A must read for the Entrprenure wanna be

A must read for the Entrepreneur wanna be:





I have worked with Founders from a lot of varied backgrounds, pure academics, research scientists, and the very rare experienced business person, all have there own philosophy on how to start a business and run a business, I have an important statement "You do not know it all" and "your point of view is not the only correct one". I have sat around numerous meetings early mornings, late nights and long haul flight meetings and listened to them declare there point of view with a level of arrogance only Kings and Queens and the President of the USA should only be making, oops !!!I forgot to mention the venture capitalist as well, well you are spending his money to test your pet theory and fix your problems, so the £xx0m you have spent so far of his money can give him the right also.

I used to be in this camp my way is the only way, but I have learned that I usually hire smart people , who are better at some things than I am, and pay them a good salary , so let them be what you hired them to be, and listen to there input, weigh it and then implement what is the best solution not your solution, it maybe the same as your original thought, but you will have a consensus amongst the team who will be tasked to deliver, that will bring a permanent productivity boost you would never get handing out £10k salary increases.



I found an interesting article by Wil Schroter who is the Founder and CEO of the Go BIG Network , he tackles some of these issues in a refreshing manor, which may bring a smile to your day. I see a few faces pass before me when I read his opening remarks, Alex Mackie, Jock Holliman, Barak Maoz , Soren Hein, all solid VC's. Have a good read.



Your Equity Isn’t a Payment, it’s an IOU

Hello there young entrepreneur, I’m your investor. Remember me?
I’m the guy that sat in front of your heartfelt and emotional presentation to raise capital for your business. I listened closely to your entire plan, and made a few comments about what I didn’t think would work. You of course ignored my comments and assured me that with the right amount of my money, you’d be able to solve all of your problems.
I wrote you a check, you spent the money, and those problems haven’t gone away.
So aside from all of your promises of future riches, you haven’t paid me back. And, you know, the reason I wrote you that check was to create more money than I started with, which hasn’t happened.
You see – giving me equity in your company wasn’t a payment, it was an I.O.U.
Your Currency is Worthless
Giving up that equity may have felt like a payment. You may have felt like what you were giving up was an actual asset that had real value. We signed agreements and created a currency that was backed by your promises and intentions. I swapped my currency for yours. Now yours is losing its value - fast.
You may have thought those promises you made were going to be forgotten about or displaced by other promises. In fact they weren’t. Unlike the currency I gave you, I couldn’t spend your promises to hire my friends, find a fancy office or buy everyone new laptops. But you did.
Now I’m stuck holding the bag with the useless currency you gave me while you’re out trying to print new currency with even more promises. I’m sorry, I’m not buying it.
Remember these Guys?
Perhaps you may have forgotten about our arrangement, but maybe you’ll remember these guys – your employees. What? You don’t? Allow me to jog your memory.
You may recall an evening over more than a few beers when you convinced them to quit their existing jobs to go work for you. You told them that even though they would be giving up a steady income with an existing company, the money they would make from the stock options you gave them would far outweigh the risks.
They went back to their families and took your sales story with them. They convinced themselves and their loved ones that the opportunity you had for them was real. Soon thereafter they were missing family dinners, soccer games, and any time they ever had with their friends. They were pretty confident that you’d make good on that little I.O.U. you created after that last beer.
Just like me, they seem to be wondering what happened to all of those promises. They’re wondering how you expected to pay them back for all of the investments they have made in you. By now they’ve figured out that no return is going to pay them back for the time they’ve lost with their friends and family, but they sure would like to think a payout might help them create some more time in the future.
We’re Not Done Here
Maybe somewhere along the line you forgot the basic mechanics of an exchange, so let me re-educate you. When I hand you something of value, in order for the exchange to be equitable, you need to hand me something back something of equal or greater value. Unless we finish the exchange, which involves you giving me something of value, we’re not done here.
In fact, unless you give me something back at all, it’s not even an exchange. It’s probably not theft but it’s certainly not charity, and I’m not feeling like Santa Claus right now, so it ain’t a gift, that’s for sure.
In order for us to complete this transaction, and in order for you to make all of your debts right, I need you to fulfill your promises. I need you to dig down and find all of the energy, enthusiasm and focus you had when you accepted my check and think about getting that money back.
You’re not Alone
Although times are tough and you’re feeling the pressure, you may feel like you’re the one with everything to lose. Truthfully though, you’re not alone. You may be the most visible person in this transaction, but if you quit on us, we all lose.
It took all of us to start the exchange and write that IOU, and it’s going to take every one of us – your investors, your employees and even your customers – to make good on your big promise to us.
We realize that you need us as much as we need you, so we’re here to support you in any way you need us to. We just ask that you don’t forget about us, because we can absolutely assure you – we won’t forget about you

Slainte Gordon

There is hope for us all still

Interesting post from Fred, I have always recognised that running a start up can look for the outside a mess, but hey we are trying to do in 3 years what a normal company does in 20 years....so take heart and keep pushing onward, have a great weekend

From Messes To Successes

By fred wilson

I was emailing with a top technology blogger yesterday and he said about one of his competitors in tech blogging, "they are such a mess". To which I replied, "yes, but our biggest messes have often turned into our biggest successes." And then I realized that I had made a rhyme and that I would have to blog it.
When I look back at my 20+ year history of venture investing, it's certainly true that the biggest successes have been big messes at some point in their life. My most successful venture investment at Euclid, Multex, almost went bankrupt before the Internet came along and provided a cheap way to get it's service to its customers. Geocities, which was our most successful investment at Flatiron, was a total mess in mid/late 1997, about a year after we first invested. And our most successful investment to date at Union Square Ventures, TACODA, was a mess multiple times including when the first build of its software totally failed on them. Delicious also had plenty of messy moments in its brief period in our portfolio. And there are a number of other companies in the Union Square Ventures portfolio that will go nameless in this post that are currently in various states of mess but doing incredibly well just the same.
I am not advocating messmaking with your startup. There have been plenty of buttoned up startups that I've been involved in that have been great successes. Companies like Gamesville and ComScore in the Flatiron portfolio and FeedBurner and Indeed in the Union Square Ventures portfolio come to mind when I think of organizations that have had their act together from start to finish.
But there is something about messes that lead to great successes. I think it often has to do with teams that focus almost exclusively on the product and the market to the exclusion of everything else. They don't build the rest of the infrastructure that it takes to be a stable well executing business and they suffer a lot because of it. But in the process they get the one thing right that really matters. And the fact that they get the one thing right that really matters makes matters worse because the product takes off and they don't have the resources in place to deal with their success. And mess ensues.
The prescription for turning these messes into successes is really pretty straightforward. You need to build the team and bring in people who excel at the blocking and tackling and the PLANNING that most startups don't have the time or inclination to do. And you need to gradually change the culture of the business from one that is all about the product to one that is about the entire company. Sometimes, often times, that means changing the people around. And that's never easy. And it's even harder to change the people around when it was the initial team that made the product so popular in the first place. So you have to somehow find a way to add the "operational" people without drowning out the "product" people.
But I urge all of our companies not to overdo the "operational" thing too quickly. You need to get your act together for sure. But it can and should be a gradual process. You can't go from mess to success overnight and even when you are a success, your company should still always be just a little bit of a mess.

Slainte

Gordon