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daily articles for founders

Here are 10 quality posts from the Founder's Library:

How Jason screwed up his Google acquisition   ✶

After that the communication fell silent. I resisted contacting Jonathan or David because I didn't want to appear too eager and I figured I was in a fairly strong position since they needed what I had and there didn't appear to be any other serious competitors in the space.

(...)

While on the phone I took the opportunity to ask him the burning question of why I had never heard back from them in regards to the acquisition of Preezo. I had developed my own theory which was that since Google acquisitions were known to be primarily about talent and not technology, a one-man show like Preezo would represent distinctly less value and ultimately more risk for them than if it was, for example, a team of five engineers. However, according to Jonathan that wasn't the reason as at all. It was simply that they were so busy during that time that the deal just fell through the cracks.

I gave a presentation recently at an HNLondon meetup. One of the key lessons I tried to get across is "don't be afraid to follow up".

People who do important things are almost always very busy. Everyone wants their attention, and even with the best will they don't have the time to keep track of every interaction they're involved in. In my experience, such people never get annoyed at you for following up - in fact, they almost expect it of you. The fear that "people will get annoyed at me for following up" is unfounded.

So never be afraid to follow up. The worst thing that might happen is that your email is ignored. The best thing that might happen is that you get what you want, or even more.

Criticism and two-way streets   ✶

Great design approach by Des Traynor in this post:

Like Apple, Microsoft encourages their designers to create many different solutions to any given design problem. But picking an outright winner isn’t easy. It can cause arguments and standstills. The quality of resolution here defines the quality of the design process. Who gets to decide? Is it the loudest shouter? The most senior? The highest paid? None of these are correct by default.

Every solution is great in some circumstances and terrible in others. Design debates are best settled by inviting everyone to present their solution, but also explain under what circumstances their solution is terrible. Finally they’re asked to explain under what circumstances their colleague’s solution would be better. This is what Bill Buxton refers to as walking on both sides of the street.

This can be scaled down to a small startup team. When solving a tricky design problem, ask everyone involved to come up with some solutions, then get them to explain when their solution won't work, and why the solutions they didn't come up with are better.

The article makes several other interesting points.

Time-saving web design generators   ✶

This will be useful to someone - particularly when trying to put together a decent design to test an idea quickly. Generators are listed for:

  • loaders
  • colour schemes
  • favicons
  • striped and dot patterns
  • miscellaneous backgrounds patterns
  • tabs, badges, buttons and ribbons
  • CSS3 effects.

Enjoy.

How to stop startups from failing in 4 common ways   ✶

Most articles listing ways startups fail are not very interesting. There are millions of ways startups can fail.

This article by Elad Gil is different, because it offers some concrete advice about what to do to prevent each of those issues: running out of money, team implosion, a living dead company, or a bad board/investors. Have a read.

Anything worth copying will be copied   ✶

Hiten Shah makes the point that anything worth doing is worth copying, and anything worth copying will be copied. So what to do then? Hiten leaves us with this conclusion:

So what is this magic element? Thankfully it’s the one thing that’s almost impossible to copy—your ability to give your customers what they want.

This is your secret weapon, your ace in the hole. As long as you still deeply understand and care about your audience, you will have the edge over any newcomers who copy your ideas. So make sure you don’t get so wrapped up in the “real work” you’re doing that you forget about what sets you apart in a more fundamental way. Make sure you don’t focus so hard on staying ahead that you forget about doing the one thing that can keep you from falling behind: knowing and caring about your customers more than anyone else.

I take a slightly different view, or I would phrase it differently. Your ace in the hole is your ability to continue executing. This applies to other fields too: your value as a writer is in what you are able to continue writing, not in what you've written; your value as a musician is in the music you will continue to create; your value as a cook is in the food you will cook in the future.

Similarly, your value as an entrepreneur is in your ability to continue to relentlessly execute and move things forward. For that to really make sense, though, you should remember that you are not your business. If your path is as an entrepreneur, you will create more than one business in your life.

So, whilst focusing on and caring about your customers is certainly a valid objective, a larger objective is, I believe, to focus and care about your own development. Make sure you keep moving forward, getting better, learning more, making better connections, and so on.

Put together effective designs quickly   ✶

Sandeep Ghael provides some clear and directly usable ground rules to put together an effective, decent-looking design quickly when aiming to develop a website quickly (for example during a StartupWeekend.

It's a solid set of tools and rules. Have a read, practice them, and use them when you create your next MVP.

