161–170 of 181 posts
Began a startup senior year of college (Thryv). Managed to build a team, get sales, generate revenue and score a large partnership. Long story short, I was a customer of my own product and assumed I knew what other customers wanted. I spent the next 6 months having a product built without validating my initial assumptions before launching. The product was too niche only fitting customers who had my specific workflow…
Started a startup in Vancouver using Machine learning to automate the sports betting odds generating stack. Got two cofounders one MBA (yah i know) and a fundraiser, both failed badly as I did all the code. ended up doing 40% of the fundraising. fired the MBA for incompetence, 4 coders I had all left when other co founder did a deal where the term sheet was pulled last second. packed up left the company to the fundra…
I have a question for you: How did you navigate the line between "I should just make money off of my own product and forget customers" vs "I should focus on the product and acquire customers"? Since there's an opportunity cost to doing both, I'm curious to understand how you navigated things with that kind of "fork in the road", so to speak.
Not a single one committed on the spot to give me money despite my API being faster (in GPU and C++) smarter (generating 6% ROI on the dollar staked ON TOP of their juice) and better coded (All Haskell, Python and occasionally C). I was floored. Technology meant nothing to these wealthy people.
I realized that the people who ran the sports books were so lazy and incompetent that they would never understand what convex optimization was and that If I instead committed to learning how to bet, I would eventually grind millions of dollars out of their archaic systems. Quite simply, anyone with enough commitment and resources can outsmart the index.
Its not that they were dolts, but that their focus was not on math and better real-time odds; the focus was on bilking very poor bettors out of their money and preying on them as much as possible. These guys just worked 9 to 5 collected fat paychecks, basically work in palaces with sweet perks, and abhorred (and scoffed) change of any kind.
Once I realized that being smart and capable would never sell, it was an elementary decision. I quit, let my investors down, left a quarter million on the table (which my foolish co-founder burnt through and AGAIN got a $3m term sheet pulled at the last minute by the SAME jewish lawyer investor guy lol) and simply said, life is easier when I only have to deal with myself. The rest is history, I surpassed a half million dollars and now sustain an excellent lifestyle. hit me up anytime at @ess2dashizzleC on twitter. (yah I like snoop dogg)
Started a startup in Vancouver using Machine learning to automate the sports betting odds generating stack. Got two cofounders one MBA (yah i know) and a fundraiser, both failed badly as I did all the code. ended up doing 40% of the fundraising. fired the MBA for incompetence, 4 coders I had all left when other co founder did a deal where the term sheet was pulled last second. packed up left the company to the fundra…
im in vancouver too. interesting you are in to sports gambling are the odds anything like poker? you should write an article on it.
Started a startup in Vancouver using Machine learning to automate the sports betting odds generating stack. Got two cofounders one MBA (yah i know) and a fundraiser, both failed badly as I did all the code. ended up doing 40% of the fundraising. fired the MBA for incompetence, 4 coders I had all left when other co founder did a deal where the term sheet was pulled last second. packed up left the company to the fundra…
im in vancouver too. interesting you are in to sports gambling are the odds anything like poker? you should write an article on it.
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How did you end up with $1m of personal debt? That seems like an epic disaster, worth telling the tale to allow others to avoid making that sort of mistake. For my part, in 2 failed businesses I never went more than £10k or so into personal debt.
In india when you borrow for business ,it's usually personal friends, family and distant cousins. I never borrowed but from my family , but since my business partner borrowed hell lot from friends, cousins, to keep it going , we were essentially paying 24%-36% interest on the debt, almost all the profit was going to just pay interest. And since we were Not making operational profit , we did turn over of 5million usd…
Also why would you pay US$ salary in India(assume)? There are lot of well funded small startup's that would staff augment you for US20$ an hour for decent programmer and you could have used remote college student for the programming after initial training.
Haven't done startup as thinking of doing in in our environment gives me jitters as I am not a very social person and gets really pissed of with govt officials. May the that was only way you had at the time.
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im in vancouver too. interesting you are in to sports gambling are the odds anything like poker? you should write an article on it.
I plan to most def, and I plan on open sourcing the machine learning tech once I hit my first million next year. The odds are nothing like poker however, it takes a long long time to understand all the ins and outs of making money in sports gambling and the strategy is much different. FYI: I am awful at poker.
I've had the biggest temptation during this summer checking out the odds on FIFA games. Although betting on Brazil would've been really bad!
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In india when you borrow for business ,it's usually personal friends, family and distant cousins. I never borrowed but from my family , but since my business partner borrowed hell lot from friends, cousins, to keep it going , we were essentially paying 24%-36% interest on the debt, almost all the profit was going to just pay interest. And since we were Not making operational profit , we did turn over of 5million usd…
Any reason why you went for 24% to 36% loan with friends rather than bank loan? with the turn around like that you could have also taken small business aid loan which are 12% at worst. Also why would you pay US$ salary in India(assume)? There are lot of well funded small startup's that would staff augment you for US20$ an hour for decent programmer and you could have used remote college student for the programming af…
One of the most important lessons , I got early on is ,you need developers and staff full time on rolls,right next to you if your business model is dynamic and also you are not sure of staff quality. If you go to skillpages, there will be thousand resumes claiming they know Python , once you hire them you will know the quality, outsourcing works to that kind student quality is like sure shot disaster.
Also I just was not lucky enough to find quality talent to outsource.
About india being good for entrepreneurs , yes and no, depends on what you are working, but just to give up on startup idea altogether is not recommended ,choose carefully plan well and most of all EXECUTE WELL.
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> Everything else we did wrong lol, implying completing "the illusion that everything was done in-house at the agency" wasn't wrong in the first place. Anyway, I still can't imagine why people found agencies. If I want to do consulting, I'd become a freelancer, this pays much better and there is plenty of work. If I don't, I would work at a real software company that builds and sells software products...
You are unkind but not entirely wrong. If you read my previous comment closely: that's something which gave us an edge early on but later became an albatross around our necks.
I have some hard feelings about consulting :\
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Congrats on coming out of failure. I would love to learn more about what worked and what didn't work. What sort of pitfalls you had, lessons learned, etc
The most important lesson , 1.Never ever give personal gaurantee for more than your net worth! So that failure stops with you, otherwise your entire family gets affected. 2.Focus on one thing , become incredibly good at it. 3.Focus on customers and trust yourself on giving value , customer insight is better than customer need. 4.Be alert about interest on debt ,business debt ( high interest) essentially will kill eve…
Someone should start a blog interviewing failed startup founders and letting them tell their stories and share their lessons, really in-depth. Maybe even bring in other people for multiple perspectives.
You mean http://mixergy.com/ ? :-)