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“One of the problems with raising money is it teaches you bad habits from the start,” said Jason Fried, the co-founder of the software company Basecamp, who has written frequently on the perversions of the venture capital industry. “If you’re an entrepreneur and you have a bunch of money in the bank, you get good at spending money.” But if companies are forced to generate revenue from the beginning, “what you get rea…
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I am very disconnected from the "startup" world, and something in your comment has me asking: What is the difference between a startup and a business? To me, they ought to be one in the same...
Paul Graham (and Y Combinator I guess) believe that the difference is the goals. A startup is a company designed to grow fast. PG, 2012 http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2013/12/16/what-... a startup is a company designed to scale very quickly Steve Blank believes a startup is determined by the search of a business model. If you have a business model, then you have a sm…
Another distinction worth making, almost its own axis really, is the difference between "a tech business" and "a business that uses tech".
Companies like Cisco, Facebook, Apple, Google, Canonical, and so forth are companies that are tech companies--without their technology, they wouldn't be in business at all. They provide a service or product that is IP in its own right.
Companies like Chipotle, Subway, Uber, Lyft, AirBNB, DoorDash, Dollar Shave Club, and so forth are companies that use tech to achieve economies of scale and growth that wouldn't be as easy otherwise but could still be done. You can imagine a way of making something that to the user is substantially like the Uber today without a complicated backend, even just using call centers and massive dispatch. The key part of their business is part-time contractor drivers, which is a business and not tech innovation.
It's easy to assume that all startups are tech startups, but that's not quite true and it also can limit and slow developing a good business model.
Those 2 things should be the very top concern of any software entrepreneur/founders. I don't understand why the survey doesn't reflect that.
They say hiring good talent is a primary concern, but if that were really the case, wouldn't start ups be moving to cities where the labor supply was greater than the labor demand? And wouldn't there be a corresponding willingness to hire remote workers (as this greatly increases the pool of candidates)?
Moving to an area where labor is 1/2 as cheap, could double your runway, assuming there aren't other timed restraints.
>Nearly 1 in 5 founders say they're raising a unicorn This is not necessarily optimism. some companies require that kind of scale in order to get the economies of scale required for profitability.
You put "6-0" instead of "6-10"
Good job putting this all together!
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Paul Graham (and Y Combinator I guess) believe that the difference is the goals. A startup is a company designed to grow fast. PG, 2012 http://www.paulgraham.com/growth.html http://www.forbes.com/sites/natalierobehmed/2013/12/16/what-... a startup is a company designed to scale very quickly Steve Blank believes a startup is determined by the search of a business model. If you have a business model, then you have a sm…
Quite right. Another distinction worth making, almost its own axis really, is the difference between "a tech business" and "a business that uses tech". Companies like Cisco, Facebook, Apple, Google, Canonical, and so forth are companies that are tech companies--without their technology, they wouldn't be in business at all. They provide a service or product that is IP in its own right. Companies like Chipotle, Subway,…
I'm not sure there's such a strong distinction between a tech business and a business that uses tech nowadays.
Interesting answers on lack of gender diversity in IT: Most of the men believe the reason is that there just aren't that many women entering the field, while almost all the women blame bias at various stages of education, hiring and promotion. Someone has a cognitive dissonance.
The 2 biggest reasons start ups fail are: 1. No/not enough market demand for what your building 2. User acquisition costs exceed LTV. Those 2 things should be the very top concern of any software entrepreneur/founders. I don't understand why the survey doesn't reflect that. They say hiring good talent is a primary concern, but if that were really the case, wouldn't start ups be moving to cities where the labor supply…
2. Going to places like the bay where demand is high and supply is meh, is behind the notorious idea that better engineers are there to compete for and/or other engineers will eventually come to the market from another city for the hunting. Sometimes it pays off, sometimes this doesn't. I rather play it safe too and go to a place with potentially good engineers and less demand, also offering remote work (But many think non-face-to-face interaction slows productivity).
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There are the places that pay and places that don't pay. Your numbers in London suggest that you should look better and negotiate harder ;)
I was talking about mid-level engineers in startups, not senior engineers in banks, if you want to compare big employers, £80-£120k is nothing compared with $250-300k you get as senior developer in Silicon Valley.
I don't know the details of the costs of living and all the expenses. Maybe SV is better but I just want to say that it is not twice as better, contrary to what some comments would have you think.
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Quite right. Another distinction worth making, almost its own axis really, is the difference between "a tech business" and "a business that uses tech". Companies like Cisco, Facebook, Apple, Google, Canonical, and so forth are companies that are tech companies--without their technology, they wouldn't be in business at all. They provide a service or product that is IP in its own right. Companies like Chipotle, Subway,…
But then, can't you make the same analogy for early stage Google--basically, a big marketing firm that manually places ads in the yellow pages? Similarly, Facebook can also be executed over a phone system ("Press 1 to hear your friends' updates, press 2 to post an update...") I'm not sure there's such a strong distinction between a tech business and a business that uses tech nowadays.
Facebook was a tech company specifically, and not a company using tech, because the entire product was devoted to rapidly filling social profiles and spinning up the microsites that were user accounts, mining those accounts for information, and then integrating as a platform for advertisers and game developers. None of that tech is really stuff they could've outsourced and still had a business--they couldn't have just white-labeled MySpace for example and gotten away with it.
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This data point isn't super useful without telling us the total size of your class. 5 out of 5–10 is great, 5 out of 25–50 might be realistic, 5 out of 100+, not great.
I'm from a class of 30. There were 2 women. This is in Ireland though.