Business guys: how my first startup went wrong
15 comments
in an odd reversal from a lot of start ups it was only the technology that could let us down
Happens all the time. At my last startup we added a new product line based on work by this super-smart PhD who had been in the business since he worked at ThinkingMachines. His product worked great -- for one really narrow use case for a single customer. His claims to the contrary, it ended up being so brittle, so poorly coded, and so ungeneralizable we had to pull the whole product. Luckily it wasn't material to our eventual acquisition :)
Happens all the time. At my last startup we added a new product line based on work by this super-smart PhD who had been in the business since he worked at ThinkingMachines. His product worked great -- for one really narrow use case for a single customer. His claims to the contrary, it ended up being so brittle, so poorly coded, and so ungeneralizable we had to pull the whole product. Luckily it wasn't material to our eventual acquisition :)
I deal with a lot business guys at my day job (20+). In 6 years I've only known 1 that I would actually go into business with myself.
I have a feeling that since there really isnt any pressure to quantify their work (at the lower levels), most of them dont measure their own performance and stay at the same mediocre level.
I have a feeling that since there really isnt any pressure to quantify their work (at the lower levels), most of them dont measure their own performance and stay at the same mediocre level.
This is just a perception bias in my opinion. I'll give you an example:
I've dealt with a lot of programmers in the past 10 years. Only a handful would I work with again, and even fewer I would employ to work in a high-paced startup. In my last startup, an expensive over-designed technology stack was our downfall. The business guy turned the company around, secured us two licensing deals, and additional bridge funding.
The point is: there are just as many egocentric, know-nothing programmers as there are douche bag business guys. It really has nothing to do with each others job description, it's just a matter of talent, ambition, persistence, etc. etc.
Attracting the right talent for the team is difficult, select wisely and try not to demonize the opposite party.
I've dealt with a lot of programmers in the past 10 years. Only a handful would I work with again, and even fewer I would employ to work in a high-paced startup. In my last startup, an expensive over-designed technology stack was our downfall. The business guy turned the company around, secured us two licensing deals, and additional bridge funding.
The point is: there are just as many egocentric, know-nothing programmers as there are douche bag business guys. It really has nothing to do with each others job description, it's just a matter of talent, ambition, persistence, etc. etc.
Attracting the right talent for the team is difficult, select wisely and try not to demonize the opposite party.
True I do get your point. And its also possible that I'm in the wrong team. There are other business people outside of my team who I really respect.
Another thing you have to understand is that my company makes a lot of money so it might be a different environment than others. Ie business always looks good as we always get sales because of our great business model.
Thank you putting this more eloquently than I have been able to. You are 100% correct.
thank you, finally someone who says stuff that makes sense.
That's true of a lot of people in every profession though. We all know bad programmers who last read a book in 1992.
I'd be surprised if the ratio of bad:good:great was very different in any field.
I'd be surprised if the ratio of bad:good:great was very different in any field.
There's nothing saying you can't send an email to each of them, saying basically, "just wanted you to know I appreciate all you did, even if it might not have seemed that way at the time." If you stay in touch, they'll see that you've put lots of effort into fixing weaknesses. After all, the person you least want to go into business with is one who can't recognize and correct their own mistakes.
I've stayed in touch with a co-founder from a previous failed venture, and while it hasn't come up to work together again, the contact has been very valuable both ways.
Lots of bridges can be rebuild, assuming you have the desire and humility. And don't think they don't regret some of the things they did. There's always plenty of blame to go all around.
I've stayed in touch with a co-founder from a previous failed venture, and while it hasn't come up to work together again, the contact has been very valuable both ways.
Lots of bridges can be rebuild, assuming you have the desire and humility. And don't think they don't regret some of the things they did. There's always plenty of blame to go all around.
You are very lucky.
Overestimating (and therefore overselling) technology is extremely common. It really takes experience being burnt a couple of times to realize there are no silver bullets - only trade offs. Engineers tend to perpetuate myths that you could stumble on great technology, develop a product based on it, and blow everyone else out of the water. Without experience you couldn't have known things don't happen that way. When beautiful, elegant ideas interact with the realities of delivering a product, things get messy and complicated. Every successful high tech product I'm aware of started this way. You now have the skills and the experience to recognize it.
I think your experience is perfectly natural. Thank heavens for the education you've received, but do not get discouraged - that's how technology products always start. You have to find your first adopter - some high tech people who wouldn't mind parting with some money in exchange for broken technology, so that you could keep polishing it until it's usable for many people.
I highly recommend you to read Crossing The Chasm. The book demystifies this process and explains how you can intricately balance the company to get past it.
Overestimating (and therefore overselling) technology is extremely common. It really takes experience being burnt a couple of times to realize there are no silver bullets - only trade offs. Engineers tend to perpetuate myths that you could stumble on great technology, develop a product based on it, and blow everyone else out of the water. Without experience you couldn't have known things don't happen that way. When beautiful, elegant ideas interact with the realities of delivering a product, things get messy and complicated. Every successful high tech product I'm aware of started this way. You now have the skills and the experience to recognize it.
I think your experience is perfectly natural. Thank heavens for the education you've received, but do not get discouraged - that's how technology products always start. You have to find your first adopter - some high tech people who wouldn't mind parting with some money in exchange for broken technology, so that you could keep polishing it until it's usable for many people.
