My friend, the first few months are the easiest months - the ignorance is bliss months. Running a startup is enormous fun and an incredible learning experience. I have enumerated some of the stress inducing issues below. I do not mean to discourage, though everyone needs to know what they are getting into with eyes wide open,
- Not having done enough research and received proper feedback before launch and the product not taking off.
- Bending over backwards for major clients.
- Feeling enormous responsibility to your investors to pay them back.
- Making sure that you do not run out of money.
- Responsibility to your employees that you do everything you can to make sure that you will be able to pay them, and that their efforts will prove fruitful.
- Hiring the right people.
- Firing the right people.
- How you are taking a $60k/year salary, basically paycheck-to-paycheck and not being able to go to your closest friend's bachelor parties/weddings, and not being able to get your girlfriend a nice engagement ring or pay for a wedding.
This sounds like it was put together by a guy with an inflated self-worth. I will wager that Bezos, Bloomberg, and Steve Jobs would all disagree.
Engineers and "business guys" are compliments. If you know how build a product but lack the necessary sector expertise, cannot raise capital, or sell it you will be SOL. The same thing is true of the inverse. I'm sick of these shortsighted perspectives.
Sir, your story is absolutely amazing. You, your wife, and your son deserve to be recognized for your struggles that will undoubtedly help others in the future.
Chinese menus should only be offered when you are trying to further segment your core market, not to try and create a market.
A significant issue for companies is not identifying the true costs of serving specific types of customers. Those that require many additional resources (that you are not charging for), particularly for a SAAS product, should be respectfully cut. Sometimes it is cheaper to not serve a client and not have some revenue come in than to serve those that are resource sucks and pull your time/focus away from your primary market.
Though those in C-level and sales-focused positions do not always understand the need, every project I have ever worked on has benefited greatly from a thorough pre-production process.
It is the ready-shoot-aim projects that are the greatest victims of these issues, even though we are always told to ship, ship, ship!
This article was clearly written by someone with very little understanding NYC's tech scene. While I would agree that there is a social/mobile bubble here, many impressible businesses serving other sectors are being started by incredibly bright entrepreneurs. Each of whom know what Quora is.
In terms of finding top talent, as long as a company is building products with tangible value and the CEO can outline the immediate ROI for customers, those that flock to Wall Street are there to be had. The East Coast also has our own top universities, the originals - Harvard, MIT, Cornell, Princeton, Yale, Penn, Carnegie Mellon - who are each producing phenomenal mathematics and CS professionals with East Coast ties. The ability to staff talent is directly correlated to the quality of the company's product and founders.
Schrage outlined how examples of how to manage crisis situations, not micromanagement.
If a manager does not delegate then he/she is not busy enough. That said, one needs to have a thorough understanding of the work of all subordinates, whether technical or not, in order to understand how to quickly ameliorate circumstances that deviate from an anticipated course.
The lesson here is that managers needs to be involved, at a high level, early and often to catch onerous situations before they evolve.
The conditions for building a sustainable business are not always perfect. Most businesses are given up on too quickly. In fact, many successful businesses have or were within hours of running out of cash before they became successful, i.e. Pandora, early Pinterest, RealNetworks. It is only due to the few who have the courage, naivety, and tenacity to pull through that many of these companies still exist.
With the exception of the startup porn you read on TC, the only companies that raise multi-million dollar Series A rounds already have traction. The difficulty in gaining traction in today's saturated marketplaces should not be underestimated.
In most standard Series A rounds the company creates a 15-20% option pool and the investor gets around 30% of the equity.
Assuming two co-founders and a small seed round, the founders each likely own 18-20% of the company. They also went without pay and healthcare for a while, built a product, got traction, raised a real round (which is more difficult than it seems you believe), and are giving you upwards of 10% of their own stake. In addition, it is likely that the founders are taking below-market salaries while paying everyone else near -market salaries. That said, 1-2% for an early, senior hire is right on the money.
Reading through these comments I feel that people are focusing on the wrong issue. At a high-level, let's not focus on high-tech vs. relatively low-tech. Rather, as Steve is, we should be discussing whether companies are pushing to solve significant world problems and pushing real sciences forward, or whether entrepreneurs and VCs are eager to tackle gimmicky but real quick buck businesses.
I feel that we have brilliant minds looking for quick paydays, which is understandable, but does not say much about our community. We need more Palantirs, Fusion IOs, and SpaceX type companies and fewer email, flash sales, and gaming companies.
I am a product strategist by trade, am a novice engineer, and run a big data startup serving the financial services sector.
Though the development of our platform is beyond my current abilities, I have been able to generate >$5m in LOIs without working MVP.
Bootstrapping is not impossible for a non-engineer, though we must focus on our strengths - in my case vision, design, and sales - in order to compensate and garner the support of others to build your team.