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Things I’ve never heard a successful startup founder say
- edw519 15y agoGreat list! A few more: We're so successful because we're smarter than everyone else. We learned everything we needed to know in college. Our technology was so good, it was only a matter of time before everyone found us. Most of our unit tests were successful on the first run. We were usually able to knock off at 5 p.m. Customer service issues went pretty much as we expected. We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that. We always had plenty of time to spend with our family and friends. We outsourced all of the technical work. I'm so glad I spent so much time on Hacker News.
- damoncali 15y agoI've heard successful people say half of those. Be carful not to paint yourself into the corner of conventional wisdom.
- benjoffe 15y ago> We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that. Pretty sure I've read quotes from Steve Jobs that follow that line of thinking actually.
- mgkimsal 15y agoSadly, I know a few entrepreneurs that also think this way. They're not having much success, but cling to the notion that the world will 'wake up' and see things their way, eventually, some day, if they could just talk to enough people (and they usually cite Apple as their inspiration for this approach). The Steve Jobs / Apple approach is more the exception that proves the rule, and even then, they've had their Newton moments too. What that proves is that with a successful enough company you can have a few failures. When you've only got the one product, you can't afford the luxury of your own Newton.
- sjwright 15y agoThe first thing Steve Jobs did when he returned to Apple was kill off the Newton. There's been the occasional slip, but nothing too ghastly (except the flower power iMacs).
- gcb 15y agowhy did he return to apple? everyone forget this, because he couldn't have the same luck at his second company. also apple would have forwarded the osx success a couple years if the acquired beos instead of next. so that was steves luck acting again
- kanamekun 15y agoHow do you explain the success of Pixar, the company that Steve bought and eventually made him a billionaire?
- gcb 15y agoThis is like saying carl icahn is genius for making motorola mobile a success and making him a billionaire. apple was a success because of woz. Jobs was good at milking it, that i will give him. jobs wasted all his apple-money on next. Pixar was more proof that even he never thought apple would be the hit it is today. i don't think they had a single mac there until 5yrs ago.
- sjwright 15y ago> Pixar was more proof that even he never thought apple would be the hit it is today. The facts don't align with that theory. Steve Jobs left Apple in 1985. Toy Story was released in 1995. There wasn't any plausible path for Steve to return to Apple until 1996.
- eropple 15y agoI'm no huge fan of the NeXT underpinnings of OS X, but the idea that using BeOS as an underlying operating system "would have forwarded the osx success a couple years" is silly. Aside from the still-continuing claims of Be adherents and their Haiku descendants, BeOS was so very much Nothing Special and I find it highly unlikely the Magic BeOS Fairy Powder would have materially improved OS X.
- nknight 15y agoI think the quote I've heard is that they don't bother with outside market research. That's different from simply ignoring customers. Any sane company will tell you feedback is important, what can differ is where the feedback comes from, how it's interpreted, and whether customers have as much knowledge of what is or isn't possible/economical as the people at the company. It's also important to note that companies like Apple are always trying new things, building strange prototypes, etc.. If a customer screams for Widget X, a company might try building a Widget X prototype, and discover it doesn't work so well in practice.
- sjwright 15y ago> If a customer screams for Widget X, a company might try building a Widget X prototype, and discover it doesn't work so well in practice. _This._ It's a lesson I learned early on in my developer career: when customers ask for Widget X, it's often a symptom of an underlying problem that customers are trying to solve. Your role as a product developer is to understand the customer's underlying problem. Discover what the problem is, and you might discover that they don't need a Widget X; maybe they need a Feature X or a Gadget X. Maybe it reveals holes in your training processes. Maybe they just revealed a seemingly trivial bug with existing stuff. Or maybe you realise you never understood why clients ever used your product until now.
- jamesaguilar 15y agoAnother one to add: "I am as good as Steve Jobs." ;)
- rokhayakebe 15y agoI'm so glad I spent so much time on Hacker News. Hence, CTRL + W.
- rimantas 15y ago> We always had plenty of time to spend with our family and > friends. If you cannot say that, I's say you failed. > We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, > they realized that. Should I repeat Ford's saying about faster horse? And not doing focus groups hurts Apple so much…
- irahul 15y ago> We always had plenty of time to spend with our family and > friends. > If you cannot say that, I's say you failed. Doesn't "not having plenty of time to spend with our family and friends" follows directly from not winding up at 5? Regardless of what you consider a failure, the hard fact is most of the businesses demand time - a lot of time. And there are only so many hours in a day. For the starting days, putting up south of 12 hours is common, and that takes a toll on the time you would have spent with your near and dear ones.
- palish 15y agoActually, Ford never said that.[1][2] [1] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747106 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2747106 [2] - http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819549 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2819549
- itrackmine 15y agoThis made me lol while taking a swig of my lemonade...point for you ;p "I'm so glad I spent so much time on Hacker News." ...ok, not a constructive reply other than: laughter generates beneficial chemicals in the brain and it's good to be good to others...thanks! carry on. :)
- Iv 15y ago"We'll share profits with employees that actually worked on the product we sold"
- cma 15y ago>Our technology was so good, it was only a matter of time before everyone found us. Google...
- tudorizer 15y ago"We were usually able to knock off at 5 p.m." That's what 37Signals always preaches.
