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Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
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Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#52> “we really do not want any distraction now, if you feel that strongly you can always send an unsolicited term sheet to the board to consider”
Nope, don't do that. If you receive a credible term sheet at a meaningfully higher valuation, you'll have to rerun your 409A, even if you don't take the investment.
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#53> “we really do not want any distraction now, if you feel that strongly you can always send an unsolicited term sheet to the board to consider” Nope, don't do that. If you receive a credible term sheet at a meaningfully higher valuation, you'll have to rerun your 409A, even if you don't take the investment.
Good point, will add that. Thanks!
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#54Great article! One question: you talk about market size, but you don’t address the existing competition in the space. In my opinion, two equally sized markets can have very different levels of competitive pressure. Is that something you factor into your playbook? Or do you simply not find it relevant to judge whether to enter a certain space?
I should add something about this, but if a market looks like a drunken bar fight, I'd probably not want to go there.
That said: A good market will become crowded quickly in either way.
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#55I resonate a lot with these reasons. I definitely know I am not the most optimal employee, but often times the people I clash with are people that I cannot respect. Either - They think they're higher than me (you cannot collab like that) - They want it their way, despite there being multiple ways to Rome, and will cut off the conversation with orders, not arguments - They pretend to be technical and are only making t…
> They want it their way, despite there being multiple ways to Rome, and will cut off the conversation with orders, not arguments I don't know about your experiences, but insisting on this point can be a death sentence. I've spent most of my career as "technical lead", carefully building an approach that works for what my team does based on an underlying theory that is very difficult to verbalize. I've found through…
What space are you in?
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#56I don’t know about the advice on market size… nearly every 2nd founder says go into beach head markets and stay away from markets with high competition.
The ones in beach head markets seem to succeed more often on average (anecdotal)
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#57This is all great. One thing I wanted to call out in particular is Thomas' take on investor verbal agreements. YC has a thing about this: it's called the Handshake Protocol. The idea is: you and your investor agree on (1) an amount to be invested, and (2) a valuation or cap. Maybe you shake hands. Then, after the meeting, you memorialize the deal in an email. The deal is then socially binding: reneging on a Handshake…
We used to do this in the software documentation team I worked with for 9 years: we would discuss something verbally, then the person who'd called the discussion would summarise the conclusions in an email to team members. They could then edit the summary as needed. It really helped further down the line as a communal memory device.
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#58"Great people are sometimes oddly-shaped"
Great people are racehorses, not donkeys. And racehorses tend be skittish. But they win races for you.
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#59> I love working with great people on problems just on the verge of the possible. This can be hard in large organizations, as large orgs tend to (unintentionally) avoid having too many good people on one team (the value for the large org is maximized by spreading out great people to guide many teams - so most teams will only have 1-2 great members).
The problem is in my opinion a little bit different: these good people would love to make the team in which they are working better, but are actually actively kept down by work colleagues and bosses. Thus, the organization does not profit from these good people, because is has no use for their greatness. Instead, this approach introduces a lot of (political) infights into the teams, where often the good people are treated as the evil troublemakers at the end.
Re: Halvar's Guide to Entrepreneurship
#60[flagged]