of compatibility, useful to at least some initial degree to assess potential partnerships in real life and over the internet.
ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
>A cofounder who compliments you was a saving grace for me. I am sure he meant "complements you"
- zodiac 9y ago
  It's also nice when the compliment you :)
  - ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
    I am sure you meant when "they" compliment you ;)
simonswords82 9y ago
From the article: "The biggest responsibility of a founder is making the right decisions." No shit?
pwaai 9y ago
While reading the article on the back of my mind I'm thinking that 99% of founders that read & follow those advices will still fail. But why? Why is the failure rate for startups so high? and why is the failure rate for starting a bootstrapped revenue generating business much lower?
- jacquesm 9y ago
  > Why is the failure rate for startups so high? - product market fit - timing - founder conflicts - better funded competition - bad management
  - sah2ed 9y ago
    You forgot a very important factor many people fail to account for: a major inflection point or what Bill Gates characterizes as "eventually, the market will turn left".
- aytekin 9y ago
  > and why is the failure rate for starting a bootstrapped revenue generating business much lower? The best vote for your ideas is the one paid in dollars by a customers.

398 points by craigcannon 9y ago

bhhaskin 9y ago

Thanks! Some great advice in there. Bookface, very clever ;)

tjholowaychuk 9y ago

Wonder when we'll stop hyping the stupid startup culture

MsMowz 9y ago
That will never happen on hacker news, certainly.
jonny_eh 9y ago
Founders learning from other founders isn't hype.
vadimberman 9y ago
Ping pong tables, follow your dreams, all that? The article is not about it at all. It's about managerial advice, which is not only suitable for startups but for any resource-constrained company under pressure.

sillysaurus3 9y ago

A. The importance of good communication with potential and existing investors. Done effectively it significantly increases your chances of keeping the company funded, and therefore of success. Done terribly it makes you borderline un-fundable. I learned it through being lashed by PG. It helped by creating an open dialogue between our investors and us, and drove our focus and prioritization on the right things at the right time. What does good communication look like? How about bad communication?

wellboy 9y ago
Mostly a lot communication vs little to no communication.
fredsters_s 9y ago
(I wrote that answer) A few principles that may be useful: - have a regular cadence of communicating, usually monthly, usually he last day of the month - have a standard format and stick to it - numbers are better than words - preview the updates where you uncover scary stuff over the phone / in person before sending an update - always include an ask
- anitil 9y ago
  What do you mean by 'always include an ask'? Is that to keep them engaged by having some information out of them?
  - mhluongo 9y ago
    You should always think about how your investors can help you, and ask them for it. It's about engagement, sure. But it's also about realizing that you need to better leverage your network and supporters. Investors can't help you if they don't know what you need.
  - sytse 9y ago
    We at GitLab frequently ask for help with hiring referrals and potential customer introductions.

rpedela 9y ago

I want to echo the advice about interns from David Wind. I have hired a few interns. While relatively cheap, which is attractive at an early stage, they took up a lot of my time and most of their work couldn't be used in the end. The latter was probably my fault, but the reality is that I didn't have the time to properly train/mentor them. It is better to go without interns at least in the early stages in my experience.

dyarosla 9y ago
Interns are great for practicing how to manage, but I agree, as anything beyond that, don’t expect much.
- Lich 9y ago
  I think internships should be about both giving and taking. Not just simply objects to practice on. If a startup doesn't have the time and money to invest in interns no matter what the payoff is, they probably shouldn't as it is wasting time on both sides.

wellboy 9y ago

> I thought I should be like Elon Musk and tried working 100h a week and sleeping under my desk. I learned that in fact I’m not Elon Musk and found myself on the brink of a burnout a couple times. Not even Elon Musk is Elon Musk. He is doing a lot of things right, very few entrepreneurs in the world are as good as him. However, checking and writing emails at all times while playing with your kids and doing things in parallel isn't smart. As a great entepreneur you also need to be excellent in mindfulness, not being that manifests in poor private life quality (women, kids, friends), not to mention exercise. Musk mentioned himself that he doesn't know much about these things. I wonder what he came up with if became an expert in these things. > Learning how to create FOMO is the most important negotiating dynamic you can learn. FOMO = fear of missing out. Needs to be added that you need traction or big social proof to create fomo, otherwise you'll see founders running around trying to create fomo with a few hundred users, no term sheets, no revenue.

goldenchrome 9y ago
> As a great entepreneur you also need to be excellent in mindfulness, not being that manifests in poor private life quality (women, kids, friends) Women can be great entrepreneurs as well.
- wellboy 9y ago
  Women can also be great scientists.
- lozenge 9y ago
  Women can also be great friends.

postit 9y ago

My only advice to anyone founding a company Learn from the mistakes of others. Your startup won't live long enough to make them all.

staunch 9y ago

Fire quickly but take responsibility! Don't spend months torturing an employee that you know is very unlikely to work out. Fire them quickly and compensate them for the situation you find yourselves in. New hires should be be given 3 months of severance. Old hires should be given 6-18 months, depending on how long they've worked at the company. Take all that time, energy, and money you were going to spend on the Performance Improvement Plan and hand it to the employee on their way out. They will thank you for it. It's not just a gentler and kinder way to behave, it's also saves money and improves productivity.

