992 Posts Found

A lot of founders will go to customers and say “Hey, would you want to use this?” And customers will say “That’s great, we’d love to use it.” And so the founders go off and build it, but when then they come back with a product, no one’s using it. That’s because what they should have asked is, “Would you pay for this?” Being interested … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Customer Related, Entrepreneurship, Market Research

Markets with potential usually have a changing dynamic that allows new players to climb in and make room for themselves. It could be falling costs, new tech or a new distribution channel. Whatever it is, if you’ve heard something was difficult, you can’t just stop there because things have probably changed.

Content: Quotation | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

As a general rule, when I make investments, it’s market first and the strength of the team second, which is quite different from a lot of other angel investors who are more founder-driven. I think that’s a mistake. Even if you have a strong founding team that’s able to pivot, they’ll probably stay trapped in the market they’re already in. Many great teams get taken … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

In the venture capital industry, we talk a lot about the importance of the founding team. But we might underestimate, especially in the early stages, something that might be as important as their drive, soft skills and strategic sophistication: their ability to recruit an A-class team. So I wondered, what are the best practices out there? I knew that I couldn’t find the golden formula, … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Willy Braun | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources

Most well-meaning people are wrong about where startups come from. They believe startups come from innovation. But we found that startups come from what we call the “builder” quality: the entrepreneurial personality that leads people to start new ventures and bring them to success.

Content: Quotation | Author: Jim Clifton | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The double-edged truth of the fast-scaling startup: If the company grows as it should, it will outgrow many of its people.

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

The law of startup physics: humans grow linearly, companies grow exponentially.

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

I started noticing patterns in startups — which I’ve validated with executives and VCs over the years — that how companies scale and break matches military groupings. So, the most efficient group in the military is a group of three, then a group of eight, and then three groups of eight, so 24. Look across companies and you’ll see that around 24 people, someone speaks … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Khalid Halim | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

You know, in the beginning, people would say, “Oh, well, we need to build this thing to scale.” But, honestly, let the site go down. If people keep coming back, it’s a pretty good sign that you’re onto something. If they don’t due to a brief technical lapse, it’s likely not just the tech; there’s a dangerous fragility with your business or business model.

Content: Quotation | Author: Payal Kadakia | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

I’ve seen hundreds of startup pitch decks and have found total addressable market (TAM) slides to be among the most frequently mis-executed. I get the sense they are often included as a formality in an attempt to get VCs to check a mental box and continue on hearing about other important things: the product, the team, the progress, the go-to-market, etc.
 
In this piece, I’m going … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jared Sleeper | Source: For Entrepreneurs | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

I first joined Airbnb as an engineer, and then as one of the first members of the budding PM team. Back then there were a couple dozen engineers, a few designers, and two very cute dogs. Over the next seven years as the company scaled to thousands of global employees, countless cute dogs, and over $30b in value, I took on a lot of interesting … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Lenny Rachitsky | Source: Medium | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

For Elad Gil, an important lesson for aspiring founders and investors alike is that nonobvious markets can lead to hypergrowth, but they’re hard to spot in the moment. The trick lies in finding what bucks conventional wisdom before anyone else and scaling that unlikely idea into a high-growth company — something Gil is very familiar with.

In his roles as an operator and angel investor, Gil … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Elad Gil | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

After graduating from college in June, I had the chance to spend three months at Union Square Ventures, helping with a project that created anonymous aggregate insights for USV portfolio companies by analyzing data across stages, customers, and industries. In order to not put a lot of extra reporting effort on our companies, we approached this project by drawing from data in existing board decks. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Max Heald | Source: Union Square Ventures | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Maybe, just maybe, you too have a nagging, gagging sense that the current atmosphere of disrupt-o-mania isn’t the only air a startup can breathe. That perhaps this zeal for disruption is not only crowding out other motives for doing a startup, but also can be downright poisonous for everyone here and the rest of the world.

Content: Article | Author: David Heinemeier Hansson | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Jenny Lefcourt is general partner at Freestyle Capital, a venture capital firm that specializes in seed and early-stage investments. She knows what it takes to be an entrepreneur because she’s been there. Lefcourt co-founded two companies — WeddingChannel.com and Bella Pictures — after dropping out of Stanford Business School. Meetings with investors to pitch the business and raise capital left her with a deeper understanding … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jenny Lefcourt | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

Howard Morgan is an encyclopedia of tech history and startup lessons. And all that he hasn’t experienced firsthand, he soaks up, too. (He keeps a running list of all the books he’s read over the last 30 years; it’s over 5,700 entries long.) In this exclusive interview, we dig into the practice Morgan has seen differentiate good founders from great founders: the ability to relax … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Howard Morgan | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Jim Clifton, chief executive of Gallup Inc., has a robust theory about entrepreneurialism and economic recovery.

Content: Thought Leader | Authors: Art Kleiner, Jim Clifton | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Economics, Entrepreneurship

The reality is that visionaries like Steve Jobs haven’t been successful because they thought of something amazing and original out of thin air. Rather, they were gifted at constantly persuading many people to follow them on their journey to something amazing and original. To succeed, startup founders need to cultivate persuasion as a skill and habit. That’s how they’re going to get the funding, the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Tyler Odean | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior, Personal Development

Should I take my company public? Why? If so, when and how? In this post, I’ll demystify these questions and provide a framework for answering them.

Content: Article | Author: Nicole Irvin | Source: Andreessen Horowitz | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Founders will often ask me, “Do you want to go through our deck?”
 
It’s not about the slide deck. We have made the decision to invest in entrepreneurs without slides, whose ambition, passion, depth of understanding of an opportunity and compelling vision come through crystal-clear in conversation.
 
But…that’s a high bar for communication. Most of the time, putting a business plan on paper helps you structure a … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Sarah Guo | Source: LinkedIn | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital