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Startups are different beasts. If you’ve never been a part of one, it’s really hard to explain just how unique and challenging it is to be part of one during its early stages. I’ve seen so many people think they want to be involved in a startup only to have the reality punch them in the face when they get what they want.
It’s really easy to fall into the trap of hating on VCs if you are a startup looking for funding.
When I started my first “real” company in the early days of the Internet era I was traveling with my immediate family to visit my mother in Bangladesh. I remember distinctly the fear I had but it wasn’t about flying or malaria or anything related to the actual journey. It was what my answer was going to be when someone asked me “what do you do for a living?”
This is a slight departure but for good reason. Both my kids graduated from high school today with a flourish.
Co-founders need to be aligned. Unified. Clear on objectives. To have a voice.
Startups, by their nature, are designed to be an uncontainable, uncontrollable and unstructured mess.
How often do you say “yes” to customer requests?
Lots has been written about the importance of company culture and how to encourage it to develop and flourish in the right way.
This is the hardest question to answer for founders.
As the US and potentially Canada gear up for elections, the ideological divisions are obviously quite deep. Each side feels that theirs is the righteous one and their party alone is the one that speaks the truth.
“Just f@cking do it.”
Title or outcome.
What gives a startup the highest chance for success?
Great interviewers know that silence is a tool. They don’t feel the need to fill the space left by a question or an answer. They soak in it and keep their mouths shut.
“We need you to remove your product right away. It is hurting our business.”
It is every startup team’s hope — that they are building something that puts them in front of someone else that wants to buy their company.
Some of us have a hard time making decisions. Period. We like to analyze options until we’ve backed ourselves into a corner and all of them have expired.
Why myself and my co-founders of a delivery company spent months doing deliveries ourselves, and how that’s the opposite of what most scaling advice tells you.
After the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 — attributed to a lack of up-to-date information — President Kennedy ordered the creation of the Situation Room in the basement of the White House. Its sole purpose was to bring together the right people and information at the right time, mostly during a crisis, to make the most right decision available.
How much patience should you have with employees in an early stage startup?
Adult Mayflies live for 2 days. They spend a year as larvae, burst onto the scene with the sole purpose of mating and then, 2 days later, dead.
The all-too-common knock against venture capitalists is that they never make up their mind. They lead founders on, always asking for more proof points only to disappear or finally say no months too late.
Early days in startup life feels like David Allen’s GTD on amphetamines.
This happens all too often in early stage companies.
The answer will be no.