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The first 18 months of a startup

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Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#61

Post by majormajor »

randomsearch wrote: post #20
josh_carterPDX wrote: post #12

There are some useful nuggets here, but every company and founder are different. Having run three different accelerator programs I have learned to STOP assuming what makes a good or bad idea. Some of the companies I thought were certain for failure have raised multiple rounds, found product market fit, and are growing just fine. The first 18 months of a startup should include one thing, "GET SOMEONE TO PAY FOR YOUR P…

It’s obvious that a promising startup can fail, eg great idea but bad execution. It’s really not obvious that an unpromising startup could succeed, though. What were the main factors in those unpromising startups doing well?

Promising/unpromising is a judgement call here. If you thought something was a great idea but you were wrong, there's a potential failure mode for a promising startup. And the reverse would give you a successful one that you found unpromising.

That's what the poster you're replying to is saying - it's hard to be consistently correct on if an idea is good or bad.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#62

Post by JCM9 »

philshem wrote: post #36

Wasn’t this guy the CEO of the unnamed startup in Anna Wiener’s “Uncanny Valley”? https://slate.com/culture/2020/01/uncanny-valley-brand-names...

That’s what was said at the time. Regardless, the stories coming out of Mixpanel under his leadership weren’t great to put it lightly.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#63

Post by edoceo »

ggregoire wrote: post #7
hawthornio wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“It’s like Stadia but for Chrome”

Showerthoughts: why not stream the entire OS at this point, with a dedicated storage? Like an EC2 with a desktop environment that you can access in a VNC-like way but with the resolution, FPS and input responsiveness similar to what Stadia/Mighty offers. Which will allow you to play Cyberpunk (Stadia) + browsing the web (Mighty) + do whatever else you want, like using After Effects (?).

Apache Guacamole is like webbased vnc client so any VNC server would do

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#64

Post by potatoman22 »

andy_ppp wrote: post #40

I liked the thread a lot, but as with all things startup I feel a lot like this is trusting a very successful horse race gambler with his perfect method to track the form. I have a feeling with these things timing and luck is everything no matter how well you follow what worked before. I bet some startups do almost the opposite of this advice and still end up doing well just because the idea and timing were so good.

People who take the thread's advice to heart will be better positioned to benefit from luck.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#65

Post by ozim »

simonw wrote: post #54

One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict with other advice, and that's OK. The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours? So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the conte…

My approach in life is that all advice is bad.

Exactly because of the same reason you write about.

Someone giving advice usually does not have all needed context of your situation. At the same time they are not going to give you all the context they were in while taking similar decision.

Even if you would deal with the same people as that person, those people might just not like you and they liked him/her. Where someone giving advice will think they are just like that for everyone.

Even advice about "great restaurant" is probably bad, because well they were there a while ago, maybe chef will have a bad day or you will get a rude waiter because you will sit in a different spot, maybe they were there with great friends and you want to go with a girlfriend. It might turn out that restaurant was not that great when you arrived.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#66

Post by owyn »

Cilvic wrote: post #60
airstrike wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is literally what https://shadow.tech does I used it for about a year and it's fantastic if you have really fast (preferably wired) internet

That's sounds awesome and I'd be ready to pay alot for that. Can you use it as desktop replacement installing all applications etc.? Or is there an hour limit? The pricing of 14 € / month can't really provide an unlimited usage of 4 core/12GB/256GB SSD/GTX 1080? Also when i try to pre-order for Germany the ETA is Mach 29, 2022 ...

I've been using Shadow for a year and that's exactly what it does. It's a standard windows box and you can install whatever you want on it, and there's no usage limits. I use it to play windows games on my mac without fussing with dual booting. I played through the Witcher 3 entirely on that machine. :)

Non action games are playable over Wifi, but on a wired connection it's much better. It does have its own client and disconnects if you are idle so I don't think you could run it as a server, but I never tried.

The only odd issue I ran into is that it supports a virtual USB device for pass-through which is cool, but you can't use a fancy multi-button mouse as that USB device because the mouse is "special" and it's always a 2 button virtual mouse but the xbox controller worked just fine.

They do have a fairly slow rollout of new hardware updates and new country support at this point, and seemed to be in danger of going out of business for a while, but so far it's still there. You can always hook up something like Dropbox to back up work in progress.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#67

Post by tomerico »

ozim wrote: post #65
simonw wrote: post #54

One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict with other advice, and that's OK. The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours? So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the conte…

My approach in life is that all advice is bad. Exactly because of the same reason you write about. Someone giving advice usually does not have all needed context of your situation. At the same time they are not going to give you all the context they were in while taking similar decision. Even if you would deal with the same people as that person, those people might just not like you and they liked him/her. Where some…

Do you also ignore online reviews on movies, restaurant, products, etc.?

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#68

Post by cutenewt »

simonw wrote: post #54

One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict with other advice, and that's OK. The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours? So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the conte…

I always remind myself that advice givers often have a projection bias.

Reading between the lines, it seems like this founder is telling others advice he's trying to tell himself.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#69

Post by danenania »

simonw wrote: post #54

One of the most important lessons I learned as a founder is that everyone will give you advice, and the advice will often conflict with other advice, and that's OK. The trick is to look at the source of the advice and think about why that advice worked for them. What aspects of their situation are similar to yours? So all advice is good, provided you use it all as inputs to your decision making and consider the conte…

Definitely! It's also important to realize that many people are way too quick to give advice with limited information. Watch out for anyone who gives you advice quickly without taking the time to understand your situation. Giving good advice to a founder who is past the early stages and no longer a neophyte takes a fair amount of questioning and digging in. It's rare to find easy answers without tradeoffs. Even if someone is really smart or has been successful in the past, low-effort advice that they give you off the top of their head will often cause more harm than good if you follow it blindly.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#70

Post by kingsuper20 »

Good Lord this makes me feel old.

mixpanel: "Powerful, self-serve product analytics to help you convert, engage, and retain more users."

I'd love to read about founders that actually make something. In days of yore, practically any startup actually made a physical 'thing', unless they were busy writing some useful workstation software. Basing an entire economy on internet advertising and related issues strikes me as a risky bet.

To be fair, probably due to offshoring, about the only useful startups I've personally run into for the last decade or so have 100% been specialized medical hardware. The FDA can quickly become the main focus of your life.

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