Zitat des Tages von Steve Blank:
Everyone on the founding team ought to invest the time in a coding bootcamp.
One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times, they confuse VCs with their friends.
Michael Bloomberg has yet to get his due for engineering the New York entrepreneurial ecosystem.
What's been missing from regions outside of Silicon Valley is a 'playbook.' In American football, a playbook contains a sports team's strategies and plays. It struck me that every region needs its own industry playbook on how to compete globally.
In the past, when venture-funded startups told their investors they'd found a profitable business model, the first thing VCs would do is to start looking for an 'operating exec' - usually an MBA who would act as the designated 'adult' and take over the transition from Search to Build.
Understand that VCs are simply a sophisticated form of financial investors who, in turn, need to satisfy their own investors.
The Lean Startup process builds new ventures more efficiently. It has three parts: a business model canvas to frame hypotheses, customer development to get out of the building to test those hypotheses, and agile engineering to build minimum viable products.
Founders, presuming they know their customers, assume they know all the features customers need.
We now understand the distinction between startups - who search for a business model - versus existing companies - that execute a business plan.
At the intersection of food science and technology, food replacement startups are creating substitutes for the basic components of meals as well as replacements for complete meals.
Schools reward their students for a combination of intelligence, perseverance, and hard work - in the classroom and on the playing fields. But these metrics don't help kids understand that great grades are not a pass for a great life.
By the beginning of the 21st century, entrepreneurs, led by Web and mobile startups, began to seek and develop their own management tools.
Long hours don't necessarily mean success.
The introduction of new technology is always disruptive to existing markets, particularly to content/copyright owners who sell through well-established distribution channels.
Market type influences everything a company does. Strategy and tactics for one market type seldom work for another.
In a web/mobile startup, coding is not an outsourced activity. It's an integral part of the company's DNA.
In corporations, the penalty for repeated failure on known tasks is being reassigned to other tasks or asked to leave the company.
Entrepreneurial education in grades K-12, if it exists at all, still focuses on teaching potential entrepreneurs small business entrepreneurship - the equivalent of 'how to run a lemonade stand.'
At 19, I joined the Air Force during the Vietnam War.
One can make the case that the New York venture capital industry is rooted in the 21st century, not the 20th.
Describing something as the 'Woodstock of...' has taken to mean a one-of-a-kind historic gathering.
Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.
The music and movie business has been consistently wrong in its claims that new platforms and channels would be the end of its businesses. In each case, the new technology produced a new market far larger than the impact it had on the existing market.
Visionary CEOs don't need someone else to demo the company's key products for them. They deeply understand products, and they have their own coherent and consistent vision of where the industry/business models and customers are today, and where they need to take the company.
The business model is both the starting point and the scorecard for Customer Development progress.
I have to think my success in the VC business was due in no small part to seeing Larry Ellison in action back in the day.
At some major events - your birth and death, for example - while you may be the center of attention, the events are managed by others and are more important to the people around you.
Unlike many other startup processes, Customer Development is deep, detailed, and rigorous.
Once you establish what activities your company needs to do, the next question is, 'How do these activities get accomplished?' i.e. what resources do I need to make the activities happen?
First and deadliest of all is a founder's unwavering belief that he or she understands who the customers will be, what they need, and how to sell it to them.
Creating a vertically oriented regional ecosystem is a pretty amazing accomplishment for any country or industry.
For busy young adults, the lure of meal substitutes is simple - it's all about convenience - the level of effort to open a bottle or package is minimal, and the time from thinking you're hungry to eating is almost zero.
In winning companies, everybody pulls in the same direction.
Customer discovery is the process of translating a founder's vision for the company into hypotheses about each component of the business model and creating a set of experiments to test each hypothesis.
Part of Customer Development is understanding which customers make sense for your business.
Measuring how hard your team is working by counting the number of hours they work or what time they get in and leave is how amateurs run companies.
