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Starting a Business in Silicon Valley

257 points by imartin2k 8y ago

shawn 8y ago
Silicon Valley is the place where Mark Zuckerberg - a college drop out - ... Calling “those who leave college to grow their promising business” undermines the challenges that actual dropouts face. (Note the word “promising.” Most people don’t have users banging down their door to use what they’ve made.) Plus, I don’t think Facebook could have been started outside of Harvard or similar. When Gates, Jobs, and Zuck are dropouts, you get the impression that college is worthless. But where else are you going to find a cofounder? Perhaps step one in starting a business in Silicon Valley is “go to college.”
- maxxxxx 8y ago
  Exactly. Gates and Zuckerberg (don't know about Jobs. did he drop out?) went to a good school and stayed there until the business took off. In a sense they graduated early. that is totally different from people who drop out of college and then look for a job.
  - jhfdbkofdcho 8y ago
    Jobs left Reed College in part because he didn’t like it and felt that his parents were sacrificing too much for him to attend.
    - zerohp 8y ago
      He stuck around for a while attending classes without being enrolled. That says something about how much he valued college.
- walrus01 8y ago
  People like to say all the time that Gates was a 'dropout', nevermind that he came from a wealthy family that was probably in the top 2% of income-earners for the Seattle area at the time. He went to high school at the Lakeshore school, the most expensive private school in the Seattle metro area (one year tuition currently around $34,000 USD, it was similarly expensive relative to inflation and cost of living back in the 70s). Gates started with a huge advantage over the middle class. Both of his parents were lawyers specializing in corporate law.
- icelancer 8y ago
  Since this type of comment gets traction every time it's posted, I feel like posting my rebuttal story just to be fair. I went to a shit liberal arts school that taught me COBOL for Information Systems I/II in 2003, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups + Novell Networks for Building Local Area Networks where we had to patch Novell to recognize what a CD-ROM was, all on Jaz/Zip disks. I dropped out 3.5 years into it and changed my major five times. I moved across the country with no support network over there and I've worked since I was 14 and full-time since I was 17 to support myself. I solely founded my current company which was named in some publications as a fast growing company in the United States and the state I live in, and brought on a partner (who I ceded the CEO title to) who I met not in college. It's possible. The challenges are enormous. And I don't think articles like this undermine them at all. It isn't easy to drop out and to work full-time your whole life from a family of below-average means, but it can be done in this country, maybe specifically this country because of the unbounded opportunity and low amount of government regulation that exists. I'm not saying my path is doable for everyone, or even anyone, really. But it isn't NOT doable.
  - wavefunction 8y ago
    You can make a ton of money with COBOL, even in 2018.
    - scarejunba 8y ago
      Interesting. Doing what?
      - umichguy 8y ago
        Maintaining/ fixing old banking SW.
compumike 8y ago
> I'd later learn from some hardware experts that you really want to price goods like mine around 5x the cost to manufacture. This. If you're doing hardware, your price needs to be minimum 3x-5x the COGS. If you think you're going to win some market by pricing with lower margins, like 1.5x-2x, you're setting yourself up for failure. Interestingly, the same rule holds for restaurants: food input costs should be no more than 20-30% of the meal price.
- baybal2 8y ago
  Yes, totally true. And this very reason "good goods" don't survive on the market for long. The need to just make any money at all, means that you have to import cheap goods from China, unless your competitive advantage will worth more than that 5x margin ones get from "cheap sh*t." And you will never ever get this for any non-high tech (which implies easy to manufacture) consumer product.
  - JJMcJ 8y ago
    > cheap goods Price anything at professional grade. For example, a heavy duty professional microwave can cost well over $1,000, but you can run it 20 hours a day for years. Thanks to my former restaurant owner friend for this example.
- preommr 8y ago
  There's a good video from EEVblog (EEVblog #887 - The Economics Of Selling Hardware) where he suggests a MINIMUM of 2.5 x COGS. But I think that was assuming directly selling to customers and passing the cost of shipping to the customer.
  - SquishyPanda23 8y ago
    I recall that episode. It was a Bobby Dazzler.
- sharkweek 8y ago
