@terns Lunch & Learn: Entrepreneurship
This is another note I took from one of the @terns Lunch & Learn Sessions at Twitter. This time the topic is about entrepreneurship given Jeff Seibert, Director of Product at Twitter. Previously Jeff co-founded Increo in 2007 (acquired by Box in 2009), and co-founded & served as CEO of Crashlytics (acquired by Twitter in 2013).
- Great resources: http://etl.stanford.edu/ (Entrepreneur Thought Leaders series at Stanford)
- There is no such thing as a bad idea, YouTube started as a dating app
- Ideas often come in the form of document, slides, etc
- Balance Your Team
- Do not underestimate the importance of skills you lack
- It’s easy to discount the skills you don’t have, don’t do that
- Distribution is KING, it’s useless to build cool thing nobody uses
- “Build it and they will come” is no longer true
- How are you getting distribution? Have a concrete plan before launching
- How do you get your product to spread virally?
- “There is no black magic to successfully attracting customers via the Web.” -Rand Fishkin
- Jeff ended up meeting 36 VC firms, painful process, none of them interested.
- How do you get profit, so that you can continue to run your business?
- Time your fundraising
- Be really intentional about what to pursue
- Investor category:
- vision-driven: looking long term, breakthrough idea, change the world
- momentum-driven: looking at the number, realistic
- Vision driven: align with your product (Okay, you want to change the world, but really, you built that thing?)
- What round are you raising? What type of investor are you pitching?
- Early, pitch to vision driven investors
- Later, pitch to momentum driven investors
- Investors don’t fund DOTs
- Dot means a point on a graph of growth (one dot, need only one meeting)
- Investors want to fund a line (two dots, need two meetings)
- Investors want to fund a curve (more extreme, three dots, minimum of three meetings)
- Always be raising
- Case with tiresome Facebook SDK installation experience
- How many steps of those can you remove?
- How do we create a tool that developers want to immediately tell their friends. Can be generalized into: How do we create a product that people want to immediately tell their friends?
- Maximize your FTE
- First time experience sets expectations for your product
- If it’s a terrible experience, low chance of them to try again
- Build to succeed, not to exit
- How do you measure success?
- Stay true to your mission
- Culture-fit is paramount
- Don’t look for cheap wins
- Should I start a company?
- Popular reasons: wanna be rich, everyone is doing it, it’s cool, flexible schedule
- Right reason should be: I am irrationally obsessed with solving a problem that many people have and I am willing to commit the next 5-10 years of my life to do so despite insane stress and extremely low odds of success
- Counterintuitive advice: You should hire a full time recruiter as number 3 employee
- CEO job: to fire themselves. As the company grow:
- CEO need to hire engineer (to stop coding)
- CEO need to hire recruiter (to stop recruiting)
- etc..
- What to do if you want to start something, but you have no idea?
- There’s no perfect idea
- But you don’t want want to jump directly into your first idea either
- Founder-market fit
- What’s your competitive advantage as a founder?
- What are important things you know that others don’t?
- Are you obsessed enough?
- Social network: started gaining users as a utility
- Facebook started as a utility to solve the problem of not knowing people in your class
- Twitter started as a utility to broadcast SMS message
Also check my previous note on Product Management.