1001 Posts Found

Startups that grow into transformative companies do two things: (1) they nail the basics and (2) they cultivate the right habits (core operating principles).

The first is mandatory. If you don’t get the basics right, in all probability your company won’t succeed. A list of things we consider basics:

• Fundraising (don’t run out of capital)
• Ship (don’t just talk about it, ship it)
• Customer focus (live

… [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: James Currier | Source: NFX | Subjects: Best Practices, Entrepreneurship, Management

How the right mix of experience and innovation generates a great start-up top management team.

Content: Article | Author: Nathan Furr | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Nikhyl Singhal advises folks at every end of the startup spectrum, from scrappy early-stage founders to heads of product at some of the biggest unicorns. Founders and product leaders at companies big and small bring him their toughest questions: When should founders hand over the product controls? What should you look for in a PM? How do you structure the team? How do you balance … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Nikhyl Singhal | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management

Gloria Lin has gone on a lot of dates in the past year. No, not that kind. We’re talking about co-founder dating. As the next generation of company builders takes shape and new founder mafias spin out of places like Stripe, it stands to reason that more co-founder stories won’t fit the traditional mold, and will instead look a lot more like Lin’s.

Lin’s process is … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Gloria Lin | Source: First Round Review | Subject: Entrepreneurship

What happens to a company when a visionary CEO is gone? Most often, innovation dies and the company coasts for years on momentum and its brand. Rarely does it regain its former glory. Here’s why.

Editor’s Note: for more on this theme, read “Visionary, Salesman and Pragmatist Model of Business Succes.”

Content: Article | Author: Steve Blank | Source: VentureBeat | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Management, Organizational Behavior

Having the best product won’t help your start-up without a focus on segmentation, targeting and positioning.

Content: Article | Author: Patrick ‘Mad’ Mork | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subject: Entrepreneurship

When a startup launches, there have to be at least some users who really need what they’re making — not just people who could see themselves using it one day, but who want it urgently. Usually this initial group of users is small, for the simple reason that if there were something that large numbers of people urgently needed and that could be built with … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

There are strong arguments that diversity promotes effectiveness. But I think that has implications that people haven’t really thought through. What about situations where some people believe diversity produces ineffectiveness? That’s not a hypothetical — this has long been the argument against diversity in the military. But there’s a counter-argument rooted in social justice. Do I want to live in a world where people’s outcomes … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Ken Shotts | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Human Resources, Organizational Behavior

As Vinod Khosla has observed, your market entry strategy is often different from your market disruption strategy. And too many people focus on how small the market entry side is, but the entry point almost definitionally has to be small, because you have to find a space that isn’t covered or saturated by incumbents. If you find a gap and push your way through, often … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Elad Gil, Vinod Khosla | Source: First Round Review | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Strategy

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