Startup lessons
Update: Pascal Rossini points to a great Paul Graham speech: The hardest lessons for Startups to learn. It’s worth a read, even if it’s not written by Pascal ;-)
Seems there is an informal series of blog posts about entrepreneurship in Europe emerging. After my rant and Valerie Thomson’s state of the European investment, the latest episode features a pep-talk by Pascal Rossini, CEO of Ads-Click and Sky-Click, one of the longest-standing Web entrepreneurs of Switzerland, and the best animator of our local blogosphere (mostly in French thou). He wrote an amazing post about the hardest lessons for a startup to learn, and says that “the most important quality in a startup founder is determination. Not intelligence. Determination.”
It is a must-read for all the web/software/product entrepreneurs, because as he says, things that make a startup successful “are kind of counterintuitive”. There are so many quotes I wish to reprint but instead click here and read that post!
The hardest lessons for Startups to learn
Lesson 4: Fear the Right Things […]Most visible disasters are not so alarming as they seem. Disasters are normal in a startup: a founder quits, you discover a patent that covers what you’re doing, your servers keep crashing, you run into an insoluble technical problem, you have to change your name, a deal falls through – these are all par for the course. They won’t kill you unless you let them.
Nor will most competitors. A lot of startups worry “what if Google builds something like us?” Actually big companies are not the ones you have to worry about – not even Google. The people at Google are smart, but not smarter than you; they’re not as motivated, because Google is not going to go out of business if this one product fails; and even at Google they have a lot of bureaucracy to slow them down.
What you should fear, as a startup, is not the established players, but other startups you don’t know exist yet. They’re way more dangerous than Google because, like you, they’re cornered animals.
Looking just at existing competitors can give you a false sense of security. You should compete against what someone else could be doing, not just what you can see people doing.
May 3rd, 2006 at 5:00 pm
I could be wrong, but I think he lifted it wholesale from a Paul Graham post: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
May 3rd, 2006 at 5:00 pm
I could be wrong, but I think he lifted it wholesale from a Paul Graham post: http://www.paulgraham.com/startuplessons.html
May 3rd, 2006 at 5:12 pm
@scott
same here, that’s where I’ve read it first,too.
interesting post however
May 3rd, 2006 at 5:12 pm
@scott
same here, that’s where I’ve read it first,too.
interesting post however
May 3rd, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Seems pascal made a copy/paste and forgot to mention it. Great read anyway, whoever wrote it ;-)
May 3rd, 2006 at 5:34 pm
Seems pascal made a copy/paste and forgot to mention it. Great read anyway, whoever wrote it ;-)
May 4th, 2006 at 5:30 am
Yes, it’s true, sorry, I forgot to mention it, it’s not write by me but write by Paul Graham with the help of “Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Beau Hartshorne, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this”. In any case, it’s a very good post about entrepreneur/founder expérience.
May 4th, 2006 at 5:30 am
Yes, it’s true, sorry, I forgot to mention it, it’s not write by me but write by Paul Graham with the help of “Thanks to Sam Altman, Trevor Blackwell, Beau Hartshorne, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this”. In any case, it’s a very good post about entrepreneur/founder expérience.
May 5th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
This part that you have reproduced goes for pretty much any company, I think – very good advice. We’re eighteen months in to our business and three months in to a slight re-framing of what we do … I am terrified that there’s someone out there that we don’t know about who is also competing for our market share :).
May 5th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
This part that you have reproduced goes for pretty much any company, I think – very good advice. We’re eighteen months in to our business and three months in to a slight re-framing of what we do … I am terrified that there’s someone out there that we don’t know about who is also competing for our market share :).