Viewing profile — jmaskell

It's not about fear of failing. I wouldn't do it again unless I was convinced the venture would be successful (and I think there's a significantly increased chance of that, based o…

I believe that being a solo founder contributed to the failure of my startup. In short, it puts a lot of pressure on yourself, that can't be split with other members of the team. I…

This is probably skewed by finance and a small number of extremely well paid bankers, hedge fund traders etc.

I've been living here for a few years, and the main killer has always been rent. I've been able to get this down by sharing with others, learning about nice but cheaper neighbourho…

The urgency to interview, followed by the abrupt halt in communication isn't something that is unique to Silicon Valley or engineering positions. I had it a lot in London a couple …

also get used to befuddling even competent recruiters, at one startup I did almost every job in the place at one time or another, when looking for a new job it drove the recruiters…

Unfortunately I'm not a programmer (I can write enough code to be dangerous) - but more of an ops/product/sales type person instead, so it was a bit harder for me to find something…

It's definitely about having the right attitude. I was able to find a job that gives me a lot of autonomy, but also direction. At the moment, I quite enjoy letting someone else mak…

It didn't make enough to support the team. There was an argument for running it as a side project / one man business, but that wasn't something that I wanted to do (and investors s…

The struggle was more around scaling the business. We had income, and raised some seed funding on the back of it (in order to go full time on the project). We didn't take further i…

I got this a lot. I think it was the cause of me not getting a few job offers. It's good to pre-empt the concern and be clear about wanting to take what you learnt on to another pr…

It's fine wine (£100 per bottle and up). Of which about 80% is Bordeaux. I calculated those figures by looking at widely used market stats, and then the turnover of the UK's fine w…

It seems to me that you are saying that if buyer and seller know each other then they would eschew the market for a more intimate trading arrangement. This is exactly what I'm sayi…

I hope so. I can definitely understand why investors prefer second or third time entrepreneurs so much!

Exactly. There's a wine trading company called Wine Networks - a branch of SK Group (huge South Korean conglomerate). They're relatively successful, but are hugely inefficient (no …

It's a little more complex - a lot of our customers were trading wine to make a profit, and were far more price sensitive. They traded on the site in the early days. Sadly, the nov…

We did. I had a year of experience (on the operations side), our sales guy had several years of experience. Many people in the industry were surprised when we closed - they fully e…

That would have taken a lot of money (to buy stock), and expose us to a lot more risk. Investors were backing us for the disintermediation. I quite strongly believe that someone wi…

Exactly. I'd have had to lie and mislead investors to get the money. That's fraud and something I wasn't prepared to do.