  Cousin is a restaurant manager in the bay area. He mentioned that the margins are so thin in the business that one or two "bad" nights can literally ruin the balance sheet for the entire month.
keeptrying 8y ago
This is the kind of stories we need in the valley. This more than any other story gives you a the sense of anxiety that goes with each phase of building, marketing and launching a product. Thank you for sharing!
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  Thank you for the kind words! :)
ajiang 8y ago
Yeah, that's the experience of working on a hardware startup. The amount of anxiety is unreal. Great writeup, with a rawness that most people don't get in these retrospective pieces.
- vonseel 8y ago
  Does shipping 20 packages a weekend sound kind of low for a pre-manufactured product?
  - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
    It's low. Remember that at this point, I was well past burn-out. I'd burnt out two years earlier and was still going. I worked a full time day job and had been doing this all by myself for years. I was tired of working on it, and sure as hell wasn't going to work 7 days a week for the Nth year. That meant I spent part of the weekend trying to live my life. It was a miserable balance and my productivity was super low. Nothing like what it would be if this was my day job.
    - avinium 8y ago
      Great article and appreciate the transparency/honesty. FYI the link in your profile (www.reboot.love) isn't working - outdated?
      - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
        Thank you for the kind words and for the tip! I forgot about that, but you reminded me that my server is not configured properly and the links should say http://reboot.love http://reboot.love I’ve updated my profile and I’ll have to fix my server!
    - vonseel 8y ago
      Fair enough, I've been there before. Good to hear you got out of the "funk".
  - 8y ago
grellas 8y ago
The difference between the ancient way of working a lifetime for a salary, perks and a gold watch on retirement and the new one of building a breakout company in tech lies in a wholly changed business environment by which super-talented founders with a business sense can draw on a depth of knowledge/expertise (typically gained from work experience in a demanding tech environment) to conceive of a solid business model to profitably disrupt existing enterprises and thereafter apply grit, good sense, unbelievable perseverance, and basic street smarts to execute on that model via a startup world that affords amazing access to capital, an ultra-connected network of technically savvy persons with whom one can potentially ally, and a huge reservoir of resources by which founders can educate themselves to learn, grow, and develop. One might sum this up by saying "Silicon Valley" but it really is most anywhere in the modern world where any modicum of freedom prevails, though Silicon Valley still offers unique advantages in my view. The odds of failing are still stunningly high and those who make it to success are often bloodied by the process but the door is open today in a way it never has been before. Another way of saying this is that, in the founder/investor partnering that is typically necessary to succeed, no arrangement was even possible for all but a rare few in mom/dad's ancient days, a reasonable arrangement that skewed heavily toward investors was possible just 20 years ago, and an even more reasonable one with founders and investors in near parity (when the founders are strong) is readily achievable today. I actually don't believe that the story told in this blog post conveys a typical situation but what I have just said does so based on my having worked in depth in this world since the mid-1980s.
- abtinf 8y ago
  > The difference between the ancient way of working a lifetime for a salary, perks and a gold watch on retirement and the new one of building a breakout company in tech lies in a wholly changed business environment by which super-talented founders with a business sense can draw on a depth of knowledge/expertise (typically gained from work experience in a demanding tech environment) to conceive of a solid business model to profitably disrupt existing enterprises and thereafter apply grit, good sense, unbelievable perseverance, and basic street smarts to execute on that model via a startup world that affords amazing access to capital, an ultra-connected network of technically savvy persons with whom one can potentially ally, and a huge reservoir of resources by which founders can educate themselves to learn, grow, and develop. The length and structure of this sentence obfuscates its meaning.
i_am_nomad 8y ago
These articles are always a guilty pleasure, because all of us reading them can point out countless mistakes the author made that we, of course, would never make. All the time failing to consider that we would simply make different mistakes.
- draw_down 8y ago
  Sure sure. Criticism is untenable until we all prove ourselves perfect.
