Tag Archives: entrepreneurship

Business

Is Working For This Startup Is The Right Move?

Coming to evaluate if a specific startup is a good option for you?

You should check it from several different angles as the risk/reward is very different from a mature company. The critical aspects that I will look for are:

  • Do you like the people?
    Culture fit is the critical because you need to work with your team mates every day and spend a LOT of time with them, especially if the startup is early stage. If you aren’t having fun with them… will it be worth the time?
    How do you figure this out: Try to go out for a drink or lunch. When you hang out you could learn a lot by talking on life and see how they treat others.

    Screenshot 2015-05-13 18.03.41

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Android, Business

How To Make Money From Your App?

What are the action items that will increase the odds in that battle to improve your monetization?

This is one of the most challenging aspect for every startups. After you build your application (or service) you need to measure all the actions that the users take. This is a learning mechanism that will let you iterate (hopefully quickly) and improve your product. Once you feel that you have a good product market fit and you are out of the alpha (or beta) modes it’s time to put efforts in the ‘Grow’ and ‘Earn’ parts.

Let’s see what are some of the tools that we can use.

develop, grow and earn! Continue reading →

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Business

How To Evaluate A Startup?

Why?

It’s mostly depend on the angle you are coming to this good question. If you are the founder, valuation matters because it determines the share of the company you are going to give away (to investors) in exchange for money. If you are the investor, you want to make sure it’s the right deal in terms of risk/reward or give/get.

When you listen to experts in this domain, in most cases, the answer is something like: “It is a form of art rather than science”. But this is not very helpful, is it?

How?

Let’s break the puzzle into few pieces and see how can we think on each one of them. Here are few questions to help us identify what we are doing in each piece. We start with ‘What we  are going to solve’ (=problem) and with ‘How we are going to solve it’ (=solution). Later, we should see what is the potential (=market) and what are the risks (= direct/indirect competitors). We also need to show the team and why it’s capable to deliver. Continue reading →

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Business

Mentoring Entrepreneurs And Developers

Screen Shot 2016-06-16 at 12.51.01 PMIn the past six years I had the pleasure to mentor hundreds of entrepreneurs and developers. For some, as an investor and for others as an external advisor or a domain expert. These days I’m doing it mostly as my day job which is really fun!

Here are some of the lessons learned over time.

If you are an entrepreneur who is asking:
“Why do I need someone to mentor me?”
Well, there are many good reasons, but check the graph below. Continue reading →

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Business

Innovation From One Startup

These are the slides from my talk today at Google IL Office.
It covers:
1. Google’s past, present and a bit of the future.
2. Google’s 5 principles of innovation.

If you are an entrepreneur, there are some good principle to take to your venture (especially from slide 23).

SFO bride to startups

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Business

Failure Is Part Of The Game

blue in the dessertLast night, I read this article. What I like most was the short paragraph that gave few recent examples of ‘big’ failures:

…With original ideas, failure is inevitable, because it’s impossible to predict how technologies will evolve and tastes will change. Mark Cuban passed on Uber. In the early days of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin tried to sell their search engine for less then $2 million, but their potential buyer turned them down. Publishers rejected Harry Potter because it was too long for a children’s book. Executives passed on Seinfeld for having incomplete plot lines and unlikeable characters. Pay a visit to Jerry Seinfeld’s bathroom, and you might find a memo hanging on the wall that calls the pilot episode of Seinfeld “weak” and says “No segment of the audience was eager to watch the show again.”

We know that most startups will fail. Moreover, in many cases, they will fail even if they had a good idea and executed well (see: “Why Startups Succeed” for more details).
So be willing to fail and try again.
You are in a good company.

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Business

How To Start? The Execution

Build something people loveThis is the last part from four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. In the last three lessons: Idea, Product and Team I did my best to focus on the things that will move the needle for you at the early stages. This fourth lesson is all about execution and it might be the most critical part. Continue reading →

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Business

How to Start? The Team

Build something people love

This is the third part of four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. The slides are as brief as possible because they meant to give just the framework. The real content is pass verbally.
However, the main points to pay attention are:

  • In many aspects, finding a great co-founder is like finding a partner for life. You should do your best to seek for someone you can trust and spend time with during circumstances that will be very challenging. The ‘honeymoon’ will pass quickly, so make sure it’s someone you want to have with you on a deserted island, because this is what ‘startup life’ will look like after few days. It’s important that your skills will complement each other. So if you are the technical person, you should find a partner that is strong in business, marketing, sales etc’.
  • You should pick the initial team members by their resourcefulness and passion (or determination) to the mission of what you are trying to accomplish. A good way to look on the ‘founding team’ is for people that could have been co-founders if the timing was right. Another great way to look on these first hires as people that you would have feel comfortable to report to.
  • Hire only when you desperate – So do everything first and only hire when there is no other option.
  • Hire true experts. The difference between an ‘OK’ developer and a true expert is unbelievable. At the early stages, it’s critical to build an ‘A Team’ because these type of teams create ‘A companies’.

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Business

How to Start? The Product

Build something people loveThis is the second part of four presentations I did to a course for young entrepreneurs. The slides are as brief as possible because they meant to give just the framework. The real content is pass verbally.
However, the main points to pay attention are:

  • Get users manually at the beginning. It won’t ‘scale’ but that is more than fine. You need at the start to get users (in every way possible as long as you aren’t breaking any laws) and not to expect them to come to you. The notion of ‘if we will build it they will come’ is not working in most cases.
  • Listen to outside users – This is very important in order for you to build something that users love. A lot of users will give you noise, but your role is to extract the signals and shape the product base on that feedback. You should build an engine: Users -> Feedback -> Product improvement

Continue reading →

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Business

Find A Great Co-Founder

Startup thoughts on changeIn the past, I wrote about hiring for startups and raising money. It’s one of these things that you must do right. Hopefully, on the first try. It’s also, easy to say and really hard to do. There are a lot of things to consider and in most cases, it’s during a time that you are extremely busy with building your product and finding answers to daily fires.

If your core team is not a great one, your chance to build a great business is low. It’s important at the start, when you wish to find a co-founder that will be a good match. This post is aimed to founders and investors. It contains the aspects that I would look for. Continue reading →

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