—————Table-of-Contents—————

Why not to do a startup Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs Ten Rules for Web Startups What Business Can Learn from Open Source How Not to Die A Fundraising Survival Guide The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy Excuses Why to Not Not Start a Startup Startups in 13 Sentences What makes a good founder? 10 Tips for the First-Time Business Owner The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups 7 Things I Learned From My Startup Failing

Why not to do a startup

1. Startups are emotional roller coasters
   One day you think your company is going to succeed 100%
   The next day you expect the company to be broke by tomorrow

   Will the product ship on time? Will it be fast enough? Will it have too
   many bugs? Will it be easy to use? Will anyone use it? Will your
   competitor beat you to market? Will you get any press coverage? Will
   anyone invest in the company? Will that key new engineer join? Will
   your key user interface designer quit and go to Google?

2. In a startup nothing happens unless you make it happen
3. You get told “NO” a lot.
   by potential employees, potential investors, potential customers, potential partners, reporters, analysts…
   every time you hear a “yes” expect it to morph into a “NO” within 2 days
4. Hiring is a huge pain in the ass
   Expect only 20% of the people you interview will actually commit. + Those who commit 50% will be too lazy, too slow, easily rattled, political, bipolar, or psychotic…
5. The working hours
   

   it is impossible to keep a healty life balance when you are close to running out of cash, your product hasn’t shipped yet, your VC
   is mad at you, and your competitor in Menlo Park
   – you know, the one whose employees’ average age seems to be about 19
   – is kicking your butt.

6. If your team is not willing to commit → you are out
7. X-factors waiting to drop an A-bomb in front of your feet
   

   Stock market
   A better funded startup with a more experienced team that’s been hard
   at work longer than you have, in stealth mode, that unexpectedly
   releases a product that swiftly comes to dominate your market,
   completely closing off your opportunity, and you had no idea they were
   even working on it.
   Russian mobsters laundering millions of dollars of dirty money through
   your service, resulting in the credit card companies closing you down.

The rewards of taking all that:

1. The opportunity to control your own destiny
2. Opportunity to create something new
3. To have an impact on the world
4. Ideal corporate culture and dream team of people
5. Getting rich

Characteristics of Successful Entrepreneurs

Five Biggest Mistakes That Entrepreneurs Make:

1. Have clear goals/mission
   What is our measure of success? (sell the company for 20 mill)
2. Don’t try to prove that you are smart
   Rather than doing it for your ego, try to get a good product customers want
   Share credit!
3. Don’t be greedy – don’t just do it for the money
   Don’t try to keep all your shares, try to improve the value of your shares
   focus on the success of the company, not on keeping your equity
4. Don’t hire people you like, hire people you need
   Bring in people who have different skills than you
5. Know when to let go
   Find out when your skills are not sufficient anymore for the growth of the company

What are the Best Qualities of Successful Entrepreneurs?

1. Believe that you can make a difference
2. Passion for making things happen
   don’t just know things, do things
3. Have unjustifiable optimism
4. Have a high tolerance for uncertainty
5. Have a genuine concern for other people

Five Critical Skills That Entrepreneurs Need

1. Leadership
   ability to build consensus in the face of uncertainty, no matter how big and diverse the group
   convincing people to all pull on one string
2. Communication
   ability to keep a clear and consistent message
   convince people why working late is good for them
3. Decision-making
   knowing when to make decisions
   don’t make decisions too early (you might miss the most important pieces)
   don’t make decisions too late (over-analyzing might paralyze you)
4. Being a good team player
   knowing when to trust and delegate
   See when your people know it better than you – you don’t need all skills, get
5. Ability to telescope
   focus on details and the big picture
   no task is to “low” for you – you are just another employee

Companies Have Personalities, usually exactly the same as the founder, be aware of that from the beginning on
Timing is extremely important: the same idea too early might not find resonance amongst the investors or users. Too late means there is already a big player
Tips of risk: market risk | financial risk | technical risk → make sure you get rid of those as quick as possible → if your solution is not obvious to the market, you have to get into the market and show how much better it is.
The best time to start a company is when nobody thinks it’s possible (on average companies exist for 1-2 years before they get finance)
When you hire people from the beginning on: be aware that you have to change the management. Don’t make them Vice President of Sales, they might not be good in that once the company is bigger

Ten Rules for Web Startups

1. Be Narrow
   Focus on one problem of your customers and solve that perfectly
2. Be Different
3. Be Casual
   Don’t demand an immense afford from your users to use your services
4. Be Picky
   You should wait as long as possible to accept a new idea/person in your world
5. Be User-Centric
6. Be Self-Centered
   solve a problem you are facing personaly
7. Be Greedy
   the difference between 1000 users and 1000.000 is much bigger than 1000.000 and 100.000
8. Be Tiny
   Have low costs
9. Be Agile
   The world changes, so should your business model
10. Be Balanced
    Take care of your health

What Business Can Learn from Open Source

People work harder on projects they like. Emotional attachment brings a better outcome than any financial incentive.
The surrounding must be pleasant to work at
People have different ideal working hours
Ideas should come bottom-up (managers don’t tend to have better ideas)
Some People tend to work their ass off for a customer, but hate to be told by a boss.

