Startup: A Silicon Valley Adventure
Investors are people with more money than time. Employees are people with more time than money. Entrepreneurs are simply the seductive go-betweens. Startups are business experiments performed with other people’s money. Marketing is like sex: only losers pay for it. Company culture is what goes without saying. There are no real rules, only laws. Suc
... See moreAntonio Garcia Martinez • Chaos Monkeys: Obscene Fortune and Random Failure in Silicon Valley
How can you reconcile Dr. Stay-the-Course and Mr. Sell-the-Thing? Clearly they are irreconcilable, but the key is to mute them both. A few keys on muting the emotions: Get paid (a salary). Most venture capitalists like entrepreneurs that are “all in,” meaning the entrepreneur has everything invested in the company and will have very little to show
... See moreBen Horowitz • The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers
Livingston: What surprised you the most? Ozzie: How difficult the go-to-market challenges are. I suppose it shouldn't have surprised me, but in both the cases of Notes and Groove, building a market in something that's new can be as, if not more, challenging than building the technology. We were building some very complex technology, and I thought,
... See moreJessica Livingston • Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days
There were more lessons. Copart didn’t just learn that it could operate better without its own fleet of trucks; it also learned it needed to change the way it interacted with employees. We learned it wasn’t just enough to treat your employees nice, give them good benefits, and hope they got it. That wasn’t enough to keep the unions out. We treated
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