Making the jump from a day job to starting a company is a scary one. I don’t believe there’s a ton of real risk —after all, you’re probably highly employable (particularly if you’re a developer)— but it’s still a big leap. And often, people do it after they’ve saved up about a year’s worth of […]
Quiet and Boring: How to Build a Successful Startup
A few days ago, Indeed (a job aggregator site) announced that they had been acquired by a Japanese company called Recruit Co Ltd. One story I saw pegged the acquisition close to a billion dollars. I’ve heard through the grapevine about some very happy investors. Indeed is a very successful company. And while you’ve probably […]
The Hubbub Over Acquihires
An acquihire (acquisition + hiring) is when a startup exits to a company that’s primarily interested in the founders and employees, and not the technology, product or anything else. Acquihires are most common with small startups that don’t get the traction they need to make it on their own or raise the necessary capital to […]
The Hustler
You spend enough time with enough startups and you genuinely come to appreciate the importance of The Hustler. The Hustler plays a few levels above where he* should, but gets away with it because of sheer willpower, ego and perceptivity. Tweet The Hustler learns the rules quickly — breaks those he needs to — and […]
Lean Startup, Startup Recruiting, Financing and Startup Accelerators
I’ve never found a great system for bubbling up older content on a blog. It’s so transient. Posts last a week at most and then they disappear into the archive. I’ve tried a few things, and here’s my latest attempt to collect and organize some of my posts on key topics of interest. In the […]
How I Try to Mentor Startups (And Hopefully Add Value)
Fred Destin wrote a fantastic blog post recently on how to be a good startup mentor. It made me think a great deal about how I mentor startups, where I’m effective, and where I could improve. As Fred notes, “good mentoring is hard.” He’s absolutely right. I’m currently mentoring a number of companies inside of […]
This Much I Know is True
I’m a big believer in intellectual honesty. We emphasized it at Year One Labs by pushing teams through a lean startup methodology. And when I reflect back on my failures, there were clearly times when I was lying too much to myself. Having said that, I also think founders need to be capable of lying […]
Recruit Top Talent Before and While Raising Capital
Hiring is an ongoing endeavor. You know you’re doing it right (at least partially) when you’re always doing it, even if you’re not actively trying to fill roles. One of the CEO’s main jobs should be recruiting top talent. Unfortunately, most CEOs don’t put enough systematic effort into recruiting and it falls to the wayside. […]
Weekly Investor Updates (How To Communicate with Investors & Mentors)
At Year One Labs we had 20 mentors and investors. It was (and remains) a great group. Many of them were quite active in helping our portfolio companies; many continue to help. A number of them went on to invest in the companies as well. Our system for providing mentorship to the teams wasn’t perfect […]
Competitive Differentiation that Matters
How you differentiate from competitors only matters if it matters to customers. Pick any differentiation you want – pricing, features, target market, market gap, performance, etc. – unless customers really, really, really care about the difference, you’re shit out of luck. Hell, pick two or three of them and it still doesn’t matter. You can’t […]
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