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The first 18 months of a startup

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Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#31

Post by blacktriangle »

loganfrederick wrote: post #29
polote wrote: post #24

/21 dont listen to these advice because that only worked one time for one person (myself) I'm wondering if startup gurus know their advice won't help anyone but still give them because that's what people want to read. Or if they don't know this won't help anyone

My optimistic view is that I think it's more that they are providing a data point rather than a conclusion. If every founder writes their experience, then maybe readers will have a large enough sample to find some signal from the noise (luck of individual founders).

I think this is also why its so important for founders to talk about their general background, professional experiences, and product domain. Understanding the constraints the advisor is working with helps the advisee effectively process or ignore their advice.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#32

Post by raverbashing »

codezero wrote: post #5

As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works). After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do. Founder advice is for founders.

Really, I think some twitter accounts are more vapid feel-good nuggets than actual advice (including this one)

I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (looks too niche to be sustainable)

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#33

Post by josh_carterPDX »

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?

It's a good question. From what I've seen a lot of it has to do with their network and the founder's ability to sell the narrative that what they're building is something no one else can build and/or execute. In those early days of a startup investors look at the team more closely than the product. If you're able to show that you're focused on revenue from day one it tends to shift the leverage. Very few investors are funding ideas anymore.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#34

Post by liuliu »

hardwaregeek wrote: post #27
sparsely wrote: post #3

No opinion on the thread, but his current startup involves streaming a chrome instance from the cloud, which feels very "Internet in 2021"

Yeah...I'm skeptical to be honest. If you're running Chrome on a server, you have to fetch the website to the server, then send back to the client. Now I suppose the server could be in some datacenter with really fast internet and include some aggressive caching, but that's still two trips instead of one. I suppose if you're running major web apps in the browser, this could be a good idea. With the rise of WebAssembl…

It surely will pivot. Low-latency high-fidelity streaming doesn't come handy, and a lot of hard engineering work. But if worked, a lot of applications. Like you said, 100Gbps NIC between your data and video editor is much better than 1T fast local storage editing rig with 10Gbps NIC to the archive. Citrix worked really well in industries that need tighter control over your digital environment. Oculus Link just started to support WiFi, and would be cool if it can go over WAN.

There are some competitions, such as Parsec or Stadia, but if you can have an higher-frequency use case to iterate on, why not go with that?

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#35

Post by void_mint »

The two themes I'm noticing from this list are "Lean heavily into a founders/startup community" and "Ask tough questions often". There are several bullets around coaching, bouncing ideas off of other (external) founders, leaning into internal cofounders strengths/passions, etc. I would generalize to say these things are not specific at all to the first 18 months at a startup (or startups in general). Leaders should be communicating with other leaders, teammates should be relying heavily on other teammates, all humans should seek counseling (via therapists, coaches and friends). A significant part of this process is knowing when to just smile and nod through unsolicited feedback/shitty advice. This is also totally unrelated to startups.

To his second theme (ask tough questions often), it's just the common trap tons of startup founders seem to fall into. "We don't know if users will pay for this" should be one of the first questions you answer, way way before "How will we scale" or "What tech should we use". Managing worry is identical to asking tough questions (why are we worried about this and how do we overcome the worry). Mitigating risk is identical to asking tough questions (what could cause us to fail that is in our control). A part of being a leader is being unafraid to ask questions that need answering, even if their answers may be painful or scary. Most people aren't capable of looking hard at all of their possible failure scenarios honestly, and even less are able to objectively move forward with the findings of that examination. It's a tough ego game to play.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#37

Post by nprz »

sparsely wrote: post #3

No opinion on the thread, but his current startup involves streaming a chrome instance from the cloud, which feels very "Internet in 2021"

Why would people want this? With the recent concerns of censorship and getting locked out of platforms this just feels like handing even more power to some central authority that can suddenly decide who can and cannot browse the web.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#38

Post by PragmaticPulp »

codezero wrote: post #5

As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works). After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do. Founder advice is for founders.

There are good pieces of advice in founders’ self-reported experience, but it needs to be taken as a distorted data point rather than absolute truth.

Founders tend to rewrite history in ways that benefit themselves presently. It’s human nature, but it’s finely honed in founders who are pitching their personal brand on social media. Even the humble, self-deprecating anecdotes are usually carefully filtered in ways that make them look good in the present, or as something they can wear as a badge of honor for overcoming.

I worked for a small startup that nearly died because one of the founders made some really bad decisions. That same founder now writes a lot of Medium thinkpieces about how to be successful, including advice to do some of the things that were clearly not at all beneficial to our startup.

Take everything with a grain of salt.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#39

Post by freebuju »

raverbashing wrote: post #32
codezero wrote: post #5

As an early employee of several small startups that have grown to decent sizes, I'll never take the advice of a successful founder (I'll use it when it works). After hiring hundreds of people the most knowledgeable people were the ones who worked on successful teams at failing companies, and very few founders go through that experience in the same way as non-founders do. Founder advice is for founders.

Really, I think some twitter accounts are more vapid feel-good nuggets than actual advice (including this one) I've checked the thread and while there's some materiality to it, it's not anything I haven't heard elsewhere. I'm also wary of founders that might have "gotten lucky" (a weak project in SV is much easier to get financed than a more solid project elsewhere), I'm skeptical of that founder's current project (l…

> looks too niche to be sustainable

To be fair, he did say that his first target was 10 customers. I assume all 10 of them happy as he mentioned.

Re: The first 18 months of a startup

#40

Post by andy_ppp »

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.

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