71–80 of 453 posts
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"my startup failed because I hired a snitch" good thing the laws against unpaid interns, hiring discrimination, and interview homework all have toothless penalties
What are you talking about? I was the founder/CEO.
I chased and successfully won a huge customer for my small and fledgling startup. I chased and successfully won a sole service contract for a key part of their business process. I allowed a credit situation with them to grow over the course of 3 months while I allowed them to have 60 day terms. And then, they went out of business and left me holding the bag with $150,000 in unpaid AR after I spent $90,000 generating…
I’m curious if your experience in this case was similar.
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Turning off a customer and refusing to turn them back on until the wire hits the account solves all kinds of problems.
Might not work in all cases. I have excellent clients who could not afford to pay for a consultation because they themselves were waiting on the client they were farming out jobs from. They still work with me because they know I understand their cashflow issues.
We once were jerked around by a reasonably well known customer. Their accounting people decided they did not need to perform under the payment terms the customer signed off on. First time they did it, I sent an email to the EVP that signed the order. We got an apology and a payment. The next month the same thing happened again - we redirected all their traffic to "We are unable to process your request - please contact your account coordinator to restore access" message and did not remove it until the wire hit our account ( 5pm-8:02am ). We received a letter with apologies from the customer's CEO, customer was saved and they never missed a payment again. I heard, via the grapevine, that three people at the customer's AP group were shown the door as the result of our message.
(Also because 95% of the functionality of the ~$60BOM hardware we spent 12-18 months getting into manufacture could be replicated with new components with a BOM of around $10 by the time we had the product in our hands...)
CEO would disappear for months at a time, with the promise of returning with capital. We never really knew where he went, and he wouldn’t let anyone else talk to investors (including me, who was CTO). Eventually he stopped paying us, but promised that the money was just tied up in the parent company set up in the caymans. After 2 months of not paying myself or any other employees, the COO and I drainked the remainder…
Why shouldn't a startup fuck with the cartels?
Armored cars and armed security are nice and all, but being in a situation that necessitates riding in an armored car and armed security detail is not really fun.
I've had two startups "fail" for unusually clear reasons: Startup #1: too hard to believe it could be big. Widely loved consumer website we tried to fund with angel/VC money, and it was too implausible it could ever be a $1b+ company. We needed a non-VC strategy to fund that business but didn't realize that - ran out of gas. Startup #2: found PMF, business-model fit, high-growth, and had an amazing team. Blown up by…
Could you elaborate on this in some detail? I'm in the position of believing I have "1 thing right." I worked in an industry (banking) with a serious software problem and one particular vertical that I'm confident I could build a good product for. I was in a position to evaluate all of the major vendors that would be my competitors, and I'm confident that I could get one particular thing very right. Ths problem is th…
To get to that point, you have to do a lot of the things bigger companies have to do. Those things just tend to be less complex and you have fewer people to do them. Accounting, sales, engineering, marketing, etc., etc. all exist, to some degree, in a two-person company. At first, you learn to do them yourself. You'll probably suck at them. It's okay. They all have some degree of a feedback loop. If you're open, you'll figure it out. Eventually, with success, you'll hire other people to do them.
From there, you can get access to a great network by doing an incubator as someone else mentioned, or by just getting out there and talking to users (do this day 1). But you're worried about years 2-4 when you haven't even started year 1 yet.
If you want to discuss in more detail, I'm a founder with a product in banking that's been moderately successful. Email's in my profile. Feel free to reach out.
A: Brilliant beloved and trusting visionary founder just didn't have a functioning crazy person detector (which was fortunately why he hired me), but he also unfortunately hired a self-proclaimed "Serial Hacktreprenuer" (I shit you not) as a "game finance expert", who failed to do his job raising money, and whose bizarre behavior and "volatile and erratic work habits" led to battling lawsuits and the failure of the company, who claimed the founder "tried to push him out of the company and committed an "atrocity" by trying to take away" his equity, who called the dispute a "genocide", and who then threatened to publish an "exposé documentary" by tweeting: “Looking for PR professionals to build awareness for “THE INCONVENIENT TRUTH ABOUT WILL”, an exposé documentary, releasing on YouTube 6/2012.”
But they eventually settled the lawsuits, and Will issued a statement officially thanking him for his "tenacious execution" of the company (insert capital punishment joke here), so he never followed through on that threat.
Q: What did you learn?
A: I learned to program iOS and Unity3D, and to stay out of company politics, and to listen to my bullshit detector.
https://venturebeat.com/2011/11/16/will-wright-hivemind/
https://venturebeat.com/2012/06/03/game-pioneer-will-wrights...
https://venturebeat.com/2012/11/01/simcity-pioneer-will-wrig...
http://gamingsession.taterunino.net/2012/06/03/will-wrights-...
I wrote a great software library for specific web development problems back in the dotcom boom. I learned a few things, much of you hear already but is worth repeating : * The MVP thing is real. I had a competitor that regularly released simple things that barely worked - while I continued to polished my project. By the time I'd finished the competitors stuff was all over the internet few a year or two and no one was…
Quoteworthy.
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^ this is real talk. Big companies love to be behind on AP for a variety of reasons, among them: - Their own 'highly matrixed' organizational structure makes it near impossible to find 'the correct person' to talk to about accounting issues, let alone get a straight answer out of them - so chasing these issues down becomes a huge drag on your time and energy and you may very well just give up after a while - Past-due…
A lot of this is probably true, but it's really to your benefit to understand, as a businessperson, that this is generally how large clients expect to conduct business. You can fight it and even establish better payment terms, but it isn't always worth it. It's usually cheaper just to build a business that is resilient to late payments. Over the last 15 years or so, a lot of my best customers have been super-late pay…