- iamzozo 8y ago
  Completely agree. But if you read something like this, you notice there will be a failure... > but all the stories of success from Techcrunch, the accelerator Y Combinator, and the Facebook movie combined and fed in to my fantasies that somehow through sheer will and my own brain power I could achieve similar success Maybe just me, but getting inspired by Mark its the first mistake you could do.
  - alonsonic 8y ago
    Just you. What's with all the hate to Mark lately? Even tho Facebook has its issues today it was a very innovative and well-executed product.
    - ido 8y ago
      That's not how I read it...more like "watching a movie about facebook and building my hopes and dreams on this being me in x years" is what you should avoid. FB/GOOG/etc are the very rare outliers. Don't hedge your business (or mental-wellbeing) on the expectation to replicate their success. It's good to have high ambitions but have a plan B & don't expect to be the unicorn. It would be analogous to starting a band in the hopes of becoming the next Beatles.
    - ameister14 8y ago
      Facebook has had major ethical issues every step of the way and Mark himself has made some serious mistakes over the last year or two. Plus, arguably the most innovative part of Facebook was the go-to-market strategy.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
Animats 8y ago
"I knew at that moment I wanted to run my own robotics company. I have been hell bent on it ever since." Robotics is a tough business. The problems tend to be way underestimated. Even by the big names, like John McCarthy and Vic Scheinman. There is progress, but it's slow. I've done some stuff there myself, but never made money off it, although I sold some technology off to the game industry. Linear motors have never made it big. They exist, but they're a tiny niche and cost too much. I once was very interested in Aura, which made the electrical equivalent of a hydraulic cylinder, but they went off into strange directions, first subwoofers for gamers (the Aura Interactor), then some financial mess. If you're building RF stuff, as this guy was, the test gear you need is quite expensive. More expensive than what you need to build the product. Big problem for startups. This guy seems to have failed to research the history of the fields he was in. That's important in technically hard areas. Otherwise you repeat old mistakes.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  Well I did have the help of Silicon Valley’s most talented RF guy, who had met me and agreed to lend me his time and lab to help test my product. I never could have gotten this off the ground without him. Even if I got things working with my first layout, I’d never have been able to solve the manufacturing problem I had when the fab house swapped the RF crystal for 5 different clones. I am forever indebted to Earl McCune for his help: http://wirelessandhighspeed.com/ http://wirelessandhighspeed.com/ I did get a functional RF design that passed FCC testing, but the fear of regulations around RF sunk me. I read the specifications for wireless in the US, EU, Australia and New Zealand and designed a frequency hopping wireless protocol that I believe satisfied all three regions rules. The protocol supported operating in the 902-928 MHz band, 915-928 MHz band, and the 865-870 MHz band with pseudorandom channel schedules picked as a hash of the network name. But damn it was a lot of work. And then I found out about how the FCC also issues directives that maybe count as law too, so it’s not just part 15 you have to comply to... I suppose that could be called a lack of research. I saw it as naïveté and optimism, which might be the same thing. I learn everything else by doing so that was my plan for learning to run a business. I can’t research everything so I just dive in and see what happens. I was desperate to do something. As far as the linear motors, they were specifically sex toys. The linear motors worked, but only at the prototype stage and they needed better electronics and software to work at the desired speed and smoothness the application would require. Here’s some videos I have not posted publicly, but have thought I should share (safe for work): https://youtu.be/Fm8lxtqEPk8 https://youtu.be/Fm8lxtqEPk8 https://youtu.be/H3qLlZ6cJho https://youtu.be/H3qLlZ6cJho See the mildly NSFW web page: http://www.mobiusadult.com/investors.html http://www.mobiusadult.com/investors.html And SFW images of the device hardware: http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7219_phixr_sm.jpg http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7219_p... http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7185_sm.JPG http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7185_s... http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/robots_sm.jpg http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/robots_sm....
la6470 8y ago
