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Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

miguelgfierro.com

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Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#41

Post by JeanMarcS »

I started my 21 yo company with 2 friends. One we fired after about a year (he was literaly doing nothing). Then the other one and I continued for 6-7 years before he started working on other projects with an other company. Still, we still holded 50/50 of the shares (which was not a problem due to the way small companies works here).

For all this time we stayed friends.

And then, 3 years ago he offered me to join him on his new company. And at the end he screwed me. Deeply. Leaving me and our first company in big troubles.

So long our 25 years of friendship.

The funny part (if any) is that a couple of months ago, he sold me his shares of our company.

Not because he felt guilty of any kind. But because, as the company had made a really bad year in 2016, with important loss compared to the size of it, he had to sell the shares to not being a part of a loosing money company to obtain a loan from banks for buying his new house...

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#42

Post by psergeant »

not_a_moth wrote: post #4

The author opens by nobly asserting "I take all responsibility for the failure" yet then, everything that follows is how his co-founder screwed him who he is now suing. Feels kind of inauthentic overall.

I was going to simply quote:

> I, not my cofounder and ex-best friend Miguel Angel Maldonado, was to blame

and note: “this is not apparently something the author actually believes”!

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#43

Post by confiscate »

JeanMarcS wrote: post #41

I started my 21 yo company with 2 friends. One we fired after about a year (he was literaly doing nothing). Then the other one and I continued for 6-7 years before he started working on other projects with an other company. Still, we still holded 50/50 of the shares (which was not a problem due to the way small companies works here). For all this time we stayed friends. And then, 3 years ago he offered me to join him…

how much did he sell you his shares for, if you don't mind me asking? because it sounded like it's for the first company, not the new one

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#44

Post by ddtaylor »

bigiain wrote: post #26
alfredallan1 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Increasingly, Microsoft seems to be taking the same approach, at least with its Azure line of products where you can buy “service” separately from the actual cloud product.

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...

I think Rackspace is now entirely on top of AWS, whereas before they used to be a competitor in the cloud space.

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#45

Post by fanzhang »

rsp1984 wrote: post #7

If 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…

Can someone with historical experience starting a company with both a friend and a nonfriend comment about this?

We get a lot of advice (e.g. pg) to start a company with friends, but we also get a lot of comments one way or the other, but without personal experience in both.

Can someone who have been on both sides talk about it? I certainly have not been on both sides.

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#46

Post by kensai »

rsp1984 wrote: post #7

If 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…

I had a similar experience, unfortunately. Call it pressure to establish, call it stress... the friendship was ruined. Thankfully, we did not even start, but we were about to.

I would also argue that starting with a distant family member is also not ideal.

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#47

Post by clusmore »

ExBritNStuff wrote: post #3
tonyarkles wrote: post #2

Haven't read the article yet but my first question is: what the heck did they use to make that?! It's beautiful like LaTeX but appears to be plain ol' HTML!

https://github.com/miguelgfierro/sciblog - Looks pretty sweet!

Off-topic, but I find it rather baffling that with uMatrix blocking scripts from ajax.cloudflare.com, the page renders with the article content missing, despite it being included in the page source (just with style="dispay: none").

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#48

Post by komuW »

heliodor wrote: post #17
thisiszilff wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the academic style! The academic style is effective communication, the problem is there's a lot of bad essays.

The standard academic essay style in the United States is: 1) An intro starting what you want to discuss or accomplish 2) The body, or details 3) The conclusion, or summary Effective communication starts with a brief explanation of your conclusions or points, then it goes into details.

''The standard academic essay style in the United States is:''

Not everyone is in/from the USA. And not everyone cares about standards from the USA.

Communication can still be effective without following made up standards by one country.

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#49

Post by vincentdm »

rsp1984 wrote: post #7

If 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…

My experience is the reverse: I started a company with my 10+ years best friend, and it has been great. We even hauled another friend on board (he bought some shares, but we still have most of them).

Most people I know complain that they don't see enough of their friends due to increasing family commitments, but I'm spending most of my working time in the office having fun with my best friends. It's absolutely great and all the shared experiences also nurture the friendship.

I guess it all boils down to being really really honest about your assessment of each other's character. I couldn't have done it with most of my other friends. We also wrote out rules up front about all kinds of possible issues and determined who would arbitrate, so that we would have clarity before everyone is entrenched in a POV that coincides with their interest.

And our #1 rule is: if anything bothers you, you have to be explicit about it or accept your grievances will be ignored.

Re: Top Mistakes and Learnings from My Startup: Postmortem Samsamia

#50

Post by wpietri »

heliodor wrote: post #5

Reading the abstract reminded me that so many people don't understand effective communication. The academic essay style is a travesty of global proportions. Effective communication would start with the conclusion section, then the body, and leave the intro out. Make your statement quickly, and then expand upon it for whoever wants to keep reading. Saying, "in this essay I will tell you what I learned" is not going to…

I really appreciate any post-mortem like this, so I don't want to be too critical. But the document itself helps demonstrate one of the reasons for failure: poor user focus.

The faux-academic-paper style looks cool, but is a clearly worse reading experience. It's tolerable on a big screen. But on a small laptop it requires pointlessly scrolling up and down. On mobile, it's much worse.

A lesson declared in the document is "too slow iterating". But I think that's a symptom. I think the real lesson is that instead of building to the founder's vision of what's cool, you have to build for actual people and their actual needs. To do that well, you of course have test your hypotheses, which requires iteration. But the iteration itself is secondary; building the founder's fantasy iteratively can fail just at thoroughly as building it in one long go. Either way, it's self indulgence.

I'd say the blog format has the same build-what-I-think-is-cool flaw. It's more excusable in a personal website, of course. But I hope he learns this lesson before his next startup.

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