Overhead will eat you alive if not constantly viewed as a parasite to be exterminated. Never mind the bleating of those you employ. Hold out until mutiny is imminent before employing even a single additional member of staff. More startups are wrecked by overstaffing than by any other cause, bar failure to monitor cash flow.
One of my first investments was $100,000 in a Web-based calendar startup - and I lost every dollar.
America is an unsolvable problem: a nation divided and deeply in hate with itself. If it was a startup, we'd understand how unfixable the situation is; most of us would leave for a fresh start, and the company would fall apart. America is MySpace.
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.
Failure will happen. It's a normal part of the startup process.
YouTube began as a failed video-dating site. Twitter was a failed music service. In each case, the founders continued to try new concepts when their big ideas failed. They often worked around the clock to try to overcome their failure before all their capital was spent. Speed to fail gives a startup more runway to pivot and ultimately succeed.
Part of the entrepreneurial thing is there are lots of ways to die.
Startups don’t fail because they lack a product; they fail because they lack customers and a profitable business model.
In general though, if you look at the track record of pivots, they don't become big companies.
If I had one piece of advice to tell an entrepreneur, I always say, 'You have to have emotional investment in what you're working on.' That's what we lacked at Odeo.
Believing your own bullshit is always a perilous activity, but never more fatal than for the owner of a start-up venture.
Companies that I've been very involved with, that have had a very bad first hire in the first 3 or so employees never recover from it.
A single mediocre hire in the first five will often in fact kill a startup.
In YC's case, the number one cause of early death for startups is cofounder blowups.
That 95 per cent. fail of those who start in business upon their own account seems incredible, and yet such are said to be the statistics upon the subject.
The track record for founders that don't already know each other is really bad.
You'd better have the technology knowledge. I really urge you not to think you can start a whole company and business with just ideas on paper, because you'll end up owning so few of those ideas.
There's a lot of glorification of startups and being a founder. People brush the failures under the rug, but that's the worst thing you can do. You kind of have to face it head on.
One of the top causes of startup death - right after cofounder problems - is building something no one wants.
When you’re in a startup, the first ten people will determine whether the company succeeds or not.
A startup is not just about the idea: it's about testing and then implementing the idea. A founding team without these skills is likely dead on arrival.
Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line.
If a startup stays in Microsoft, it does not have a chance, because all it tries to do goes against what Microsoft is about.
Start a part-time business and make as many mistakes as you possibly can while you still have your daytime job.
I think extreme secrecy is a bad sign in all startups. Very few startups die because they tell you exactly how their technology works. On the long list of startup killers, that's pretty far down. Though on the list of entrepreneur fears, it's pretty high.