You sir are definitely a success ..no one can match your experience , you might even educate people on udemy or as a professor . Thank you mighty for sharing.
TaylorAlexander 8y ago
Oh wow I didn’t expect this to get posted yet! There is also a video of this lecture, which I’ve now added a link to in the article. https://youtu.be/huOzokY_fME https://youtu.be/huOzokY_fME It’s part of a series of lectures I delivered are African Leadership University in March. Please check out the playlist here below. I just finished editing these videos last night! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anezfZZMB4Dh-78x_6zVsxIm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anezfZZMB4Dh...
- gurpreet- 8y ago
  Wow this is was truly an amazing piece to read. I have a few questions: 1) How did you manage to keep working even after you realised you were $85k in debt after 2 years? 2) What drove you further into investing into the business after that point? Sheer motivation? 3) How did you stay sane throughout all this?
matchagaucho 8y ago
"I lost $100,000 over five years on my first halfway successful venture." Real World MBA.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  That’s what I tell myself!
anon2775 8y ago
Where to eat, University Ave PA: - Cafe 220 $ - Oren's Hummus $$ - Crepevine $$ - Il Fornaio $$$ - Coupa Cafe $$ - Local 271 $$ - Sprout $$ - Madera $$$$ (Sand Hill Rd) Man-bod approved.
rationalfaith 8y ago
Start a business in Silicon Valley: 1. Don't 2. Look for literally any other place in the world and build your company/technology to scale with remote work. 3. Keep investors at bay as long as possible by bootstrapping. 4. Profit either financially or wisdom/lessons for next venture. Being debt free is most important.
scarejunba 8y ago
What a brutally raw narrative. Thank you for sharing! Things I never would have thought about.
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  :) Thank you! I’m glad my story is appreciated.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
dominicr 8y ago
"I found that the manufacturer did not use the part I specified, but something else." - Everyone who works with manufacturers needs to watch out for this, especially if they're in the East. I knew a small scale bicycle manufacturer and he worked with a well known & respected bicycle manufacturer in Taiwan. Even then he'd only get his bikes produced while he or someone else was on site as otherwise they swapped parts, or worse, change the alloy mix in the metals to something cheaper but a lot weaker.
maddening 8y ago
I'd like to see a essay about starting a business outside the SV. Maybe even outside a startup hippie communities in general. * no investors interested in pre-seed phase - they all say that you should call them when you are already profitable * nobody interested in being cofounder - cold cash only * clients saying that they like your MVP - but you unknown, so they won't buy the product anyway I don't mean that in SV things are magically happening on its own, but sometimes I have an impression that anywhere else you have to be twice as bold and twice as careful to get 1/10th of a result... Yet they are written in a way that suggest that you can easily reproduce SV results everywhere.
- nojvek 8y ago
  If you think about it from the first principles and ignore the location, it’s a fact that a business can be launched anywhere. We are in a global economy and most software runs in the cloud. Companies like Stripe will let you bill from the cloud. So technically running a SaaS company from anywhere should be possible. That being said, any great company is a product of vision * team * execution * luck. SV and to a larger degree US provides the huge networking effects of talent, funding and a big market. That being said, it still warms my heart to see successful startups from other countries do well.
- mattferderer 8y ago
  Check out the MicroConf community - https://www.microconf.com/ https://www.microconf.com/ Read the The E-Myth Revisited (80's classic) Check out MIT's Bill Aulet's Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup & accompanying workbook.
EGreg 8y ago
This was frustrating to read. He describes the romanticized notions promoted by silicon valley similarly to “making it” in Hollywood or as a singer. There, people waited tables and were peniless but at least they didn’t borrow huge sums from their parents who borrowed against their home, and then said it was a huge success when they ended up in the red. Not to mention all the drinking drugs and stress. In the end, the guy got crowdfunded, and his girlfriend helped him a lot. They could have done that from anyplace, living near his parents, and gotten married.
j_shi 8y ago
I'd like to see more content like this. Find it 100x more helpful than the success stories. Karenina principle and whatnot. Would gladly subscribe and pay buku bucks for a more rigorous startupgraveyard-esque page. And would gladly contribute as well..

