Posts from entrepreneurship

The New York Times has a piece up on Eliud Kipchoge, the world’s best marathon runner.

I read it with interest yesterday as I like to think of startups as marathons and I am always on the lookout for ideas and insights that can help entrepreneurs and investors.

Eliud is an impressive person and, as you might expect, he is extremely disciplined.

He says in the piece:

Only the disciplined ones in life are free. If you are undisciplined, you are a slave to your moods and your passions.

That rings so true to me.

It is true in investing, where I like to have a framework and stick to it and not let my emotions get in the way.

But it is also true in building companies.

Being focused on the long game and what you want to achieve is the best way to get there.

I see many teams looking around at what others are doing and it makes them crazy.

And I see a few teams heads down, executing their plan, and it makes them calm.

In the short run, it can often seem like nothing is getting done, and your competitors are passing you by.

But, like the marathon runner, it is never the sprinter that wins the race, it is the dogged and determined that is there at the end with the trophy in hand.

Eliud just broke the world record in Berlin today. He finished in 2 hours, 1 minute and 39 seconds.

He’s an inspiration to all of us.

Getting to something first has tremendous advantages but also comes with a bunch of challenges.

I was thinking about this yesterday as I was setting up a couple iPads to be used around our house as smart home controllers.

The Apple identity management and app store systems feel like they were built for a different era. Because they were.

Comparing those experiences to Google, which is not a new company either, is eye-opening.

You can also see this in crypto. Companies that were built in the age of one crypto-asset (Bitcoin) have to retool their software to make it work well in an age of multiple crypto-assets. Companies that were started in the age of multiple crypto-assets have the benefit of starting day one with a different perspective.

If I had to pick first mover or second mover, I would still pick first mover because I think it is easier to attain a dominant market position when you don’t have any competitors.

Once the market opportunity has been identified, and there are multiple companies competing for market leadership, it becomes more difficult to win.

But if you are the first mover, you need to understand a few things:

1/ Life gets harder, not easier, when you have established yourself as the market leader.

2/ You need to invest in top-notch product and engineering teams because product execution and technical debt will become significant challenges.

3/ You need to use your market leadership to build a balance sheet and a team that can allow you to manage the transition from first mover to market leader.

4/ Many of the best ideas will come from your emerging competitors. Look at their product execution for inspiration (Facebook has done an excellent job at this).

It is not a given that fast followers will beat a first mover, but that has certainly happened time and time again in the world of technology, internet, and mobile over the last thirty years.

I think that bad management and weak leadership of the first movers has as much to do with that as anything.

First movers can and often do maintain their market leadership. But doing so is a lot harder than people think.

I spoke to a group of women entrepreneurs a few weeks ago, and one asked me “why do you need to raise VC?”

And the answer is “you don’t.”

The vast majority of entrepreneurs out there don’t raise VC. Many don’t raise any money to start their businesses.

As I was answering that question, I thought about a talk I gave at the 99U Conference back in 2012 called “Ten Ways To Be Your Own Boss.”

I’m sure I have posted this here before, probably back in 2012, but I thought I’d post it again.

It makes the point that you don’t need VC to be an entrepreneur pretty nicely.

An entrepreneur asked me a great question last week:

When is it OK to say I don’t know in a pitch meeting?

I told her the following things:

1/ This varies from investor to investor. Some investors are looking for founders to have all the answers.

2/ I am not one of those investors but I do want the founders to have some of the answers.

3/ If I asked her how large and valuable her publicly traded competitor is, and she said “I don’t know but I will find out and get back to you on that”, I would be fine with that answer.

4/ If I asked her what the tech stack is that her engineering team is using to build the product, I would be dissapointed if she didn’t know that answer.

In general, I believe it is critical that the founder be knowledgeable about all the details and aspects of the internal operations. They should have those answers on the tip of their tongue. That includes things like monthly burn, cash balance, headcount, etc.

And if you don’t know the answer to the question, you should be honest about it and say that you will get it and get back to the investor. And do that quickly.

Sometimes investors ask ridiculous questions and then you have to bite your tongue and be polite.

I will end with a great story. It was 1991 and we had seed funded a brilliant software engineer who was building a product for the wall street sector. I took him to see a very prestigious VC as we were looking to fill out the seed round. The company was maybe six months old and was not yet in market with the product.

The entrepreneur started in on the market, the opportunity, and the product. Maybe three or four minutes in, the VC interrupts the founder and asks, “what will your revenues and profits be next year and the year after?”

The founder was pissed. He had not even gotten to the product they were building and he was annoyed by the interruption and the question.

So he answers in his broken English “I don’t have a fucking clue.”

Our meeting ended several minutes later and we were shown the door.

We did not secure an investment from that VC but the company was successful and went public five or six years later.

So you obviously don’t need to have all of the answers in a pitch meeting to be successful. But you do need to be polite and respectful if you want to secure the funding. And there are some things you absolutely need to know the answers to.

