David Cohen Quotes

One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.

Most phenomenal startup teams create businesses that ultimately fail. Why? They built something that nobody wanted.

What I tell founders is not to sweat the business model too much at first. The most important task at first is to build something people want. If you don't do that, it won't matter how clever your business model is.

Every startup should address a real and demonstrated need in the world - if you build a solution to a problem lots of people have, it's so easy to sell your product to the world.

I don't understand how you can have product-market fit and not a lot of people wanting your product. The two go hand-in-hand.

The problem with entrepreneurship is we are often working really hard producing high quality products that no-one wants. The creation of stuff is not valued.

I think the mistake people make most often when they invest in other kinds of startups is they say, 'This is totally different.' And so the things that matter, like making a product that people desperately want, like talking to customers, they throw this out the window. That is a recipe for heartache and tears.

If you're an entrepreneur and you're starting a company, I think the first thing you do is you go and talk to a bunch of people. But then the next thing you probably should do is figure out if there's a broader demand than just people you know. That's where I think SurveyMonkey is pretty valuable to people.

One of my earliest ventures was when I was nine years old. I realized there was a shortage of pencils at school, so I started Rent-a-Pencil. But I made a fundamental mistake. Everybody stole my pencils.

The opportunity for an entrepreneur to start a company from scratch today is abysmal.

The dumb-manager theory of business problems just didn't hold water for me. There had to be a deeper reason why smart people would make decisions that lead to failure.

You cannot have companies where many of the largest ones lose money indefinitely without someone finally waving the white flag, and IBM is the most recent example of that.

Every time you start a company - and I've started five or six - you have the opportunity to screw up in whole new ways.

If you look at the Internet, the vast majority of start-ups are not successful. But the ones that are, are very very successful. So you can't point to the unsuccessful ones and say, 'There's no hope for this field.' It's just that they had the wrong idea or they had bad execution.

Most of our [economic] problems are of our own making.

If your startup is only in the development or idea stage, there is almost no better predictor of failure - I mean, utter failure, scorched-earth bankruptcy - than raising too much money in the first round.

Go find out if you can make your product. Once you make it, stop projecting what's going to happen and go find out whether your product can sell. Find out whether someone is willing to take hard-earned cash out of their pocket and exchange it for your product.

Wherever we are seeing something getting used, that to us is an early indicator that there might be something that people want. And then let's figure out how to make that great. And then let's go figure out monetization.

The number of businesses that fold due to bad partnerships is staggering. In some cases, they are charlatans, in others inept business people, and others find themselves unable to scale with any growth.

Doing a me-too business, because it's you - the only person who cares about that is you. The market doesn't care if it's you. The market is pretty much being served. You better have something that the world doesn't have, because even then, you might screw it up through your own ineptitude and inexperience.

For over forty years, I've been one of the most passionate believers in entrepreneurs. From day one, I've learned that too many small businesses are predicated on business models that the owner barely understands, and then, those same men and women are baffled when their business dreams are overwhelmed with struggles they never foresaw.

Don't spend months building something without any idea if someone actually wants it.

There had to be a market in order for you to be successful in a business. The market had to need your business, or the product of it.

It's easy to hire too fast and have chaos and disorganization and insufficient management.

Whenever you start a new business, the sheer number of variables at hand makes failure a constant possibility.