Categories
- Benefits (5)
- Company News (40)
- Enterprise 2.0 (107)
- Information Management (23)
- Keep It Together (8)
- Product Announcements (36)
- Productivity (15)
- Software Development (31)
Dharmesh Shah gave a presentation at the Business of Software conference called Everything I Know About Startups. He posted a video of it to his blog, OnStartups. If you’re in the software industry or work with startup companies, you should watch it. The video lasts about an hour, but the insights Dharmesh gives you will last much longer.
Dharmesh lists the ten key points from his presentation — I’ve copied them below — but you need to hear his explanation to understand the rationale behind each.
1. Your idea can suck. Just get started.
2. You can be in the middle of nowhere and still build a great business.
3. Not having cash breeds good behavior. It’s helpful to have constratints.
4. In defense of the modest outcome: You don’t HAVE to build the next Facebook. Modest liquidity events are highly under-rated.
5. “I’m a complete introvert. It’s not that I don’t like people, I just don’t like beind around them a whole lot.”
6. Something’s changed here. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get your message out there.
7. The real issue with VC is not the cost of capital (which is high), but how hard it is to actually raise it.
8. You have to go through the 12 flaming hoops of venture capital.
9. All the time you should’ve been spending solving your customer’s problem, you use to start to solve the VC’s problem.
10. Write a blog, not a business plan.
We’ll be giving all of these points deep thought over the coming months.
Paul Graham posted a Fundraising Survival Guide for start ups to his website. It’s a subject that’s been on my mind a lot lately.
Tick tock tick tock
When we started Infovark, we had roughly enough money to get through the first year. We did a fairly good job of budgeting, all things considered. We’ll be able to stretch our initial round further than planned, basically because we hired a few specialists under contract rather than another full time employee. We were also pleasantly surprised at the number of high quality software development tools you can get for free or at reasonable cost. (Microsoft’s Empower for ISVs was a particular boost.)
But when you’re a startup, the clock is always ticking. I can hear it now: “Time is money is time is money….” This is the mantra of the founder. It’s what gives us sleepless nights. It leads to fear and indecision. The search for additional funding can obscure the real goal of starting the company: building something useful — and having fun while doing it.
Infovark has by far been the best work experience of my life. Not merely because the Burrow is conveniently located in my basement — though it’s nice not to fight traffic — but because I’ve finally gotten a chance to create a product from scratch. I’ve never had the chance to do that before, and I’ve been learning a lot in the process. (That’s entrepreneur shorthand for making more mistakes faster than ever before.)
I’m really excited about this stage of the project. We’ve gotten an initial round of feedback from our alpha testers, and we’re mapping out the plan to get us to beta. But I can also hear the clock ticking…
That means at some stage — probably sooner than we’d like — we’ll have to leave the Burrow in search of funding. It’s a scary prospect for introverted software engineers. We’ll have to explain what we’re building, why we’re building it, and why you ought to invest in it. That means we’ll have to define why people will want to buy it and how much it will cost for them to get a copy. These are yet more things to add to our long, growing list of things that aren’t writing code. Except that getting funding is far from trivial, as Paul Graham points out. It’s a matter of survival.
The most discouraging thing about running a startup is how long it takes to start up. Maybe that’s why I found The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun such a great read. He systematically demolishes common misconceptions about how ideas get to market. Just skimming some of the chapter headings made me feel better:
The Myths of Innovation
We’ve absorbed these myths into our culture because they make entertaining and memorable stories, but innovation rarely works that way. Edison had a team of reasearchers working for him and trial-and-error was his primary means of refining ideas. The advertising industry owes much of its existence to the difficulty of getting people to try new products and services. Sometimes it takes years for a new development to reach consumers, as was the case with 3M’s laughably weak glue formula eventually becoming the blockbuster Post-It note.
It’s good to be reminded of these counterexamples. The idea is often the easy part. It’s the execution that’s hard.
A tip from Mikal sent us browsing to Startup Warrior. It’s a mashup that uses the TechCrunch database and Google Maps to plot hotspots of tech activity.
ValleyWag reported the ten most concentrated tech regions. 
All the usual suspects were there: Palo Alto, San Francisco, Mountain View, New York, Austin, Vancouver. Northern Virginia didn’t make the cut, though Infovark is listed.
On the positive side, we can now definitively state that we are THE best startup within a ten-block radius of the post office in Oakton, Virginia. That’s not something everyone can claim.
It’s a funny thing working for a “stealth” startup. There’s two very diametric forces at work. In one corner, you have the notion that you aren’t willing to share precisely what you’re working on with everyone until you’re sure that it’s ready. And in the other, the fact that as a young organization, you really want to engage with potential customers and partners already in the kind of space that you’re aiming to get to.
This kind of “Come Here – Go Away” paradox is pretty common in startups and their blogs (ours included).
But, after a bunch of long hours writing code, and consulting with designers, and doing other fairly insular activities, Dean and I have decided that we couldn’t possibly miss the big Enterprise 2.0 Conference. So, we’re dusting off our nice clothes, and emerging from the comfortable darkness of the Infovark Burrow to join everyone in Boston next week.
We’ll be in town Tuesday to Thursday – so if you happen to be able to make it, and you’d like to catch up and talk with us about Enterprise 2.0, the stuff we’re working on, the stuff you’re working on, (or any thing at all) — we would absolutely love to see you! You can leave us a comment here, find us on twitter, or via email at info@infovark.com.