I’ve been chairing a $40 million capital campaign for NYC’s CS4All effort to bring computer science education to every school and every student in the nation’s largest school district.

We are just into year four of the ten-year CS4All effort and we are also into year four of the capital campaign.

The good news is I can see the light at the end of the tunnel. Depending on whether you count “soft circles” or not, I think we have about $10 million left to raise.

We started out with a bang, announcing $11.5mm in contributions, including those of my wife and me, at the start of the effort.

Year one went well, with another roughly eight million raised.

Year two was a struggle and year three started out similarly. We made some changes to our team and strategy and message and the second half of year three was much better and we are entering year four with great momentum.

I have learned a lot about running a capital campaign or any sort of large and long fundraising effort and I thought I would share some of the big lessons:

1/ You have to be patient. It is a marathon, not a sprint. No matter how much you want it to go quickly, it won’t.

2/ Cultivation is the name of the game. You have to work the top prospects slowly and carefully and patiently. Most eventually come through but you need to invest a lot of time and effort without any certainty of closure. I found this particularly hard as I always want to be investing my time where it is going to pay off.

3/ You need people around you who are experienced fundraisers. There is an art AND a science to qualifying, presenting, and following up that the best people in the fundraising business understand and bring to their work. Without that, you are going to flounder.

4/ Communicating and engaging your donors is critical. I thought a donor would write one check and be done. It turns out many donors like to start small and grow their committment over time as they see progress and get comfortable with the effort.

It turns out that raising a big sum of money is like a lot of other things in business and life. Slow and steady is a virtue, great people make all of the difference, your best prospects are the people you have already closed, and frequent communication fixes a lot of problems.

I think all of these lessons I have learned in the last three years are applicable to raising capital for your business. Fundraising is a process not a campaign and it needs to be part of a CEO’s daily cadence and calendar.

You are never not raising money when you are running a company or any sort of business endeavor that requires capital, which is basically everything.

I am not reading Bad Blood, the book about Theranos, but many of my friends and colleagues are.

One of the many “tells” that Theranos was not a good company was the board chock full of trophy board members.

A “trophy” board member is someone with a big name who, in theory, brings credibility and connections to your company. They are often out of the world of politics, or a Fortune 500 CEO job, or Wall Street.

I dislike trophy board members and advise our portfolio companies to avoid them. But they don’t always take our advice.

One good example is Lending Club, a very good company run by a very good entrepreneur, who got thrown under the bus, in my view, by his trophy board.

USV is an investor in that entrepreneur’s new company which says all you need to know about where we come out on that one.

Trophy board members are more concerned about their reputations than your company and will often react badly in times of crisis and challenge, which is exactly when you need your board members at your side more than ever.

Trophy board members often miss board meetings, show up unprepared, and frequently don’t take the time and effort to truly understand your business.

I am a huge fan of independent directors to complement the founders and investors on a board. The quality of the board is highest when there are more independents on it than investors and founders. Try to get that ratio right on your board as soon as practical.

But don’t put “names” on your board. Put operators, ideally very seasoned operators, who have done everything you want to do, ideally multiple times, and can help you spot the issues before they become problems and spot the opportunities with enough time to go after them.

These ideal board members are often not big names and they usually don’t have big egos. They are solid, steady, and worth their weight in gold. They come in male and female varieties and across the racial and ethnic spectrum too. It is true that it takes a bit more work to build a diverse board of operationally focused board members but it is worth it.

But whatever you do, stay away from trophy board members. They rarely help and often hurt.

Last night I picked up my phone after a long and fun dinner party and saw that the Golden State Warriors had signed Boogie Cousins (one of the most talented big men in the NBA) to a one year mid level contract of $5.3mm, an incredibly low number for a perennial all-star. Granted Boogie is coming off an achilles injury and won’t be available until mid season, but it just felt like the best getting better at the expense of every other team in the league. It annoys me.

Kind of like seeing a company renting electric scooters by the minute raising $400mm in a month when you can’t get anyone to put a dime into your company.

I’m not suggesting that the electric scooter companies should be dismissed. I don’t have a point of view on them other than as a user and I posted that here this past winter.

I am suggesting that the news cycle can make you depressed and jealous. My Knicks continue to struggle to put a decent team on the floor and the Warriors are assembling an all-star team that plays for them every fucking night.

It doesn’t feel fair. And it isn’t. Life isn’t fair. That’s how it is.

At times like this, I like to remind myself to keep my blinders on, ignore the news cycle, and focus on what I can control.

Most of us are not going to raise $400mm for our companies in a month. But we can all ship products, sell them, hire some good people, and find a few dimes to keep the lights on.

And that’s is what we must do. Lusting over what someone else has does us no good. Even it if is the best basketball team ever assembled.

I saw this tweetstorm today from Suhail Doshi, founder of Mixpanel.

