At about the 23 minute mark of the video PG starts talking about team size. Four is bad. One is a bit better. Two and three teams seem to do best. This started quite the discussion across the Internet about startup teams. A part of that discussion is listed web log style below.
As I said before this whole meme started, I like three. You need a developer, most important person in the bunch. If you don't have a person that can build a functional product you are doomed. Number two is a a front end developer that can also design. Design is very important in this day and age. You need these folks to work together as a product team. A business person is nice but not necessary number three (tough thing for a business guy to say). This biz person needs a combination of what some of the links point out. The business person needs to bring money, the access to money, customer development skills, the ability to do deals, marketing skills, and a strong grasp of technology.
I also agree with lots of folks that it is easier to teach technical people business skills than business people technical skills. Lots of advisors and mentors that are willing to take talented technical folks under their wings and teach them the ropes.
How about you? What are you looking for in a co-founder?
As is often the case PG has an excellent essay up on "What Happened to Yahoo" (no exclamation point from him).
While the entire is a must read the money quote for me is:
Yahoo treated programming as a commodity. At Yahoo, user-facing software was controlled by product managers and designers. The job of programmers was just to take the work of the product managers and designers the final step, by translating it into code.
One obvious result of this practice was that when Yahoo built things, they often weren't very good. But that wasn't the worst problem. The worst problem was that they hired bad programmers.
In technology, once you have bad programmers, you're doomed. I can't think of an instance where a company has sunk into technical mediocrity and recovered. Good programmers want to work with other good programmers. So once the quality of programmers at your company starts to drop, you enter a death spiral from which there is no recovery.
Good stuff. The question is how do you build a hacker-centric culture. PG has some thoughts. I saw a good example this morning.
We are sitting around the kitchen counter eating breakfast when the Kokomo Kid asks "You know anything about SQL?" "A little, why" was my cautious reply.
While it just so happens one of the companies where she works as a controller, QuantiSense, sent out a throw down challenge. Who is the best SQL expert? They distributed one of the tests that they give to developers when they are being interviewed. The test went to the entire staff. The entire staff was expected to complete it, including writing a little code snippet at the end. So my wife, who is the part time controller, is reading SQL code and trying to determine the output of a command string. It just so happens that the sample table had a few null values. She could not determine how to treat them as different versions of SQL treat null values in different ways.
So my wife, the controller, who before this morning had never ever looked at a line of code in her life sent this note:
What variant of SQL are you using? Don't I need to know this in order to understand how Null values are treated?
When you get your controller to ask what version of SQL you are using to figure out the output of a query I would say that you might be on your way to building a hacker-centric culture.
Main Entry: non·start·er noun
Date: 1902
1: one that does not start
2: someone or something that is not productive or effective
I have been thinking of this word for sometime. I see two different types of startups that are nonstarters on an almost daily basis.
The first is a team of technical co-founders that do not know how to sell or market. They are not comfortable with it. They have built something. No one is using it. They just need $250,000 to hire a sales guy or a marketing girl or they want to outsource to an agency. But they don't understand or want to understand customer acquisition. They just need the $250k for SaM.
The second is the business guy or girl with an idea. A vision. Might be a good one but they have no skills to create a product out of their vision. Not only do they not have technical skills, they have never been involved in building a product. They don't have any technical types in their networks and they are looking for some stranger to join their company as a co-founder and work for sweat equity. Or they need $250,000 - $1.2 million to build the product.
These are both scenarios that do not start. How to be more effective.
The tech team needs to invest the time to understand their potential customer buying motivations and putting together a prototype customer acquisition machine so they can gain some traction, revenue, and proof that they have a product that solves a real problem.
The business types either need to belly up to the bar with some personal credit card debt or use their personal network to make their way to a person that is willing and able to build a product prototype. They will have proof they can actually make what they have been talking about and be able to get some customer feedback on the product direction.
If you can't build both a product and and a method to acquire customers there is no chance, no hope, for success.
ReadWriteStart had a nice article the other on the downside to bootstrapping. But better than the article was a comment by Micah Wedemeyer, the founder of DoLeaf and a part of the dev team over at BLiNQ Media.
The money quote:
So...the downside to bootstrapping is that it makes it hard to get VC money? Next you're going to tell us that the downside to being gay is that it's hard to pick up chicks.
So this little meme about how different things are in Atlanta than other parts of the startup world has cropped up again. I don't think so much. And instead of pontificating a point of view I will tell you a real story that a few people are familiar with, the company conceived at Atlanta Startup Weekend 2007, Skribit.
So Skribit got rolling. Launched a nice product. Got a lot of attention. Decent traction. It's the summer of 2008. I am having a little chat with an investor. Question. What are you guys going to do with Skribit? Answer. Seems a little small.
Fast forward. 2010. Skibit founder Paul Stamatiou meets the Startup Boy himself, Naval Ravikant. Naval founded VentureHacks and AngelList. Navel invested in Twitter and Disqus. Guess what Naval told Paul. Yep. Market seems small.
