Archive for the ‘entrepreneurship’ Category

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RB @Evan William’s How to Evaluate a New Product Idea

Sunday, April 11th, 2010

Note: This is another gem of a post from Evan Williams; dated, but still pertinent even as of today. I’m “re-blogging” it here, for safekeeping!

I’ve been thinking about a number of new product ideas lately. In doing so, I’ve been trying to come up with a more structured way of evaluating them. Here’s a first attempt at defining that. It’s not as clear as I’d like it to be. But perhaps you’ll find it useful.

Tractability

Question: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?

Blogger was highly tractable. Twitter was tractable, but sightly less-so because of the SMS component. Google web search had quite low tractability when they launched it. Vista?: About as low as you can get.

Tractability is partially about technical difficulty and much about timing and competition—i.e., How advanced are the other solutions? Building a new blogging tool today is less-tractable, because the bar is higher. Building the very first web search engine was probably pretty easy. Conversely, building the very first airplane was difficult, even though there wasn’t any competition.

In general, if you’re tiny and have few resources, tractability is key, because it means you can build momentum quickly—and momentum is everything for a startup. However, tractability often goes hand and hand with being early in a market, which has its own drawbacks (e.g., obviousness, as we’ll discuss below).

If you’re big and/or have a lot of resources—or not very good at spotting new opportunities, but great at executing—a less-tractable idea may be for you. It may take longer to launch something worthwhile, but once you crack the nut, you have something clearly valuable.
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Posted in entrepreneurship, product management, regular reads | No Comments »

RB @Evan William’s 10 rules for startups

Wednesday, January 6th, 2010

So good I’m RB’ing (re-blogging) it. Just in case the original ever gets taken down.

#1: Be Narrow
Focus on the smallest possible problem you could solve that would potentially be useful. Most companies start out trying to do too many things, which makes life difficult and turns you into a me-too. Focusing on a small niche has so many advantages: With much less work, you can be the best at what you do. Small things, like a microscopic world, almost always turn out to be bigger than you think when you zoom in. You can much more easily position and market yourself when more focused. And when it comes to partnering, or being acquired, there’s less chance for conflict. This is all so logical and, yet, there’s a resistance to focusing. I think it comes from a fear of being trivial. Just remember: If you get to be #1 in your category, but your category is too small, then you can broaden your scope—and you can do so with leverage.

#2: Be Different
Ideas are in the air. There are lots of people thinking about—and probably working on—the same thing you are. And one of them is Google. Deal with it. How? First of all, realize that no sufficiently interesting space will be limited to one player. In a sense, competition actually is good—especially to legitimize new markets. Second, see #1—the specialist will almost always kick the generalist’s ass. Third, consider doing something that’s not so cutting edge. Many highly successful companies—the aforementioned big G being one—have thrived by taking on areas that everyone thought were done and redoing them right. Also? Get a good, non-generic name. Easier said than done, granted. But the most common mistake in naming is trying to be too descriptive, which leads to lots of hard-to-distinguish names. How many blogging companies have “blog” in their name, RSS companies “feed,” or podcasting companies “pod” or “cast”? Rarely are they the ones that stand out.
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Posted in business, entrepreneurship, people i like, startup | No Comments »

Roll with uncertainty

Saturday, November 14th, 2009

A lot of time we spin our wheels going back and forth when faced with uncertainty in life. I know sometimes I tend to overanalyze and try to risk-assess something to death, and still get no closer to a decision. At the last Y Combinator Startup School in Berkeley, Mark Zuckerberg said (paraphrase),

“In a world where everything around you is constantly changing quickly, the most dangerous thing you can do is to not change”.

And that’s especially true in the technology business. As a technologist, if you don’t learn to love it, you won’t keep up. I’m a big fan of Tina Seelig and her famous talk at Stanford titled “What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20” (I can’t highly recommend it enough, please check it out and you can thank me later). That talk has received so much interest that it’s now a book.

Going back to uncertainty, it just never stops. If everyone had equal visibility and the exact equal amount of information for decision making, then everybody would be able to make the same sound decision. Now making decision, with incomplete information .. that’s how you win; how you get an edge on the competition. Also not easy, but you have to roll with it.

In a recent Q&A with Tina on BNET,

Q: Your latest book is entitled What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World. So the inevitable question: if you could go back and give your 20-year-old self just one piece of advice, what would it be?

A: I would tell myself that the uncertainty of life never goes away. There are always choices in front of you, challenges to overcome, and failures from which you need to recover. If you embrace the challenges and view them through the lens of possibilities, then you will not only be happier, but will be much more likely to turn the inevitable obstacles into opportunities. The world is always changing, and it is up to you to be flexible and optimistic. With a positive attitude and creative thinking, most problems can be viewed as opportunities in disguise.