aidanlister 9y ago
18 months of severance? Like, their monthly wage x 18, to let them go? What startup could possibly afford that?
- BukhariH 9y ago
  Agreed! 18 months isn’t feasible. Even well funded Fortune 500 would refuse that. At the end of the day you have to think of this as an employee benefit to convince people to jump ship from their current employers. I personally think 3 months + 1 month for every year they’ve worked for you is attractive enough. You can make exceptions if you’re trying to poach some high level exec.
  - brianwawok 9y ago
    So I haven't had to fire that many people yet.. but you think someone that worked for me for 3 months should get 3 months severance? I think something like 2 weeks is "fair", and unemployment would kick in past that. In any case, firing stinks and is super hard. Agree it's important to get it done sooner rather than later though. Interviews are imperfect.
    - BukhariH 9y ago
      Sure, if you can find talent that’s willing to do that. But trying to convince someone who has a cushy day job at a more developed company is going to be way harder without great severence packages.

TheFullStack 9y ago

A good way to gauge a founder's (first-time founder) likelihood of success is to see how receptive they are to this list of advice. As a contract developer, I find that many many founders consider themselves the exception to the points listed in the original article which is a huge red flag. The biggest exception is probably listening to customers - I find a lot of founders insist they have to 'educate' customers which basically never works. I wrote about it at length here: https://www.turbo360.co/blog/startup-red-flags-syzdan https://www.turbo360.co/blog/startup-red-flags-syzdan

spraak 9y ago
Is the link supposed to be to a specific post? I just see a list of posts so I'm not sure where to read more about what you mean to share.
- mediascreen 9y ago
  On mobile you only see the menu, the responsive layout hides the actual article.

milansuk 9y ago

Many founders talking about hiring or firing employees. I'm not from US, so I wanna ask How long trial period do startups offer? Do they pay severance package during/after trial and how much?

dmitrygr 9y ago
It is very uncommon in US to have trial periods. Alternate interpretation: since in most states employment is at-will and the company can fire you anytime for any or no reason, basically your entire employment can be considered a trial period.

dmitrygr 9y ago

> [...] we thought paying more to get experienced people wasn’t worth it. > we thought because we knew how to code that we didn’t need senior > engineers [...] Shouldn’t we just be able to teach ourselves? > The answer was maybe, but with a lot of wasted time along the way. A lot of startups make this mistake from what I can see

JohnHammersley 9y ago

There is a lot of really good advice in there... perhaps almost too much in the sense that it's easy to skip the ones you should pay attention to, and nod along to the ones that reinforce your existing idea of what advice you need. Putting myself in my wife's shoes for a moment, I'm pretty sure she'd say I need to listen to the advice on getting more sleep (I'm typing this at 1am in the UK). In fact, thinking about it, I am going to call it a night now! I'm a first-time founder, and lucky enough that our company (Overleaf [1]) has been going for five years now. If you haven't had enough of the advice for one evening, you can read my take on it here: https://clutter.errantscience.com/2017/07/31/reflecting-on-the-founding-growth-and-maturing-of-overleaf/ https://clutter.errantscience.com/2017/07/31/reflecting-on-t... [1] https://www.overleaf.com https://www.overleaf.com

spraak 9y ago
My wife also added to the list the need to make love with her more often ;)

ScottBurson 9y ago

Venture investors want to hear crazy ideas, not pragmatic plans. When I first pitched investors, I was talking about how we would add customers slowly at first, because that’s how enterprise SaaS works. Honesty is always a good policy. But those pitches did not go well. I'd love to hear investors' thoughts on this one. lpolovets, are you around?

danieltillett 9y ago
The reason for this is a lot of investors are looking for unicorns, not businesses with a high(ish) probability of success. Well managed, slower growing businesses have a vastly larger chance of success (good for the founders), but a lower NPV. As a founder you will/should be biased towards success over NPV because of your risk concentration, but an investor can spread their risk over as many startups as they like and so only care about NPV. The only thing worse that taking investors money is going bankrupt. If you can bootstrap then bootstrap - the pain is only worse in the beginning (most of the time).
lpolovets 9y ago
Each investor is different, but I personally think the ideal pitch is a big vision combined with a pragmatic plan for the first couple of years. If the vision is not that big, then that won't excite most (Silicon Valley) investors. However, "big vision" is not the same as "crazy vision." A big vision could be "we're going to replace an old incumbent in a $5b industry." A crazy vision could be "we're going to build an amazing piece of technology that very few people think is possible." The crazy vision only works if you have a lot of credibility. One of the only personal examples I have of backing a crazy vision is with Rigetti Quantum Computing (a YC company). The founder, Chad Rigetti, set out to build a quantum computer from the ground up. This is an extremely ambitious goal, but when I spoke to a few Caltech quantum physicists, they said that Chad was one of the 2-3 best people in the world for building a QC. That was a very strong testimonial. On the planning side, I prefer pragmatic plans and start rolling my eyes if someone's plans sound completely unrealistic. I've seen so many pitch decks with a predicted revenue ramp up that looks like: "$500k sales this year, $4m next year, and $50m in year 3." I've been investing for five years and I've never personally seen a company ramp up that quickly. What I do want to see though is that if customer acquisition is slow/deliberate, then there's a good reason for that. Example of a good reason: "I'm working with 3 pilot customers for the next 6 months and focusing on learning and iteration and understanding exactly where their biggest pain points are. I'm intentionally not focused on getting new customers." Example of a poor reason: "I'm not good at sales but don't want to hire anyone because I think salespeople are overrated. I expect to get 3 pilot customers by myself in the next 6 months, and I think that should be enough to make investors happy." On an unrelated note, I'm happy to answer any other questions folks have. My background is that I was a sw engineer for 10 years, then moved to seed stage investing about 5 years ago.

