999 Posts Found

The most painful and counterproductive mistake I see startups make in hiring has to be over-selling and failing to interview the candidate thoroughly. This almost guarantees you end up with a bad team. The weak candidates pass through too easily, but more importantly, the strong ones walk away–they don’t want to work with a mediocre team, and they are estimating the quality of your team … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jordan Burton | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

In his conversation with YC Partner and COO Qasar Younis, Marc outlined two tests investors run on entrepreneurs before working with them. Later in the conversation Qasar asked Marc who he looks up to.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: Marc Andreessen | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Since many of a startups’ earliest advisers come from the fundraising world, they’re likely to offer advice from one particular perspective. Traditional VCs have a playbook that they run across their companies, and their business model works for them. Their goal is to place strategic bets in a handful of companies. Founders, though, aren’t managing a portfolio. They need to base their decisions on the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Wade Foster | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required.

When you get right down to it, you can ignore almost everything else. I’m not suggesting … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Andreessen | Source: LinkedIn | Subject: Entrepreneurship

You can obviously screw up a great market — and that has been done, and not infrequently — but assuming the team is baseline competent and the product is fundamentally acceptable, a great market will tend to equal success and a poor market will tend to equal failure. Market matters most.

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Andreessen | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

When a great team meets a lousy market, market wins.
When a lousy team meets a great market, market wins.
When a great team meets a great market, something special happens.

Content: Quotation | Author: Andy Rachleff | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Strategy

The caliber of a startup team can be defined as the suitability of the CEO, senior staff, engineers, and other key staff relative to the opportunity in front of them. You look at a startup and ask, will this team be able to optimally execute against their opportunity? I focus on effectiveness as opposed to experience, since the history of the tech industry is full … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Marc Andreessen | Source: LinkedIn | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The WSJ wrote a story on venture capital returns that claims “Andreessen Horowitz’s Returns Trail Venture-Capital Elite.” Andreessen Horowitz’s Scott Kupor offers a rebuttal by explaining how arcane and obtuse venture capital valuations can be.

Content: Article | Author: Scott Kupor | Source: Andreessen Horowitz | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

I like to say the role of the entrepreneur is to understand the difference between perception and reality. Perception is conventional wisdom, it’s what everybody thinks is right, or is the answer. And reality, sometimes it’s the same, but often it’s very different.

I like to say the distance between perception and reality is the innovator’s playground. But if you are going to play in that … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Travis Kalanick | Source: Business Insider | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Autopsy is a collection of lessons from failed startups. Reading through some of them will probably be of value for any entrepreneur.

Content: Online Resource | Subject: Entrepreneurship

We often get emails from startups saying “we’re running out of money, so we’re going to raise a series A now.” As if it were like making a second trip to the ATM. And when we ask how they’re doing, the answer is usually a combination of slow growth and high expenses. We have to tell them they have no hope of raising a series … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Jessica Livingston | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

A resilient culture has a certain amount of resistance embedded in it. Not too much to capsize it, but enough so that it doesn’t atrophy. What happens when startups get successful and grow is that they become more and more vulnerable to the attraction-selection-attrition cycle, where people of the same stripes are increasingly drawn to the organization, chosen by it and retained at it. The … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Adam Grant | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Culture, Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

How to improve your fundraising with investor segmentation, storytelling and specific follow-up.

Content: Article | Author: Edith Yeung | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Entrepreneurs are always called crazy, until they start making money. Then they’re brilliant.

Content: Quotation | Author: Alex Charfen | Source: ChangeThis | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Content: Quotation | Author: Alex Charfen | Source: ChangeThis | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior, Personality / Behavior

Immigrants are 15 percent of the overall United States population, but they become entrepreneurs at a much higher rate, according to new research by William Kerr and Sari Pekkala Kerr.

Content: Article | Author: Michael Blanding | Source: Harvard Business School (HBS) Working Knowledge | Subjects: Economics, Entrepreneurship

Sam Altman interviews Jessica Livingston, co-founder of Y Combinator. Topics include the history of Y Combinator itself and some interesting anecdotes about AirBNB.

Content: Multimedia Content | Authors: Jessica Livingston, Sam Altman | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Sounds like clickbait, right? A “listicle”, questionable facts loosely stitched together only to get you to visit. But what this really is is ten solid, if I say so myself, marketing tips based on almost a decade of technology marketing.

I wrote them down because each of them has proven valuable in conversations with people that are marketing startups in one way or another. Here they … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Andrus Purde | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Marketing / Sales

Each quarter we pull the Arthur Ventures team together for an all-day offsite where we go through every company we’ve funded in detail and rank them across a handful of categories to help inform where we want to deploy additional capital and better understand where we expect future returns to come from for our limited partners. Coming out of this last meeting I analyzed the … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Patrick Meenan | Subject: Entrepreneurship

I asked [an experienced board member] “what exactly does a CEO do?” He answered without thinking:

“A CEO does only three things. Sets the overall vision and strategy of the company and communicates it to all stakeholders. Recruits, hires, and retains the very best talent for the company. Makes sure there is always enough cash in the bank.”

I asked, “Is that it?” He replied that the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Fred Wilson | Source: A VC | Subjects: Corporate Governance, Entrepreneurship, Management