Yours truly is reading this book on my Kindle. I. highly. recommend. it.

What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20: A Crash Course on Making Your Place in the World



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Posted in entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, problem-opportunity, quotes, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | No Comments »

Flame out or become a $1Bil business

Saturday, September 19th, 2009

VCs take a porfolio approach to managing risk; individual company is largely irrelevant because of diversification effects. In fact, one of my portfolio companies was once rejected by Sequoia because, “You’ll almost certainly build a nice $100 million business. But we’d rather have a riskier investment that either flames out or becomes a $1 billion business.” Thus the key metric is expected value.

Quotable quotes, from 21 Million Reasons For Mint To Sell via CloudAve.

I’ve blogged before about Vinod Khola’s video here (iinnovate’s interview), where in it he says one of the problems he notices in entrepreneurs is that they don’t dream big enough. Just recently Sarah Lacy wrote that the consensus of the recent TC50 panel is that nobody was “swinging for the fences“, everyone just playing it safe–basically dreaming small.

Sarah writes:

Here’s why this matters: Start-ups by definition don’t have the experience, market position, funding or resources to tackle obvious market opportunities. If what they’re trying to do makes clear business sense, a bigger, better-positioned company would do it. A start-up’s only edge is that it’s not built into legacy businesses and preconceived notions and can do something, well, crazy.

There are entrepreneurs somewhere building the next big companies. But it’s probably just a wonky side-project that no one—not even the entrepreneur himself—realizes is the next big thing. That’s who we need to drag on stage next year.

I agree, if it’s an obvious opportunity, someone’s already on it. We need more crazy people working on crazy ideas.

Vinod Khosla on problem solving: You don’t solve all problems before you jump into a new situation. You just believe in yourself, and say, “I’ll figure it out, one way or another”. Vinod had no idea how he was going to pay for fees and rent when he got accepted to the Stanford GSB. To me, this is the “leap of faith” advice entrepreneurs talk about. You just got to jump.

Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, passion, quotes, startup, things to ponder about, things to remind myself | No Comments »

Ex-Google China Chief speaks on mobile internet, cloud computing, ecommerce

Monday, September 7th, 2009

It’s Labor Day, I’m still groggy from just waking up .. but this is a good piece worth sharing here if you’re looking for opportunities, and focused on mobile and cloud computing. Google’s China chief Kai-Fu Lee just left Google (some of us recall this as it was a controversial high profile hire because Lee was poached from Microsoft). Here’s what he is up to next, and his words from an interview with peHUB.

“There is a confluence of several things happening in China, and we’re at an inflection point of mobile Internet, cloud computing and ecommerce. It’s really now or never.

There is an abundance of companies here and VCs have lots of money, but there is a lack of angel funding and experienced entrepreneurs. It’s a compete imbalance. Whatever you might think of Y Combinator or Idealab in the U.S., the China market is different. China needs this type of business-building platform to hire and train people and provide angel funding, which is scarce.

There also is a worldwide economic crisis, which means that there is a bunch of strong talent out there that we want to hire, in order to start a lot of exicting businesses.“

On why it’s “now or never”, he says,

“Ecommerce in China has gone from 7% adoption to 25% adoption. Payment capabilities are just happening. Really, it’s a lot like the late 90s in the U.S. Remember how quickly Amazon and eBay and even Google search took off? You have to imagine the current Chinese Internet as news and games and blogging, but a big shift is inevitable. The average Chinese Internet user is just 25, compared to 42 in the U.S. That means they are getting older, getting more money, getting married, having kids… A rising ecommerce will lift all boats.

In terms of mobile, there are 650 million cell phones in China and mobile Internet usage is growing like crazy. It’s not just knowledge workers, but it’s also growing rapidly for groups like migrant workers and people making just a few dollars a day. They view it as the only way to access information, and with usage and volume a lot of things will grow.

There also is 3G, which is the one thing the Chinese government is going after and developing this year. In China, when the government wants to do something it happens.

For cloud computing: China has never really developed a software market, and what’s happening is like what’s happening in the U.S. – moving from packaged software to online or the cloud. In that process new businesses and models are starting to happen. If you look at the success of the Amazon platform or Google apps in the U.S., it will also be true in China because there are millions or people who want easy ways to build websites.

There is incredible opportunity right now.“

Via peHUB.

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Posted in business, cloud computing, entrepreneurship, innovation, mobile, problem-opportunity, regular reads, startup | No Comments »

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