Whilst spending time with my newborn son in the last 48 hours, I realized that
it's possible to draw a lot of comparisons between how founders act within their
startups and how parents do with their newborn babies.
The one comparison that particularly jumped out at me, is how new
The Lean Startup [http://theleanstartup.com/] approach to creating new business
has become massively popular amongst online entrepreneurs for one reason: it
works. The Lean Startup methodology with regards to customer development
(broadly) dictates that we can create better products (and thus business)
through continuous learning via being in constant
Everyone is working to hard. I include myself in that statement: I work too hard
most of the time. Heck, in my average week I make compromises with regards to my
health, my home life, my marriage and all of my friendships. All for the sake of
working harder.
But
Many of you don't know this, but I actually have a Honours degree in
(traditional) management accounting & business strategy (yep, I studied to be an
accountant before my own business started taking off). And whilst I'm not
actively practicing the skills I picked up during my student years, I love
I'd add"it takes money to make money".
If you can't de-risk such an early stage startup, then we're basically talking
about gambling to some extent. Yes social proof works well and gut feel (based
on experience) works too, but many of these type of investments won't work out.
I
Andrew talks about all of the initial mistakes they made at Groupon. Found it
funny and enlightening!
Watch the rest of the Startup School presentations here too.
[http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/videos?page=1]
I just had an epiphany of sorts…
With regards to the financials of your startup, there are only two things that
really matters: money that comes into your company & the money that goes out.
There’s no need to waste time & energy in an in-depth analysis of your finances
(most
I recently stumbled onto the Second Startup Syndrome
[http://bhorowitz.com/2010/06/14/second-startup-syndrome/] article by Ben
Horowitz and whilst reading it I realized that I was going through exactly the
same thought processes, emotions & ideas as was described in the article.
Since the beginning of the year, I’