A great founder starts a startup with a great taste in product design and a vision that is built through engineering a user experience that elevates the product to new heights and creates an improvement, an order of magnitude, better than any other product in the market.
Good design is not just about pushing pixels and creating sleek interfaces. It’s much more than simply designing the look and feel of the product. It’s about designing how the product will work.
Kris Jones is an entrepreneur, angel investor, and author.
In 1999, he started Pepperjam, an internet marketing company and affiliate network.
I’ve written about how startups take time to build and how they evolve in a post about Pinterest.
Building a startup takes time. It can take years before a founder decides to quit their day job to start a startup for an idea that they’ve had for years.
Often times, the idea will fail, and the founder will try 10 more ideas before realizing they should focus on another idea.
Venture capital can seem very esoteric and hard to understand if you’re on the outside.
But the more you study the VC asset class, you develop pattern recognition and certain things you might want to look for.
I recently read a great post on David Hornik’s blog that was published about 13 years ago, in 2009, titled “Monetizing Twitter: Bring on the Ads!”
In the blog post, David talks about how Twitter should start serving ads to its users and start monetizing the traffic on Twitter.
Raising money from investors in the early stages of your company can be tricky. It is especially hard to figure out if this is your first time trying to raise money for a startup.
I always tell founders that the best way to raise money quickly for your startup is to spend the first few months completely obsessed with building your product and generating revenue.
No investor wants to pass on the investment of the century. I’ve heard that every VC or early-stage angel has a story of passing on a company that turned out to be a unicorn or decacorn.
They can be missed opportunities that haunt some investors for the rest of their lives.
There are often just a few key decisions that shape who we become in life and where we end up eventually.
From an investing standpoint, understanding what decisions make a founder who they are and what decisions made it so they are where they are today is important.
I learned from Jessica Livingston that as an early-stage investor, there are two things to look for in a founder.
You need to figure out if a founder has grit, and they need to be working on a problem for which people desperately need a solution.
Jonathan Staenberg of Staenberg Venture Partners often asks himself, “Why would someone even want to do a startup in the first place?”
He talks about how hard it is to get a startup off the ground and that it’s not for the faint of heart.