257 points by imartin2k 8y ago

Silicon Valley is the place where Mark Zuckerberg - a college drop out - ... Calling “those who leave college to grow their promising business” undermines the challenges that actual dropouts face. (Note the word “promising.” Most people don’t have users banging down their door to use what they’ve made.) Plus, I don’t think Facebook could have been started outside of Harvard or similar. When Gates, Jobs, and Zuck are dropouts, you get the impression that college is worthless. But where else are you going to find a cofounder? Perhaps step one in starting a business in Silicon Valley is “go to college.”

maxxxxx 8y ago
Exactly. Gates and Zuckerberg (don't know about Jobs. did he drop out?) went to a good school and stayed there until the business took off. In a sense they graduated early. that is totally different from people who drop out of college and then look for a job.
- jhfdbkofdcho 8y ago
  Jobs left Reed College in part because he didn’t like it and felt that his parents were sacrificing too much for him to attend.
  - zerohp 8y ago
    He stuck around for a while attending classes without being enrolled. That says something about how much he valued college.
walrus01 8y ago
People like to say all the time that Gates was a 'dropout', nevermind that he came from a wealthy family that was probably in the top 2% of income-earners for the Seattle area at the time. He went to high school at the Lakeshore school, the most expensive private school in the Seattle metro area (one year tuition currently around $34,000 USD, it was similarly expensive relative to inflation and cost of living back in the 70s). Gates started with a huge advantage over the middle class. Both of his parents were lawyers specializing in corporate law.
icelancer 8y ago
Since this type of comment gets traction every time it's posted, I feel like posting my rebuttal story just to be fair. I went to a shit liberal arts school that taught me COBOL for Information Systems I/II in 2003, Windows 3.11 for Workgroups + Novell Networks for Building Local Area Networks where we had to patch Novell to recognize what a CD-ROM was, all on Jaz/Zip disks. I dropped out 3.5 years into it and changed my major five times. I moved across the country with no support network over there and I've worked since I was 14 and full-time since I was 17 to support myself. I solely founded my current company which was named in some publications as a fast growing company in the United States and the state I live in, and brought on a partner (who I ceded the CEO title to) who I met not in college. It's possible. The challenges are enormous. And I don't think articles like this undermine them at all. It isn't easy to drop out and to work full-time your whole life from a family of below-average means, but it can be done in this country, maybe specifically this country because of the unbounded opportunity and low amount of government regulation that exists. I'm not saying my path is doable for everyone, or even anyone, really. But it isn't NOT doable.
- wavefunction 8y ago
  You can make a ton of money with COBOL, even in 2018.
  - scarejunba 8y ago
    Interesting. Doing what?
    - umichguy 8y ago
      Maintaining/ fixing old banking SW.

compumike 8y ago

> I'd later learn from some hardware experts that you really want to price goods like mine around 5x the cost to manufacture. This. If you're doing hardware, your price needs to be minimum 3x-5x the COGS. If you think you're going to win some market by pricing with lower margins, like 1.5x-2x, you're setting yourself up for failure. Interestingly, the same rule holds for restaurants: food input costs should be no more than 20-30% of the meal price.

baybal2 8y ago
Yes, totally true. And this very reason "good goods" don't survive on the market for long. The need to just make any money at all, means that you have to import cheap goods from China, unless your competitive advantage will worth more than that 5x margin ones get from "cheap sh*t." And you will never ever get this for any non-high tech (which implies easy to manufacture) consumer product.
- JJMcJ 8y ago
  > cheap goods Price anything at professional grade. For example, a heavy duty professional microwave can cost well over $1,000, but you can run it 20 hours a day for years. Thanks to my former restaurant owner friend for this example.
preommr 8y ago
There's a good video from EEVblog (EEVblog #887 - The Economics Of Selling Hardware) where he suggests a MINIMUM of 2.5 x COGS. But I think that was assuming directly selling to customers and passing the cost of shipping to the customer.
- SquishyPanda23 8y ago
  I recall that episode. It was a Bobby Dazzler.
sharkweek 8y ago
Cousin is a restaurant manager in the bay area. He mentioned that the margins are so thin in the business that one or two "bad" nights can literally ruin the balance sheet for the entire month.

keeptrying 8y ago

This is the kind of stories we need in the valley. This more than any other story gives you a the sense of anxiety that goes with each phase of building, marketing and launching a product. Thank you for sharing!

