Bad partnership will kill any business. Don't partner/cofound with strangers and be ready to lose friends if you do.
Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
31–40 of 74 posts
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#32If you are trying to start a startup with a friend, think about this, do you really know this person? are you confident that under high levels of pressure this person is going to help you or is he going to break apart? I started a startup with my best friend whom I knew for several years. The startup succeeded (kind of, we got acqui-hired by BigTech) but the friendship turned into a deep alienation in the process. St…
> Startup pressure can bring out the true character of a person Not necessarily. It can bring out the worse. Let's say you are stressing a machine beyond its limit. The risks are specified in the manual but you still do it. The resulting mechanical damage can't be blamed on the manufacturer.
So well put. People you could have roomed with, drink with, hung out with, even been trapepd on a desert island with, all successfully, can turn into monsters under the pressure of running out of money and associated startup events. And you can find yourself echoing that behaviour.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#33What was he doing from end of 2015 to middle of 2016? If I lost access to my bank accounts I’d be contacting the bank, calling emergency board meetings and filing legal motions the next day.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#34If you are trying to start a startup with a friend, think about this, do you really know this person? are you confident that under high levels of pressure this person is going to help you or is he going to break apart? I started a startup with my best friend whom I knew for several years. The startup succeeded (kind of, we got acqui-hired by BigTech) but the friendship turned into a deep alienation in the process. St…
Sometimes the friendship is worth preserving in favor of going into business with someone else that if you lose, no big deal.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#35I would never start any business with friends or families.
Anything with lots of money involve can hurt relationship.
With that said there were other points in there too and pitfalls that OP did early on that are good lessons. I think another thing to consider is that he didn't have a lawyer or accountant from the inception to go over the legality of 50%-50% and administration role.
It's a sad article but the ending was bright and I'm glad he's taking it as lessons learned. It'll help other people too.
edit:
The pivot from B2C to B2B is interesting. I never actually consider this but reading this now it's more of a "No duh" moment.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone that has done both, you might be right. Consulting is way more profitable, but the thing is that you basically are working for someone else, and you can scale it as far as you can fit it on your calendar or hiring. But with a product you can sell 1,000% of what you had yesterday, the schedules might be a little tight since B2B expects at least a few sales meetings. So it has its pros and cons. And from my…
> As someone that has done both, you might be right. I don't think he has done both. He wouldn't have asked in such a case.
It seems from the sentence that he himself has done both, he is not claiming that the original comment's author has done both.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#37One thing to consider is that your co-founder might not actually be your friend. It's easy to think you have a relationship with someone that you spend a lot of time coordinating with that might not truly exist. I believe most problems in any kind of relationships are based on expectations. It can be devastating to realize that someone else doesn't actually care what you think unless it serves their agenda and result in feeling used or exploited.
My advice, which I have failed at many times, is keep business compartmentalized and separate.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#38One thing to consider is that your co-founder might not actually be your friend. It's easy to think you have a relationship with someone that you spend a lot of time coordinating with that might not truly exist. I believe most problems in any kind of relationships are based on expectations. It can be devastating to realize that someone else doesn't actually care what you think unless it serves their agenda and result…
This is so important, it's concerning to think about how many good years of smart people have been wasted. It should be taught in school.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#39If you are trying to start a startup with a friend, think about this, do you really know this person? are you confident that under high levels of pressure this person is going to help you or is he going to break apart? I started a startup with my best friend whom I knew for several years. The startup succeeded (kind of, we got acqui-hired by BigTech) but the friendship turned into a deep alienation in the process. St…
Sometimes the friendship is worth preserving in favor of going into business with someone else that if you lose, no big deal.
I started a small real estate business and asked my friend of 15 years to invest with me. He did sight unseen because he was a friend. I didn't know what I was doing. I made some horrible rookie mistakes. Even though we were suppose to be partners, I voluntarily took the hit on the loss and made him whole so he didn't lose any money. Our friendship was more than worth the loss. He trusted me and keeping our friendship was worth every penny.
Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not _super_ surprising. AWS has spawned an entire industry who provide addon services/support for it (and if I were those companies, I'd be waiting for the Bezos shoe to drop and eat the entire space's profit). The company I work for has a bunch of clients who outsource all of their AWS capability - usually in insanely expensive and inflexible ways...
Of course, even companies like Salesforce, SAP have little cottage industries sprung up around them that do the “requirement analysis”, setup, maintenance, etc. I always wonder if it’d not be effectively cheaper to hire a parttime sysadmin to manage one’s own servers than all this trouble companies now go to with AWS/Azure. A while back, I had a good look at the AWS offerings, and they were alluring enough to someone…
Because the full value of AWS or other offerings is in not maintaining the servers and backbones they run on.