1/ Getting my first 100 customers always felt like a puzzle. The next 1000 seemed unreachable. Besides, how can you get feedback to make the product better w/o users? After many years, we ended up w/ 6,000+ paying customers. It was a grind to get there.😩 Here’s what I Iearned…

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

If you click on this link you will be taken to the entire thing. I wish I knew how to embed the entire tweetstorm. I would have done that here.

There are some real pearls of wisdom in here, like this:

2/ This 1st lesson comes hard learned for most engineers: get up — away from your monitor—and talk to your users! I know it’s safer & comfortable to just email people but it’s also easier to ignore you. Your first 100 customers are usually acquired as a result of YOU selling.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

And this:

4/ You should put as much energy into the first 3 steps of your product (including your landing page) as you do your entire product after those steps. If people don’t get past step 3, your whole product didn’t matter anyway. It’s easy to get caught up in building the other stuff.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

And this:

7/ Find a niche of customers instead of trying to be something for everyone. FB started w/ elite colleges. SoundCloud started w/ bedroom producers collabing. Airbnb w/ spare bedrooms. It’ll be easier to explain your product making it easier to convince the right early users.

— Suhail (@Suhail) June 20, 2018

My partner Brad calls that last one “finding the narrow point of the wedge.”

Getting your product right is critical. But getting your “go to market” right is just as important. They are two sides of the same coin and influence each other greatly.

Suhail’s tweetstorm makes that point so well.

It can be exhausting to try and stay caught up on every new tech company being started. The Gotham Gal said me to yesterday, “everyone is an entrepreneur these days.” She’s right about that directionally although most companies have employees who are not founders so it is not exactly correct.

The rapid expansion of tech startups and the entrepreneurs who create them has been building for fifteen years, or possibly twenty-five years if you include the early Internet exuberance and the period of disillusionment that followed.

But over the last ten years, in particular, we have seen a number of factors come together to make for an environment where “everyone” can do a tech startup.

We have more and more software engineers and related skillsets around the world as education systems are starting to respond to the market demand for this talent. This is particularly true in Asia and other parts of the rapidly developing world. But it is also increasingly true in the developed world. Our portfolio company Stack Overflow, which serves software engineers almost exclusively, sees 31 million people a month now, up from 22 million five years ago. That likely overestimates the number of globally employed software engineers but it is indicative of the vast number of people solving problems in software right now.

The explosion of open source software, transparent code repositories, and open source tools and languages like MongoDB (we own Mongo stock), React, JavaScript, Python, Ruby, Go, TensorFlow, and so many more, has made it easier to build things in software than ever before. And popular services delivered via APIs (like Twilio and Stripe, both USV portfolio companies) make building software applications even easier.

We also have more support systems for entrepreneurs than we did ten years ago. Paul Graham and Y Combinator were the innovators and first mover in the market for entrepreneurship support systems that are market-based and for profit. That model has been copied and evolved on all around the world and it is powerful, important, and its impacts are far-reaching. We have learned how to best support entrepreneurs early on in the life of a company which leads more people to try it and also leads to more projects graduating from these programs and getting seed funding.

Which takes me to capital. We now have more angel and seed and venture capital being invested in startups every year than ever before. It took a long time, almost twenty years, to pass the go-go years of 1999 and 2000, but pass it we have and even though many see that as a sign that we are in bubble territory again, I am not one of them. Technology innovation is happening in all sectors of our economy and all parts of the world. I think the expansion of capital being deployed into startups can continue for some time to come.

So there are more skilled people to help an entrepreneur build the thing they want to build, more support systems to help them avoid the big mistakes, and more capital to allow them to invest in the business ahead of revenues and profits.

And so, we are in a golden era of tech entrepreneurship where anyone with an idea can make a go of it.

That does not mean that all of these efforts will succeed. They won’t. Think of this golden age as a time of rapid experimentation in which every problem will be attempted to be solved in many ways. Most will fail. Some will succeed. And we will see multiple successful approaches to solving the same challenges.

The good news is that all of the systems that feed these startup efforts, the talent market, the accelerator programs, the capital markets, and the entrepreneurs themselves, understand that these are experiments and that most will not succeed. For the most part, the market has evolved to a point where the economics of each input system has built the loss ratios and likely payouts when you win into their pricing structures. It is not perfect by any means. We may, for example, need to do more for the very early employees. And the rapid inflation in financing valuations may need a pullback if those new economics don’t work long-term for the capital markets.

But if we are thinking about society, and I mean our global society, not just the US, the result of this era of rapid experimentation is likely to be progress on important, and also mundane, human needs.

None of this makes it any easier to try and stay on top of all of this. It seems to me that the only way to do that is to pick a subset of the tech sector and focus just on that and let others take on the challenge of doing the same on another sector. It has gotten way too big for anyone to be able to stay on top of it all.

But when you feel overwhelmed and wonder what will come of all of this entrepreneurship mania, I would urge you to think of all the good that will come of it. Lord knows we need it.