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
Thank you for the kind words! :)

ajiang 8y ago

Yeah, that's the experience of working on a hardware startup. The amount of anxiety is unreal. Great writeup, with a rawness that most people don't get in these retrospective pieces.

vonseel 8y ago
Does shipping 20 packages a weekend sound kind of low for a pre-manufactured product?
- TaylorAlexander 8y ago
  It's low. Remember that at this point, I was well past burn-out. I'd burnt out two years earlier and was still going. I worked a full time day job and had been doing this all by myself for years. I was tired of working on it, and sure as hell wasn't going to work 7 days a week for the Nth year. That meant I spent part of the weekend trying to live my life. It was a miserable balance and my productivity was super low. Nothing like what it would be if this was my day job.
  - avinium 8y ago
    Great article and appreciate the transparency/honesty. FYI the link in your profile (www.reboot.love) isn't working - outdated?
    - TaylorAlexander 8y ago
      Thank you for the kind words and for the tip! I forgot about that, but you reminded me that my server is not configured properly and the links should say http://reboot.love http://reboot.love I’ve updated my profile and I’ll have to fix my server!
  - vonseel 8y ago
    Fair enough, I've been there before. Good to hear you got out of the "funk".
- 8y ago

grellas 8y ago

The difference between the ancient way of working a lifetime for a salary, perks and a gold watch on retirement and the new one of building a breakout company in tech lies in a wholly changed business environment by which super-talented founders with a business sense can draw on a depth of knowledge/expertise (typically gained from work experience in a demanding tech environment) to conceive of a solid business model to profitably disrupt existing enterprises and thereafter apply grit, good sense, unbelievable perseverance, and basic street smarts to execute on that model via a startup world that affords amazing access to capital, an ultra-connected network of technically savvy persons with whom one can potentially ally, and a huge reservoir of resources by which founders can educate themselves to learn, grow, and develop. One might sum this up by saying "Silicon Valley" but it really is most anywhere in the modern world where any modicum of freedom prevails, though Silicon Valley still offers unique advantages in my view. The odds of failing are still stunningly high and those who make it to success are often bloodied by the process but the door is open today in a way it never has been before. Another way of saying this is that, in the founder/investor partnering that is typically necessary to succeed, no arrangement was even possible for all but a rare few in mom/dad's ancient days, a reasonable arrangement that skewed heavily toward investors was possible just 20 years ago, and an even more reasonable one with founders and investors in near parity (when the founders are strong) is readily achievable today. I actually don't believe that the story told in this blog post conveys a typical situation but what I have just said does so based on my having worked in depth in this world since the mid-1980s.

abtinf 8y ago
> The difference between the ancient way of working a lifetime for a salary, perks and a gold watch on retirement and the new one of building a breakout company in tech lies in a wholly changed business environment by which super-talented founders with a business sense can draw on a depth of knowledge/expertise (typically gained from work experience in a demanding tech environment) to conceive of a solid business model to profitably disrupt existing enterprises and thereafter apply grit, good sense, unbelievable perseverance, and basic street smarts to execute on that model via a startup world that affords amazing access to capital, an ultra-connected network of technically savvy persons with whom one can potentially ally, and a huge reservoir of resources by which founders can educate themselves to learn, grow, and develop. The length and structure of this sentence obfuscates its meaning.

i_am_nomad 8y ago

These articles are always a guilty pleasure, because all of us reading them can point out countless mistakes the author made that we, of course, would never make. All the time failing to consider that we would simply make different mistakes.

