BRYCE DOT VC: Suffering As a Competitive Advantage
Starting companies is hard.
Building them into sustainable businesses over time is even harder.
Much has been postulated about why one founder flounders and the others emerge as the next Mark Zuckerberg. Some will attribute the difference to smarts, connections, or capital, but a new research…
It wasn’t long ago that the billion dollar Instagram boys set out to debunk 8 startup myths to a room full of Stanford Mayfield fellows. At the time of this video, the service had about 4 million users. Earlier this week they announced having added that many users in just a matter of days. My how time flies.
But the advice and insights shared here are really timeless. From the “bar exam”; i.e., a test to see whether you’re able to explain your product to a friend in a bar without losing their attention, to the 6ft tall 1 yr. old; ie, scaling up a company before it’s ready or needed, there are some real gems in here.
As they talk it seems their primary takeaways from the Instagram experience are to believe in yourself, trust your instincts and build the product that only you can build. And most importantly, just start.
Priceless advice and required weekend viewing.
“ If you think you might be acquired by a company – do your homework. Some tech professionals are helplessly naive about financial transactions. They never stop to think, “what is the market cap of my acquirer, how much cash do they have, what would their investors think about dilution, etc.” In most cases the numbers in your head are fantasy land”
Growing Up and Moving On
Today I read a really interesting post about Naveen leaving foursquare and more generally, founders getting pushed out of their startups.
This is an issue I’ve thought a lot about and it’s one that you hear a lot about in the tech startup world. No founder wants to leave their company (usually) and especially not on terms that are not really their own.
However, the reality is that very few people in this world have what it takes to lead a company through its entire life cycle. Starting a company takes a different skill set than scaling company which takes a different skill set than operating a company over the long-term.
There seems to be some level of stigma about a founder moving on or getting pushed out.. sort of a “that’s too bad” kind of thing. I feel like people, and founders specifically, should do more to embrace their true skill set, and the fact that at some point it may reach a limit of usefulness to the company.
To me, their is no shame in creating something that has a huge effect on the world, letting other people run with it, and then moving on to create something new.
*photo courtesy of BottleLeaf*