From there to here, from here to there, fundable companies are everywhere. And if they are not it is usually for the same reason. If you are not getting traction with investors don't blame them. Figure out the reason why. Fix it.
So TechDrawl is saying let's somehow build a new investor orientation that does not exist in Atlanta. It is my point of view that doing this is going to take a bit of time to correct and entrepreneurs should focus on building their businesses. At some point this is essentially the local investors don't get it or the startups are not fundable.
They have a nice little application form. The things it asks for are interesting. A product demo, team, social proof, traction, and differentiation. That is what angels investors in San Francisco are asking. Sounds familiar to me and I have not been to the valley in a while.
Anyhow, you think you got what it takes? Reach out to me and let's work your deal. It's what I do for a living. And on Saturday morning for fun.
It has been quite some time since I have seen or heard from Sky Dayton when somehow I stumbled across an episode of Jason Calacanis' This Week in Startups where Sky was interviewed.
When it comes to all things Internet Sky is one smart cookie with the
perspective of someone that has been involved in the space for 17 years.
He has also knocked a few startups out of the park during this time
frame. I'll never forget his Boingo pitch to me after an EarthLink board
meeting. It was a single sentence. Lance, wants the biggest issue with
the WiFi? The answer was fragmentation and I immediately understood
the Boingo concept and what he intended to do.
So I listened to all two hours of the show. With Sky and, the love him or hate him, equally experienced and successful Jason C going back and forth the show is chock full of wisdom.
"Niche is the new mainstream."
"My test for an idea is I wake up every day and it is the first thing I think of."
"The press is like fun house mirrors."
Both this guys understand what it takes to be an entrepreneur and how to get attention for whatever they happen to be working on.
Personally I find Jason's email newsletter to be a little of a long read. But this is good stuff so I subscribed to the TWiST podcasts on iTunes. It is easy to listen while you work.
Not too long ago Matt Culbreth introduced me to Jonathan LaCour, the CTO of ShootQ. Shortly thereafter I met with Jonathan and the rest of the founding team, Andrew Nieson and Rachel LaCour Nieson, down at HobNob for about a 90 minute get to know you session. Despite, or perhaps because of, the intertwined last names I really enjoyed the discussion with the team. Most likely because I really like to take pictures and it was clear from the conversation that the team had a strong passion for photography.
Long ago Andrew and Rachel were professional photogs that had a problem. The problem was not their pictures. The problem was the business side of taking pictures. And they set out to solve it. In 2007 ShootQ was launched with the aim to liberate photographers from the tedious side of their business. I am not doing it justice, but it is essentially a photographer workflow management web app.
Fast forward to our little meeting. ShootQ was growing. Since 2007 they had created a nice business and they were at a juncture where they needed some cash to do the things they wanted to do. Shortly after we met ShootQ started having some serious discussions with a company called Pictage, a powerhouse in the professional photography space. Today they announced a deal. I advised Andrew and Rachel along the way. I think it is a good deal for them. While the official press release does not talk about price, it gives them a good exit and the resources they need to build out their platform.
It's great to see these types of deals. Self funded with efficient and significant exits for the founders. The ShootQ team is going to be staying in Decatur and I expect that this deal will not be the last we hear from the LaCour Nieson trio.
Congrats to the entire ShootQ team. When thing settle down we need to grab another pint. You buy.
Yesterday entrepreneur turned VC Mark Suster had a quite interesting post on why distributed teams are less effective. Mark goes as far to say he won't fund a startup without the CEO, VP Products, and CTO in the same locale.
I agree. And then some.
It's no big secret that I have been working on a side project called Socialytics. It is a little bit more closely held that it has not been progressing as fast as planned. I have been reflecting about this a bit. I attribute the pace of progress to three factors.
One. There is actually not a CEO, VP Products, and CTO in place. I do deals, market, and can play Mr. Outside but am by no means a product guy and certainly not a CTO. You need these three players in place to move a startup forward.
Two. Without getting into details the pace of development slowed when the proximity of the team working on the project expanded.
Three. No one is working on the project full-time. I am putting in 15 - 20 hours per week and most other folks are at about 10 max. Not enough focus.
The past six months have convinced me that you need three key team members working full-time in the same locale to significantly move a startup forward.
The focus of TES 2010 is to educate and inspire entrepreneurs on the opportunities to build and sustain innovative companies. Toward this end TES will bring together nationally recognized entrepreneurs, business thought leaders, and investors to discuss and explore what makes a successful company. Panel programming includes The Entrepreneurial Lifecycle, Social Entrepreneurship, Social Media, Mobile Technology and more. If you are a startup an Innovative Startup Showcase provides an opportunity to demo your products and services to over 50 influential VCs,
500+ attendees, and potential future customers.
The opinions expressed here are mine and mine alone (with the exception of comments by others of course). They do not represent the opinion or position of any other person on entity. All postings adhere to my personal values.
6
