The one thing we learned over 5 years is that nothing works better than just improving your product. Every minute, every developer hour we spent on any one of these crazy things—although they had some marginal return on the work that we put into them—was nothing compared to just making a better version of the product and releasing it. If we had tak

... See more

I should mention one sort of initial tactic that usually doesn't work: the Big Launch. I occasionally meet founders who seem to believe startups are projectiles rather than powered aircraft, and that they'll make it big if and only if they're launched with sufficient initial velocity. They want to launch simultaneously in 8 different publications, ... See more

Winblad: One of the big mistakes is that, when you form a company, there's a difference between being an inventor and being entrepreneurial to leading a company—being the CEO or, especially, the leader. You're not fending for yourself anymore. You're actually fending for shareholders. They can't be fending for their salary; they can't be fending fo

... See more