Evan Williams, him who invented blogger.com and whom I tried to have speak at LIFT06 (he nicely refused, saying conferences were not his stuff) has rocked the Building Web Apps workshop by candidly sharing the things he blew up while developing his current gig, Odeo, the formerly hottest podcasting company we don’t hear much about these days except in unfriendly territory. Five things not to do:

1. Trying to build too much” – Odeo set out to be a podcasting company with no focus beyond that.

2. “Not building for people like ourselves” – For example, Williams doesn’t podcast himself.

3. “Not adjusting fast enough” […] “long term is not soon enough for a startup if you’re trying to get a foothold.”

4. “Raising too much money too early”.

5. “Not listening to my gut” – “When you’ve got a bunch of money and you’ve hired a lot of people and you’re talking to your board and you’re talking to reporters, your gut can get drowned out.”

The full report is on gigaom. This reminds me of a previous post about the blink founder reflecting on his failure. And if the subject is of interest for you check my recent SHiFT talk about the lessons learned on cocomment.com.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 3rd, 2006 at 2:30 pm and is filed under entrepreneurship, english. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.