This post by Brian Balfour appeared on Hacker News under the title "How I found a cofounder, built a prototype and raised $5M in less than 4 weeks", a title which sounds like it came straight out of Daniel B Markham's linkbait headline generator, but, surprisingly:
- it's got very little to do with raising money or building prototypes, and
- it's an excellent article about a general strategy for improving your odds of startup success.
The key point of the article is that a great way to boost your success is to surround yourself with a "close peer group" of people who are more or less at the same stage in life, with whom you can develop deep relationships, who will be brutally honest with each other, and who have reasonably complementary skill sets. The effect of that:
They help raise funding faster, find co-founders and early employees, and acquire your early customers. These are often considered the toughest items in starting a company.
The unanswered question is, how do you find such core peer groups to join? Is the answer something like TechHub (in London)?