draw_down 8y ago
Sure sure. Criticism is untenable until we all prove ourselves perfect.
iamzozo 8y ago
Completely agree. But if you read something like this, you notice there will be a failure... > but all the stories of success from Techcrunch, the accelerator Y Combinator, and the Facebook movie combined and fed in to my fantasies that somehow through sheer will and my own brain power I could achieve similar success Maybe just me, but getting inspired by Mark its the first mistake you could do.
- alonsonic 8y ago
  Just you. What's with all the hate to Mark lately? Even tho Facebook has its issues today it was a very innovative and well-executed product.
  - ido 8y ago
    That's not how I read it...more like "watching a movie about facebook and building my hopes and dreams on this being me in x years" is what you should avoid. FB/GOOG/etc are the very rare outliers. Don't hedge your business (or mental-wellbeing) on the expectation to replicate their success. It's good to have high ambitions but have a plan B & don't expect to be the unicorn. It would be analogous to starting a band in the hopes of becoming the next Beatles.
  - ameister14 8y ago
    Facebook has had major ethical issues every step of the way and Mark himself has made some serious mistakes over the last year or two. Plus, arguably the most innovative part of Facebook was the go-to-market strategy.

deleted 8y ago

[deleted]

Animats 8y ago

"I knew at that moment I wanted to run my own robotics company. I have been hell bent on it ever since." Robotics is a tough business. The problems tend to be way underestimated. Even by the big names, like John McCarthy and Vic Scheinman. There is progress, but it's slow. I've done some stuff there myself, but never made money off it, although I sold some technology off to the game industry. Linear motors have never made it big. They exist, but they're a tiny niche and cost too much. I once was very interested in Aura, which made the electrical equivalent of a hydraulic cylinder, but they went off into strange directions, first subwoofers for gamers (the Aura Interactor), then some financial mess. If you're building RF stuff, as this guy was, the test gear you need is quite expensive. More expensive than what you need to build the product. Big problem for startups. This guy seems to have failed to research the history of the fields he was in. That's important in technically hard areas. Otherwise you repeat old mistakes.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
Well I did have the help of Silicon Valley’s most talented RF guy, who had met me and agreed to lend me his time and lab to help test my product. I never could have gotten this off the ground without him. Even if I got things working with my first layout, I’d never have been able to solve the manufacturing problem I had when the fab house swapped the RF crystal for 5 different clones. I am forever indebted to Earl McCune for his help: http://wirelessandhighspeed.com/ http://wirelessandhighspeed.com/ I did get a functional RF design that passed FCC testing, but the fear of regulations around RF sunk me. I read the specifications for wireless in the US, EU, Australia and New Zealand and designed a frequency hopping wireless protocol that I believe satisfied all three regions rules. The protocol supported operating in the 902-928 MHz band, 915-928 MHz band, and the 865-870 MHz band with pseudorandom channel schedules picked as a hash of the network name. But damn it was a lot of work. And then I found out about how the FCC also issues directives that maybe count as law too, so it’s not just part 15 you have to comply to... I suppose that could be called a lack of research. I saw it as naïveté and optimism, which might be the same thing. I learn everything else by doing so that was my plan for learning to run a business. I can’t research everything so I just dive in and see what happens. I was desperate to do something. As far as the linear motors, they were specifically sex toys. The linear motors worked, but only at the prototype stage and they needed better electronics and software to work at the desired speed and smoothness the application would require. Here’s some videos I have not posted publicly, but have thought I should share (safe for work): https://youtu.be/Fm8lxtqEPk8 https://youtu.be/Fm8lxtqEPk8 https://youtu.be/H3qLlZ6cJho https://youtu.be/H3qLlZ6cJho See the mildly NSFW web page: http://www.mobiusadult.com/investors.html http://www.mobiusadult.com/investors.html And SFW images of the device hardware: http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7219_phixr_sm.jpg http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7219_p... http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7185_sm.JPG http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/IMG_7185_s... http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/robots_sm.jpg http://www.tlalexander.com/content/images/2016/12/robots_sm....

la6470 8y ago

You sir are definitely a success ..no one can match your experience , you might even educate people on udemy or as a professor . Thank you mighty for sharing.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago

Oh wow I didn’t expect this to get posted yet! There is also a video of this lecture, which I’ve now added a link to in the article. https://youtu.be/huOzokY_fME https://youtu.be/huOzokY_fME It’s part of a series of lectures I delivered are African Leadership University in March. Please check out the playlist here below. I just finished editing these videos last night! https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anezfZZMB4Dh-78x_6zVsxIm https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLP0dfLFk-anezfZZMB4Dh...

gurpreet- 8y ago
Wow this is was truly an amazing piece to read. I have a few questions: 1) How did you manage to keep working even after you realised you were $85k in debt after 2 years? 2) What drove you further into investing into the business after that point? Sheer motivation? 3) How did you stay sane throughout all this?

matchagaucho 8y ago

"I lost $100,000 over five years on my first halfway successful venture." Real World MBA.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
That’s what I tell myself!

anon2775 8y ago

Where to eat, University Ave PA: - Cafe 220 $ - Oren's Hummus $$ - Crepevine $$ - Il Fornaio $$$ - Coupa Cafe $$ - Local 271 $$ - Sprout $$ - Madera $$$$ (Sand Hill Rd) Man-bod approved.

rationalfaith 8y ago

Start a business in Silicon Valley: 1. Don't 2. Look for literally any other place in the world and build your company/technology to scale with remote work. 3. Keep investors at bay as long as possible by bootstrapping. 4. Profit either financially or wisdom/lessons for next venture. Being debt free is most important.

scarejunba 8y ago

What a brutally raw narrative. Thank you for sharing! Things I never would have thought about.

TaylorAlexander 8y ago
:) Thank you! I’m glad my story is appreciated.

deleted 8y ago

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dominicr 8y ago

"I found that the manufacturer did not use the part I specified, but something else." - Everyone who works with manufacturers needs to watch out for this, especially if they're in the East. I knew a small scale bicycle manufacturer and he worked with a well known & respected bicycle manufacturer in Taiwan. Even then he'd only get his bikes produced while he or someone else was on site as otherwise they swapped parts, or worse, change the alloy mix in the metals to something cheaper but a lot weaker.

maddening 8y ago

I'd like to see a essay about starting a business outside the SV. Maybe even outside a startup hippie communities in general. * no investors interested in pre-seed phase - they all say that you should call them when you are already profitable * nobody interested in being cofounder - cold cash only * clients saying that they like your MVP - but you unknown, so they won't buy the product anyway I don't mean that in SV things are magically happening on its own, but sometimes I have an impression that anywhere else you have to be twice as bold and twice as careful to get 1/10th of a result... Yet they are written in a way that suggest that you can easily reproduce SV results everywhere.

nojvek 8y ago
If you think about it from the first principles and ignore the location, it’s a fact that a business can be launched anywhere. We are in a global economy and most software runs in the cloud. Companies like Stripe will let you bill from the cloud. So technically running a SaaS company from anywhere should be possible. That being said, any great company is a product of vision * team * execution * luck. SV and to a larger degree US provides the huge networking effects of talent, funding and a big market. That being said, it still warms my heart to see successful startups from other countries do well.
mattferderer 8y ago
Check out the MicroConf community - https://www.microconf.com/ https://www.microconf.com/ Read the The E-Myth Revisited (80's classic) Check out MIT's Bill Aulet's Disciplined Entrepreneurship: 24 Steps to a Successful Startup & accompanying workbook.

EGreg 8y ago

This was frustrating to read. He describes the romanticized notions promoted by silicon valley similarly to “making it” in Hollywood or as a singer. There, people waited tables and were peniless but at least they didn’t borrow huge sums from their parents who borrowed against their home, and then said it was a huge success when they ended up in the red. Not to mention all the drinking drugs and stress. In the end, the guy got crowdfunded, and his girlfriend helped him a lot. They could have done that from anyplace, living near his parents, and gotten married.

j_shi 8y ago

I'd like to see more content like this. Find it 100x more helpful than the success stories. Karenina principle and whatnot. Would gladly subscribe and pay buku bucks for a more rigorous startupgraveyard-esque page. And would gladly contribute as well..