How Not to Die

For every startup: “Getting Rich=10%” : “90%=Dieing”
if investors don’t hear from startups for a couple of months, this is a very bad sign
Main reason for Startups dieing = they become demoralized (Don’t give up)
make something a handful of users really <3 (love)
be 100% devoted to your company
being grimly dedicated to the success of your company (expected success rate = 90%)

A Fundraising Survival Guide

Hardest challenge for a startup is:

1. Make something users actually want
2. Raising money

No one cares if you made a genuine effort, the only thing that matters is the outcome.
You have much bigger chances if you focus 100% on the startup.

1. Have low expectations
   Deals fall through
2. Keep working on your startup
   Fundraising takes a big part of your attention, but you have to keep the startup running
3. Be conservative
   if you get a decent offer, take it
4. Be flexible
   VCs will ask:
   
   1. Who else are you talking to?
      They don’t really expect an answer
   2. How much are you trying to raise?
      They need an answer -> don’t use a fixed number, tell your options for different ranges
5. Be independent
   Show that you don’t need their money
6. Don’t take rejection personally
   Chance to get funded by an VC: 1:400
7. Always have an alternative source of income
8. Avoid inexperienced investors
   raising 20.000 from a first time Angel can be as exhausting as raising 2 mill from an VC
9. Know where you stand
   Don’t let investors to delay the process

The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn

1. Release Early (incorporate the user feedback)
2. Keep Pumping out Features (constantly improve)
3. Make Users Happy (What is your side about? -> Don’t tell, show!)
4. Fear the Right Things (don’t just look at existing competition)
5. Commitment is a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
6. There is always room (if you are good, no market is too competitive)
7. Don’t get your Hopes up (Deals fall through -> accept it)
8. Speed, not Money (four founders hourly pay might be the same, but you condense decades into years)

Why to Start a Startup in a Bad Economy

You learn to be cheap
It is the founders that make an company succeed, not the economy
less competition
good people get fired and can be employed much cheaper

Excuses Why to Not Not Start a Startup

Too young
Too inexperienced the best way to get
experience is to start a startup
Not determined enough
Not smart enough
Know nothing about business
No cofounder
No idea
No room for more startups
Family to support
Independently wealthy
Not ready for commitment
Need for structure
Fear of uncertainty
Don’t realize what you’re avoiding
Parents want you to be a doctor
A job is the default

Startups in 13 Sentences

1. Pick good cofounders.
When you get funding, you do not get money for the work you created, you get money for the outcome the founders are expected to generate.
2. Launch fast.
Launching teaches you what you
should have been building.
3. Let your idea evolve.
most
of the ideas appear in the implementing.
4. Understand your users.
the hard part is
seeing something new that users lack. That’s why so many successful
startups make something the founders needed.
5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.
It’s easier to expand user wise than satisfaction wise.
6. Offer surprisingly good customer service.
In the earliest
stages of a startup, it pays to offer customer service on a level
that wouldn’t scale, because it’s a way of learning about your
users.
7. You make what you measure.
Pretty soon you’ll start
noticing what makes the number go up, and you’ll start to do more
of that.
8. Spend little.
A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in
something like the way exercise keeps people young.
9. Get ramen profitable.
“Ramen profitable” means a startup makes just enough to pay the
founders’ living expenses. it completely
changes your relationship with investors. It’s also great for
morale.
10. Avoid distractions.
Nothing kills startups like distractions.
Paradoxically, fundraising is this type of distraction, so try to
minimize that too.
11. Don’t get demoralized.
Though the immediate cause of death in a startup tends to be running
out of money, the underlying cause is usually lack of focus.
12. Don’t give up.
You can get surprisingly
far by just not giving up. Sheer effort is usually enough, so long as you keep morphing your
idea.
13. Deals fall through.
It’s very dangerous to morale to start to depend on deals closing,
not just because they so often don’t, but because it makes them
less likely to.

What makes a good founder?

1. Someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass
   right through professional and cross over into obsessive. What it means specifically depends on the job: a salesperson who
   just won’t take no for an answer; a hacker who will stay up till
   4:00 AM rather than go to bed leaving code with a bug in it; a PR
   person who will cold-call New York Times reporters on their cell
   phones; a graphic designer who feels physical pain when something
   is two millimeters out of place.
2. Is the person genuinely smart?
3. Can they actually get things done?
4. Can we stand to have them around?
5. Good founders make things happen the way they want. Which is not to say they force
   things to happen in a predefined way. If there were a word that meant the
   opposite of hapless, that would be the one. Good founders have a healthy
   respect for reality. But they are relentlessly resourceful. Bad founders seem
   hapless. They may be smart, or not, but somehow events overwhelm
   them and they get discouraged and give up.
   1. Be Relentlessly Resourceful
6. In a technology startup,  the founders should include technical people. Business people are bad at deciding what to do with
   technology, because they don’t know what the options are, or which
   kinds of problems are hard and which are easy. And when business
   people try to hire hackers, they can’t tell which ones are
   good.
7. You need at least one person willing and able to focus on what customers want. Some believe only business
   people can do this.
8. know your product in and out
   
9. learn from your customers
10. be cheap
11. Try to improve the existing system
12. Learn from others mistakes
13. Be prepared to fail
14. Stamina, you have to be prepared to work late hours 7 days a week
15. Flexibility, your startup idea will most probably change completely over the time

10 Tips for the First-Time Business Owner

1. Focus. Focus. Focus.
   Avoid getting side-tracked.&nbsp; Do one thing perfectly, not 10 things poorly.
2. Know what you do. Do what you know.
   Do what you love. Businesses
   built around your strengths and talents will have a greater chance of
   success.
3. Say it in 30 seconds or don’t say it at all.
   State your mission, service and goals
   in a clear and concise manner. Fit the pitch to the person. Less is
   always more.
4. Know what you know, what you don’t know and who knows what you don’t.
   Surround
   yourself with advisors and mentors who will nurture you to become a
   better leader and businessman.
5. Act like a startup.
   Your
   wallet is your company’s life-blood. Watch every dollar and triple-check every expense.
6. Learn under fire.
   There is no such thing
   as the perfect plan.Never jump right into a new business without any thought or planning,
   but don’t spend months or years waiting to execute. learn from your mistakes
7. No one will give you money.
   If you need large sums of
   capital to launch your venture, go back to the drawing board. Find a
   starting point instead of an end point. Simplify the idea until it’s manageable as an
   early stage venture. Find ways to prove your business model on a
   shoestring budget. Demonstrate your worth before seeking investment. If
   your concept is successful, your chances of raising capital from
   investors will dramatically improve.
8. Be healthy.
   I promise that you will be much more
   productive when you take better care of yourself. Working to the point of exhaustion
   will burn you out and make you less productive. Don’t make excuses. Eat
   right, exercise and find time for yourself.
9. Don’t fall victim to your own B.S.
   Impress with action
   not conversation. Endorse your business enthusiastically, yet
   tastefully. In short, put up or shut up.
10. Know when to call it quits.
    Know when it’s
    time to walk away. If your idea doesn’t pan out, reflect on what went
    wrong and the mistakes that were made. Assess what you would have done
    differently. Failure
    is inevitable, but a true entrepreneur will prevail over adversity.

The 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups

1. Single Founder
   1. one founder is not enough for the workload
      
2. Bad Location
   1. a “startup hub” has many advantages
      
3. Marginal Niche
   1. better to have 1% of a billion $ market, than 90% of a million $ market
      
4. Derivative Idea
   1. Don’t copy successful business, solve real problems people have
      
5. Obstinacy
   1. As your business idea might change, only the ones who prevail after hundreds of seemingly impossible problems get successful
      
6. Hiring Bad
   Programmers
7. Slowness in
   Launching
   1. you have to be quicker than the competition + VCs love prototypes
      
8. Launching too Early
   1. Alpha versions might ruin your reputation
      
9. Having no specific
   User in Mind
   1. One has to design for the users, without a clear picture of who that is a great product is merely a coincident.
      
10. Raising too little money
    1. Money is your lifeblood. In the beginning you life from the money investors gave you, if you run out of it = death
       
11. Spending too much
    1. burning through your money = death
       
12. Poor investor Management
    1. don’t ignore investors + don’t let them run your company [you should be the most qualified person to run your company]
       
13. Not having a clear monitarization strategy
14. Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
    1. One has to make sure, all aspects of a startup are taken care of
       
15. Fights between founder
    1. If a founder leaves, not only is it a problem considering the workload, but also his stock options
       
16. Half-Hearted Effort
    1. one must put 100% of his time + afford into the startup
       

7 Things I Learned From My Startup Failing

1) Pick a problem, and solve it.

Cool as our technology
was, and as compelling the concept, we never picked a single, specific
problem to solve. Our vision kept changing, and our proverbial audience
never showed up.

2) Know your audience. Better yet, BE your audience.

We shied away from blogs and forums, and weren’t exactly rabid
Twitterers. We built a product outside the scope of our experiences.

3) Match the strength of the company to the strength of your team

I spent whole days
poring over style sheets when I really wanted to be out striking deals.

4) Talk to people and listen to them closely

When you’re met with confusion, doubt, and dismissal, it’s time to
reevaluate.

6) Narrow it down

Pick a three-word monicker and stick to it. While your execution may change, your premise should stay consistent.