danieltillett 9y ago

The one thing I have learnt is it is never too early to fire. The only exception is if you haven’t been clear with your expectations. The one counterintuitive piece of advice is don’t overpay (I made this mistake in version 1 of my company). Pay above the average the employee could earn elsewhere, but not too much over. You want to pay enough that no one leaves to get a pay rise, but not so much that they can’t get a similar salary elsewhere. A smart unhappy employee that feels they can’t leave can cause a lot of damage in ways that are hard to identify and fix. Edit. I think I was unclear about what I meant by average pay - it is not the average for the job title, but the average the employee could earn in the industry. These two numbers are close most of the time, but with high performers they will be significantly different.

dman 9y ago
I hope that your philosophy of compensation is well understood by your employees. I would hate to be an employee who goes over and above work wise in such a setup.
- danieltillett 9y ago
  Why? It would only be bad if your effort was not recognised by me and compensated accordingly. This would be bad management. Your pay should be determined by what you can earn elsewhere and if you are an employee that performs above average then you will likely be paid more than the average employee elsewhere. Being able to reward high performance is one of the great things about having a smaller business. In big companies or the public sector this is often not possible, but if I want to pay someone more I can.
  - dman 9y ago
    There is a subtle issue that comes into play here a. High performance employee who works at employer A has already given ample evidence of going over and above usual metrics of efficiency. b. High performance employee decides to go into the market and shop around but other prospective employers have to largely take the employee on their word and their portfolio about their performance. Since these prospective employers have not yet witnessed the said over achievements, rationally speaking they would apply a slight discount. c. Given the above, the existing employer can use the information asymmetry wrt to other employers to their advantage. They can as a pricing strategy apply the same discount to the employees compensation that other prospective employers would. What do you think about the idea about slightly overpaying for your high performance employees. This way when they go and look around they realise that they are valued.

shrumm 9y ago

Aesthetics really matter in the early stage. Spend time and/or money early on nailing a cool logo and beautiful slide template. It really matters. Even copying other beautiful stuff is fine. For getting our first 3/10/100 clients, the fact that we looked and sounded totally pro meant a lot. We seemed like a larger more innovative company because of it. Great advice all round but the above really spoke to me. Most advice talks about failing fast, getting to market asap etc. It's just as important to make sure what you DO ship / put out there is polished.

charris0 9y ago

I liked the advice by Garros Li – Edusight (IK12) > 1. If you plan on having cofounders, you need to determine how decisions will be made before starting a company together. Titles and vague “roles/responsibilities” won’t be enough. Play out scenarios to hash out decisions and set the right expectations, ask tough questions, and don’t let ego get in the way. It got me thinking of something like the 'Co-founder compatibility test' I wonder if anyone already has a good set of example scenarios and questions to reveal this compatibility/incompatibility between people in decision making / expectations / virtues. Many questions could come from challenging moments with co-founders and teammates in one's own experience. I can think of a few already. If we compiled a list of these types of questions and scenarios, could they be used as a good test of compatibility, useful to at least some initial degree to assess potential partnerships in real life and over the internet.

ganeshkrishnan 9y ago

>A cofounder who compliments you was a saving grace for me. I am sure he meant "complements you"

zodiac 9y ago
It's also nice when the compliment you :)
- ganeshkrishnan 9y ago
  I am sure you meant when "they" compliment you ;)

simonswords82 9y ago

From the article: "The biggest responsibility of a founder is making the right decisions." No shit?

pwaai 9y ago

While reading the article on the back of my mind I'm thinking that 99% of founders that read & follow those advices will still fail. But why? Why is the failure rate for startups so high? and why is the failure rate for starting a bootstrapped revenue generating business much lower?

jacquesm 9y ago
> Why is the failure rate for startups so high? - product market fit - timing - founder conflicts - better funded competition - bad management
- sah2ed 9y ago
  You forgot a very important factor many people fail to account for: a major inflection point or what Bill Gates characterizes as "eventually, the market will turn left".
aytekin 9y ago
> and why is the failure rate for starting a bootstrapped revenue generating business much lower? The best vote for your ideas is the one paid in dollars by a customers.