I highly recommend you to read Crossing The Chasm. The book demystifies this process and explains how you can intricately balance the company to get past it.
Pretty novel effort I'd say.. I made the same mistake with speech recognition. I built out the product only to realize that the technology is pretty difficult to scale.
I've heard a great many fail and success stories and success, it seems, is built on failure... So keep failing and eventually you'll succeed, it's almost inevitable..
You seem to have a good grasp of what went wrong as well so it seems like you've learned a great deal from your experience.. That's what counts.
Good luck on your next venture and never give up.. It's in our DNA to build and so most of us have no choice but to keep doing it =)
I've heard a great many fail and success stories and success, it seems, is built on failure... So keep failing and eventually you'll succeed, it's almost inevitable..
You seem to have a good grasp of what went wrong as well so it seems like you've learned a great deal from your experience.. That's what counts.
Good luck on your next venture and never give up.. It's in our DNA to build and so most of us have no choice but to keep doing it =)
Thank you for the good wishes :) It's now 6 or so years later and I hope I have acquired enough skills to at least be able to make new mistakes rather than repeating old ones.
It sounds like you learned a lot in hindsite and would do things differently next time. On the other hand, some things don't become apparent till you dive in and try to make them work and there's nothing wrong with that.
I've been here too. This kind of stuff requires the sort of technical experience time and education provides.
The only way tech founders can appreciate the biz guy is by personally engaging in biz development
Going by trends & data I would say every startup founder / founding team must have basic business & sales acumen to succeed. Even if u have a great business guy , he / she would need a team to compliment the efforts and that would be the founders in the initial days. Lets take the most obvious examples to back up this theory Bill Gates – a technology god but also a very shrewd business guy , he actually bought the OS Larry Page & Sergey Brin – beating Yahoo out of AOL by diverting a Spain bound flight and meeting with AOL’s Rowley in London eventually clinching the deal – this was impossible if not for the biz acumen of Page & Brin Google & Microsoft clearly indicate founders need to be well rounded in Business & technology both Its disastrous for a startup founder to say hey I am the tech guy , for success u gotta be good at Biz Development. The good news is it’s a skill that can be acquired by meeting prospects
Going by trends & data I would say every startup founder / founding team must have basic business & sales acumen to succeed. Even if u have a great business guy , he / she would need a team to compliment the efforts and that would be the founders in the initial days. Lets take the most obvious examples to back up this theory Bill Gates – a technology god but also a very shrewd business guy , he actually bought the OS Larry Page & Sergey Brin – beating Yahoo out of AOL by diverting a Spain bound flight and meeting with AOL’s Rowley in London eventually clinching the deal – this was impossible if not for the biz acumen of Page & Brin Google & Microsoft clearly indicate founders need to be well rounded in Business & technology both Its disastrous for a startup founder to say hey I am the tech guy , for success u gotta be good at Biz Development. The good news is it’s a skill that can be acquired by meeting prospects
The initial technical idea was actually mine - with this new-fangled 802.11b stuff now available on PDAs they would be perfect for VoIP. Any bandwidth problems (in a dense area) could be solved by using 802.11a back haul to a network of fixed location seed nodes, then all the handsets could be part of an 802.11b mesh network.
Obviously I had no way to implement this. I was a first year undergraduate and you can't build much of a mesh network with one PDA you bought by raiding your food budget. One day I got talking to a guy on a train about this who got pretty excited about it. A week or two later he called and asked if I would mind putting together a paper about how it could work.
Some months passed and every now and again we had a short conversation about one thing or another, but nothing much seemed to happen.
One day I'm asked if I want to get going with building it. Based on nothing more than a short technical paper (written by an undergrad!) and a few power point presentations my contact had successfully acquired sufficient funding for expenses and prototype equipment and obtained a lead customer who was willing to pay enough to get us up and running. The customer had also loaned us a large site to use as a test bed. There were also a few follow on leads at a reasonably advanced stage.
I dragooned a friend into working with me and he did most of the work getting the prototype up and running. However in practice with real world interference (hello, steel framed buildings) 100 meters was about the best separation at which voice calls would still work. By very careful placement of the static nodes we managed to get pretty good coverage on our demo route but it was never going to scale to a large operation. My great idea was not viable because my assumptions were faulty and I had significantly oversold the capability of a dense mesh network to overcome that.
At this point things started falling apart slightly with our lead customer. Our business guy did a good job at keeping them happy until it was obvious that things weren't going to work, at which point he and the company switched tack to something else.
In this case our business guy provided the opportunity and the push to take a shot at it - in an odd reversal from a lot of start ups it was only the technology that could let us down.
The things I regret most from the experience are:
- Being a pretty bad technical lead. I'm pretty sure my friend wouldn't want to work with me again, which is the worst kind of bridge to torch. I have put a lot of effort into acquiring the right skills and approach to make sure that doesn't happen again.
- Not having validated the technical side more thoroughly. If I had known it wasn't going to work I could have had that kind of push behind something with a chance of success.
- Not having put enough effort into maintaining contact with our business guy. He was pretty good at what he did but I don't think I appreciated that at the time.
Now I'm doing my own thing (details in my profile - half way through month 2 now) and most of the things I have to learn are on the marketing and sales side. I'm really enjoying it but I totally underestimated how much work was involved in doing it properly.