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> Press flowed effortlessly, funding fell from the sky > Looking in from the outside, I could only assume they possessed secret advantages that I lacked access
by birken 12y ago
> Press flowed effortlessly, funding fell from the sky
> Looking in from the outside, I could only assume they possessed secret advantages that I lacked access to.
Those secret advantages were just relationships with journalists and investors :)
I made the same mistake you did, where I conflated press and funding (especially early stage funding) as signals of some startup skill that must be critically important for success.
Incidentally, it was the Exec trajectory that broke me out of that thought process. When they launched, they raised a massive seed round and seemingly got press every week, and I assumed our company (somewhat a competitor) was in big trouble. But it turns out their product didn't work, and all the press and funding they had gotten didn't magically imbue them with any of the hard won insights our company had made.
Customers don't care about press, they don't care about your funding, they don't care about your growth. They care about you delivering them a product they want, and there are no shortcuts for that.
- JimboOmega 12y agoIncidentally, potential employees often don't care about this stuff, either. It's important you have funding enough to pay them, bur dropping names of investors/board members, or sending links to techcrunch articles just doesn't impress.
- Kalium 12y agoI see this sort of name-dropping a lot from recruiters who understand that it impresses those with no startup experience. "We've been on TechCrunch! Sequoia invested in us!"
- JimboOmega 12y agoUggh, yes. I did have one recruiter even excitedly email me tech crunch links over the next few days as they got "more press". I also "enjoy" name dropping like: "Someone on our board was like employee #17 at Amazon! He may have even talked to Jeff Bezos once!"
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- moron4hire 12y agoIt can be upsetting to see other people seemingly squander those connections. When you work hard on your own thing, and it doesn't gain as much attention, maybe even releasing first and then getting eclipsed by these competitors, it's frustrating. And then you sit there and stare at your hands, not knowing what to do differently with your own stuff to make it any different. Because it has nothing to do with the stuff, just as you say. And it certainly has nothing to do with now. It's the connections, gained 6 months, 6 years ago.