SortiPreneur

Startup Insight

Readers of my blog know I am a big Paul Graham fan.  I like him because he is, smart, honest and on the side of the entrepreneur.

His most recent essay, on his insights on what a startup is really like, is one of his most brilliant.  I especially like the part where he talks about the relationshp between founders, colleagues and the companies:

Several people used that word "married." It's a far more intense relationship than you usually see between coworkers—partly because the stresses are so much greater, and partly because at first the founders are the whole company. So this relationship has to be built of top quality materials and carefully maintained. It's the basis of everything.
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Just as the relationship between cofounders is more intense than it usually is between coworkers, so is the relationship between the founders and the company. Running a startup is not like having a job or being a student, because it never stops. This is so foreign to most people's experience that they don't get it till it happens.

Yesterday, I was discussing this exact same issue with a Turkish entrepreneur.  I can not agree more with Paul.

Minimum Viable Products

I'm a big fan of Eric Ries's MVP notion.  I firmly believe that it's exceedingly rare that a startup or a product fails because it's missing that nth feature.

Feature creep is tempting in the early stages when the product is the one area of a business that the founders have close to full control on.  And since founders tend to be very passionate and hard working, they feel that adding that one extra feature will differentiate their product and help them in going to market.

Optimizing features by applying the Pareto Principle will lead to a more effective use of resources.  Nivi has a great recent post on this topic with some great ideas and examples.  My favorites:

“If Apple can launch a smartphone without Find or Cut-and-Paste, what can you cut out of your product requirements?” – Sramana Mitra

“The first version of Gmail was literally written in a day.”

– Paul Buchheit

Censorship Firefox Extension

I just came across an app called Sorumlu Vatandaş (I refuse to link to them).  It's a Firefox extension that makes it easier for Turkish internet users to flag a site and notify the Turkish authorities so that site can be examined, and if found inappropriate, access blocked at the ISP level.

I find it deplorable that the internet community in Turkey is working to make censorship easier.  I also find  the graphic they have chosen to represent the "responsible citizen" ("sorumlu vatandaş" in English) quite funny. :)

A Players

The success of any startup, in my opinion, hinges on the quality of the team.  This is a statement I can make very comfortably.  The trick is gauging the quality.  That's usually tough, especially since, as a VC, we get to have relatively little time to spend with the team.  So I find myself looking for clues in spotting a great team.

My friend Auren has a great post on the common traits of A players.  To summarize, A players tend to:

• Be Relentlessly Resourceful
• Work Around Rules Encourage Mediocrity - So you have to avoid those who try to box them in through these types of rules
• Good at Getting Back to People 
• Show up Early vs Late
• Be Founders of Something
• Follow-up
• Work harder and smarter

Of course, this is not meant to be exhaustive or exclusive.  But, I view my job to be centered around spotting the right talent, more than anything else.  And I know Auren is very good at attracting great players around him. So I think this list is very helpful.

Apple Magic Mouse

I rarely post about hardware but this feels like a breakthrough in UI.  I assume the apple tablet will incorporate similar capabilities.

Practical Dreamers

I was at a meeting this morning where the notion of "Practical Dreamers" came up.  It was proposed that practical dreamers, when they are 100% committed, become extraordinary leaders.

I think this is particularly true for entrepreneurs.  Dreaming is the first requirement; revolutionary ideas are products of creative thinking and dreaming.  But you need to be practical.  If you possess both abilities, then you add 100% commitment and the combination becomes a recipe for success.

I know this sounds a bit cliche and obvious.  But it made me think about the entrepreneurial successes I have witnessesd in my career and without a single exception, they each had all three elements.

Future of Filmed Entertainment

Emrecan Dogan has kicked off what promises to be an insightful series on his observations and thoughts on the three areas of filmed entertainment content:

Content Owners
Intermediaries (’gatekeepers’ or ‘middlemen)
End-user Platforms

He's tackling a fascinating area with an enormmous market side, technology attacks from all directions and complex micro-economic forces in play.  I look forward to his thoughts.

LHC Sabotaged by its Future

There's a growing meme around the idea that:

.. the troubled collider (MCS: The Large Hadron Collider) is being sabotaged by its own future. A pair of otherwise distinguished physicists have suggested that the hypothesized Higgs boson, which physicists hope to produce with the collider, might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.

It's really fun to think about. :)

Authentic Enthusiasm

There exist some cliches on usability - rules of thumb on design, fonts, color palette, etc.  Then you come across very successful web properties that ignore these entirely (Craigslist and Paypal come to mind).  How come?  What's the magic ingredient in these sometimes ugly services that leads to success.

This has been an issue on my mind for a while.  Today, reading Albert' Wenger's post, something crystallized:

Hospitality is the “humanizing” element.  Visitors have to feel appreciated, they have to find their time respected and they have to find pleasure in the transaction. Achieving that for USHG starts with hiring employees based on their HQ, their “hospitality quotient,” which Danny defined as “how much pleasure someone derives from providing pleasure to others.”

Danny is the restaurateur Danny Meyer and relays his experience in the hospitality industry.  Albert found it relevant to the web industry but it made him think about the hiring decisions in web companies.

However, I think it applies to the experience the web site provides, as well.  If a website makes the user feel like it's trying really hard to be useful, then the user will forgive (or ignore) many design or usability flaws.  Authenticity can shine through on the web where you don't have face to face interactions.

Maybe Authentic Enthusiasm is the Hospitality Quotient of the web.

Angels Charging Startups

Jason Calacanis is waging a war against angel investor groups charging entrepreneurs to hear their business plans.  I agree with him that this is a very unsavory practice and support him in his crusade.  I am not aware of any angel investor groups in the Turkish market who charge startups to hear pitches, but please let me know if you are know of one.

UPDATE:  Fred's post reminds me of another variant:  The startup coach.  We have a few of these here in Turkey.  If you are thinking of spending your precious cash on one, be very careful in evaluating the merits of the coach you are about to hire.