@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).

1. Great resources: http://etl.stanford.edu/ (Entrepreneur Thought Leaders series at Stanford)
2. There is no such thing as a bad idea, YouTube started as a dating app
3. Ideas often come in the form of document, slides, etc
4. Balance Your Team
5. Do not underestimate the importance of skills you lack
6. It’s easy to discount the skills you don’t have, don’t do that
7. Distribution is KING, it’s useless to build cool thing nobody uses
8. “Build it and they will come” is no longer true
9. How are you getting distribution? Have a concrete plan before launching
10. How do you get your product to spread virally?
11. “There is no black magic to successfully attracting customers via the Web.” -Rand Fishkin
12. Jeff ended up meeting 36 VC firms, painful process, none of them interested.
13. How do you get profit, so that you can continue to run your business?
14. Time your fundraising
15. Be really intentional about what to pursue
16. Investor category:
    1. vision-driven: looking long term, breakthrough idea, change the world
    2. momentum-driven: looking at the number, realistic
17. Vision driven: align with your product (Okay, you want to change the world, but really, you built that thing?)
18. What round are you raising? What type of investor are you pitching?
    1. Early, pitch to vision driven investors
    2. Later, pitch to momentum driven investors
19. Investors don’t fund DOTs
20. Dot means a point on a graph of growth (one dot, need only one meeting)
21. Investors want to fund a line (two dots, need two meetings)
22. Investors want to fund a curve (more extreme, three dots, minimum of three meetings)
23. Always be raising
24. Case with tiresome Facebook SDK installation experience
    1. How many steps of those can you remove?
25. 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?
26. Maximize your FTE
27. First time experience sets expectations for your product
28. If it’s a terrible experience, low chance of them to try again
29. Build to succeed, not to exit
30. How do you measure success?
31. Stay true to your mission
32. Culture-fit is paramount
33. Don’t look for cheap wins
34. Should I start a company?
    1. Popular reasons: wanna be rich, everyone is doing it, it’s cool, flexible schedule
    2. 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
35. Counterintuitive advice: You should hire a full time recruiter as number 3 employee
36. CEO job: to fire themselves. As the company grow:
    1. CEO need to hire engineer (to stop coding)
    2. CEO need to hire recruiter (to stop recruiting)
    3. etc..
37. What to do if you want to start something, but you have no idea?
    1. There’s no perfect idea
    2. But you don’t want want to jump directly into your first idea either
    3. Founder-market fit
       1. What’s your competitive advantage as a founder?
       2. What are important things you know that others don’t?
       3. Are you obsessed enough?
38. Social network: started gaining users as a utility
    1. Facebook started as a utility to solve the problem of not knowing people in your class
    2. Twitter started as a utility to broadcast SMS message

Also check my previous note on Product Management.