Questions asked at YC interviews   ✶

Kevin Gao shares what he believes are key questions asked by the YCombinator team during interviews, with do's and don'ts:

  1. How did you come up with the idea?
  2. How big do you think your market is?
  3. What have you already accomplished?
  4. What is the equity split among your team?
  5. Are you going to work on your startup even if we don't fund you?

Even more interesting than this post (which unfortunately lacks any mention of whether Kevin has been through any YC interviews or has spoken with many alumni) are the comments by Paul Graham himself on the HN thread:

These are all things we care about, but they are probably not the most common questions we ask. E.g. we already know about the equity split because we ask about it on the application form, so we only bring it up during the interview if we noticed something odd about it.

The thing we care most about in interviews (at least of things one can change) is how engaged the founders are with users. How do they know people actually want what they're building? Have they talked to real, live users? What have they learned from them?

We don't care super much how big the initial market is, so long as the startup is making something that (a) some subset of people want a lot, and (b) if that market is not itself huge, there is an easy path into bigger neighboring ones. Basically, we're looking for startups building Altair Basic.

The whole thread is worth reading if you're interviewing at YC, or, in fact, any other incubator (and probably most savvy angels will ask similar questions).

Even if you have no intention to raise funding, some of these points (e.g. how you're building engagement with users) are worth thinking about for yourself.

Hand to wannabe "product guys"   ✶

Is a potential business cofounder pitching himself as a "product guy", without any evidence that he can do it? Aaron Harris has an answer for them:

The first, and I suppose seemingly easiest claim and means to justify your place in the startup world, as someone who has no experience, is to call yourself a product person.

But that claim generally comes with a fundamental misunderstanding of what it means to do product. It is not code for a person who doesn’t really know how to do anything but thinks he can boss engineers around. It doesn’t refer to marketing guys who had an idea. Understanding what it means to drive a product means understanding the full scope of the vision of your company. It means understanding your engineering team, their capabilities, and their priorities. It means understanding what your next move is, and what your 6th move is from every angle.

Aaron also proposes a development plan for people who want to become product guys in reality as well as in title, which involves both practicing the craft and reading some product development classics.

Outbound VC dialing   ✶

By Mark Suster; if you get an email that looks like:

Hi [entrepreneur],

I hope all is well. I’m an investor at [Big Name, Large Fund VC] and recently came across [Your Company].

It looks as though you’ve built a very interesting business, and I’d love to spend some time getting a better understanding of your future plans for the company and if there is an opportunity to partner with [My Firm].

In case you aren’t familiar, I’ve attached a brief overview on our firm. [It's big, well known & we've invested in all of these really cool companies]

Do you have time for a half hour conversation over the next week or so? What fits your schedule?

Looking forward to speaking,

Name

Then:

He’s an analyst, which means he’s very junior – probably 24. He’s on a fishing trip. No reason not to call him but I wouldn’t get too excited about it. Sorry.

We got a few of those calls at Woobius, and yeah, they all amounted to exactly nothing.

Even if you're talking to a partner, funding is nowhere near being in the bag. But if you've been contacted by an Analyst who's just fishing for information, then the right response, as Mark puts it, is a polite no or "yes, if".

Read Mark's full article here.

Play/life balance   ✶

Greg Bayer:

Working for a startup usually means putting in more hours than others.  Recently, I spent two days on less than 3 hours of sleep in order to push out our new Pulse.me release.  This doesn’t seem strange to me and didn’t make me unhappy.  In fact, it was one of the most exciting and fun things I’ve done in a while.

Chasing after dreams is an essential part of my life.  The feeling of fulfillment I get from doing so makes me a much happier / more content person, and this in turn positively affects my relationships.

I've argued before that hours are not a measure of productivity, but that's not Greg's claim in this post. He's saying, quite rightly, that working on your startup is not work, it's play - and so, unlike working stupid hours on a job, working stupid hours on a startup is a blessing, not a curse.

I'm reminded of an old saying:

Why work for someone else from nine to five for a daily wage, when you can work twenty-four hours a day for yourself for free?

So which view is right? Neither, really. If you feel like working, work. If you feel like resting, rest. If you feel like playing, play. Working for yourself, chasing your own dreams, is worth pursuing with far more energy than the typical job - but life is what happens while you're busy working on your startup.

I'll finish with an observation: I feel most happy, most rested, and most productive when I have had a solid 8 hours of sleep, starting and ending at the same time each day. This plus a good task list has more effect on my productivity than anything else - other than, perhaps, the pressure of an immediate deadline. But that type of intense work under pressure usually has a cost the following days.

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