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The REAL mistakes that kill startups: 1. Not solving a real problem - Product / market fit 2. Raising Too much money - Growing beyond ability for the market t

The REAL mistakes that kill startups: 1. Not solving a real problem - Product / market fit 2. Raising Too much money - Growing beyond ability for the market to support 3. Hiring the wrong people 4. Too much founder ego 5. Too much founder inexperience combined with a lack of a desire to learn 6. Focusing too much on investor needs vs. customer needs 7. Spending too much money 8. Perfect is the enemy of good - Start small, think big, iterate often. I think single founder issues, so-called "bad location" issues, derivative ideas are not really issues at all. The top 7 will kill you even if you have great locations. And there are many examples of great business started by sole founders outside the high expense "prime" locations.

barrkel 7y ago
On "bad location": consumer-focused startups will need to scale up fast if they get traction. Those are the ones that benefit most from being in SV: a pool of skilled labour they can bid their VC dollars + stratospheric ambitions on. B2B companies may be better off located in one of the top areas for the business vertical. For example, non-consumer FinTech startups may be better off in New York or London than SV.
- hinkley 7y ago
  I still firmly believe that a lot of people get the scalability/sustainability thing wrong, and then overhire like crazy. If you ran a lean startup, would location be as much of an issue? Or asked the other way around: should all startups outside of the valley be lean startups? It may just be the horizontal versus vertical question. A lot of the work I do, when to have the autonomy to do it, is to make sure that every developer can get more done, or be more certain that the work really is done. I’m trying to vertically scale developers. In systems design, when communication is cheap you scale horizontally. When it’s expensive, you scale vertically. What have we really done as an industry to improve the effectiveness of human communication? I mean, really? Most of those improvements were made in the 90’s, a bit more in the 00’s, and everything since has been refinement (or regression.)

barrkel 7y ago

On "bad location": consumer-focused startups will need to scale up fast if they get traction. Those are the ones that benefit most from being in SV: a pool of skilled labour they can bid their VC dollars + stratospheric ambitions on. B2B companies may be better off located in one of the top areas for the business vertical. For example, non-consumer FinTech startups may be better off in New York or London than SV.

hinkley 7y ago
I still firmly believe that a lot of people get the scalability/sustainability thing wrong, and then overhire like crazy. If you ran a lean startup, would location be as much of an issue? Or asked the other way around: should all startups outside of the valley be lean startups? It may just be the horizontal versus vertical question. A lot of the work I do, when to have the autonomy to do it, is to make sure that every developer can get more done, or be more certain that the work really is done. I’m trying to vertically scale developers. In systems design, when communication is cheap you scale horizontally. When it’s expensive, you scale vertically. What have we really done as an industry to improve the effectiveness of human communication? I mean, really? Most of those improvements were made in the 90’s, a bit more in the 00’s, and everything since has been refinement (or regression.)