Elaine Wherry, co founder of Meebo
6. Be optimistic. Be paranoid.
These are the cardinal rules of successful entrepreneurship. The optimism is the faith that you have in the potential of an idea. But before you invest your life savings into your billion dollar idea, do a quick search just to be sure that no one else has had this idea before. That’s the paranoia – and it comes in handy when one is shopping their idea around. Due diligence is the name of the game. Earn the respect of potential investors by showing that you are aware of the market for you product, the competition in that space and that you know exactly what you’re going to do to counter it.
7. Murphy’s law.
“Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Be prepared for that, and manage the challenges as they come. However, founders who sleep with their phones under their pillows will be driven crazy by the constant ringing. You have to intentionally create time to relax; taking time out for yourself or else you’ll burn out pretty fast. A good analogy for this is a baseball pitcher. They keep their eye on the position they want the ball to land all through their swing, yet look away at the very last second so they can look back and refocus. So take a moment to refocus yourself – to remind yourself of the big picture. If you can’t do it for your own sake, then do it for the sake of your business.
8. Selling the business/idea versus not selling
Chad Hurley who sold YouTube in 2006 said: “We were growing so quickly and we had some decisions to make. We didn’t want the service or our communities to suffer because we couldn’t access the resources we needed. We had a good relationship with Google and it was an opportunity for us to accelerate development by using the infrastructure that they already have in place so that helped us decide that selling would be a good move for us.”
Mark Zuckerberg, “Whenever you choose not to do something like that (sell), there’s obviously some risk involved but I think that if you have the type of situation that we have where our user base is doubling every 6 months, user engagement is higher here [on Facebook] than anywhere else on the internet, and there’s nothing that indicates that it’s going to slow down, then there’s really no need to reason to sell. The way we see it, there’s no reason why, in two years, we won’t have hundreds of millions of users.” And he was right.
From what they’ve both said, if you have the capacity to scale the business on your own then by all means keep it. However, if it gets to the point where it has outgrown you as the founder and you need access to more resources to continue running it, selling might just be the right option for you.
9. Being first to break into the industry
The fact that other companies exist in the space that you’re considering entering should not deter you from trying to enter that market. As the VC moderating the panel said, “First movers are way over hyped.” You need to be the best company that best meets the user need and a lot of times, first movers are those who build something before the market was ready, or before technology existed to fully take advantage of their product or before the things that would really make their ideas work came together. It’s dangerous to be the first entrant into the market because they are more likely to be a lesson on what not to do for companies that come after them, rather than a success story. As it is often said, ‘Pioneers are martyrs’. However, it takes some special skills to create a product, a market and dominate it or be the only, just as Apple have done or James Cameron who conceptualized the movie ‘Avatar’ years before the technology to create 3D movies existed.
10. Stay hungry, stay foolish
This is a statement credited to Apple co-founder Steve Jobs who was addressing the graduating class of 2005 at Stanford University. In his speech, Steve Jobs narrated his life and how dropping out of college was the best decision he ever made. This, he explained, allowed his mind to be creative and learn in an unconventional manner. Though we are not advocating for you drop out of campus, it will do you good to learn new things outside the class and lecture hall. As an entrepreneur, you should never settle, never stop growing. The ‘I will retire at 40 as a millionaire’ is something you will never hear from successful entrepreneurs coz’ it’s now not about the money. They live for something greater. They are naturally looking to improve their services or come up with the best next thing.
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