- Tichy 15y ago"We were usually able to knock off at 5 p.m" Actually I am pretty sure I heard/read that a couple of times (or equivalent, not completely busting their asses). "We always knew better than our customers. Eventually, they realized that." Apple?
- ericd 15y agoI've witnessed the first one...
- sp_ 15y agoThe first one was definitely a mantra of the Google-acquired start-up I used to work for. My boss was unhappy with existing software in our field of expertise, so we set out to build something that makes us happy, not other people. It helped that we (especially my boss) knew more about the field than nearly all of our customers, so our customers bandwaggoning on our software was not surprising to me.
- JoeAltmaier 15y agoYes, building what you know is right is satisfying, but can be a hard road. You have to educate at every level. Ask a farmer in 1900 what he wanted, he would have said "A stronger horse that eats less oats". Never would he have said "a tractor".
- ericd 15y agoYeah, I've witnessed the first one succeed wonderfully, and it's exactly what you're talking about - they built exactly what they envisioned because they were frustrated with existing solutions, and the customers came in droves.
- arcej 15y agoI thought I was going to work less starting my own company than when I had a corporate job.
- deleted 15y ago[deleted]
- alexro 15y agoWhat about: After I found my great co-founder(s) we had never had to bother with other employees.
- pclark 15y ago"Reading pithy superficial quotes about startups changed my companies trajectory."
- ruchi 15y agoSpending all that time on finding a great name paid off.
- ChristianMarks 15y ago"We owe our success to ITIL certification before launching. Period."
- revorad 15y ago"Changing the world is nice, but I mainly did it for the money."
- Alex3917 15y ago"My lack of an MBA degree made building a company from scratch harder for me than for others." Are all the entrepreneurs you've talked with the kind of people who made something like Wufoo or HARO? Because if you were trying to do a rollup or start a wireless company then I think having an MBA would make a pretty big difference.
- ThomPete 15y agoWhy?
- keiferski 15y agoBecause not every business is composed of four hackers around a kitchen table?
- ThomPete 15y agoOf course not. But how is the MBA helping them?
- Alex3917 15y agoHow are you going to convince folks in their 60s and 70s to invest hundreds of millions of dollars in something completely unproven if, at the very least, you haven't studied corporate finance and corporate strategy at HBS or Wharton or wherever? Once you get to a certain level just being able to impress Paul Graham or Dave McClure isn't going to cut it anymore.
- ThomPete 15y agoHuh? So they don't look at whether I have a sound business but whether I have an MBA when they are in their 60s and 70s??? Care to give some examples? Are you really arguing what I think you are arguing?
- burgerbrain 15y ago
- ptn 15y ago"I regret having done a startup"
- mathattack 15y agoA few more: - I don't need to worry about the product. I hired someone for that. - Hiring is for HR. - I will be spending August on an island in the South Pacific. - It is ok to miss payroll. - Our value add to the customer-centric value chain is based on world class process excellence principles. - That's not my job.
- d0ne 15y agoI've heard the 3rd one a few times.
- mathattack 15y agoAfter the startup succeeded or before? :-)
- d0ne 15y agoAfter
- bane 15y ago"- That's not my job." I've seen worse...an agreeing head nod that he'll do something...then months of passive aggressive cat and mouse games to get it out of him...only to find it's simply not been done.
- d0ne 15y agoOne I've never heard: We were an overnight success.
- ScottBurson 15y agoThe company structure can matter a lot. IANAL, but my understanding is that an LLC is not an appropriate choice for a company that hopes to be acquired or issue an IPO. So don't obsess over it, but be sure you have competent advisers including an attorney who can help you make the right choice in such matters.
- irahul 15y agoI don't know about US, but here in India, you can re-incorporate. I don't see how that can be an issue - operate as a LLC(if you have reasons to) - re-incorporate later when you are becoming a potential acquisition target. I don't think whoever is going to acquire you will decide not to just because you are going to re-incorporate.
- gk1 15y agoIn the US, you can form a corporation and then merge your LLC into it, thus tranforming your LLC into a corp. So yeah, it may lead to extra work down the road, but it's not a life-or-death decision at the beginning.
- Swizec 15y agoIn my own personal experience this list seems kind of dubious. I've never said any of those things and I'm not a successful entrepreneur. Must be something more to it than a list of Bad Words (tm).
- reemrevnivek 15y agoOur most effective marketing campaigns where the ones filled with buzzwords and non-specific claims. s/where/were/
- onan_barbarian 15y agoSome more still: "May I mambo dogface on the banana patch?" "My hovercraft is full of eels" "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously" It turns out that this - "things I've never heard class of person X say" rhetorical device is a fine way to lend credence to what would otherwise be a simple collection of one-line assertions about how to do startups. Not saying that I agree or disagree with many of the sentiments here, just that this is a very back-door way of adding authority to a bunch of statements. In the case of Jason Cohen, I'd pay attention if he just made the statements flat based on his own experience.
- j_baker 15y agoIt turns out that this - "things I've never heard class of person X say" rhetorical device is a fine way to lend credence to what would otherwise be a simple collection of one-line assertions about how to do startups. So? What's wrong with rhetorical devices? You can't win people over with logic alone. Believe me, I've tried.
- jonathansizz 15y ago'Actually, we just inadvertently happened to be in the right place at the right time. We got lucky.'