Too Many Pivots, Too Little Passion?
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And then...what?
I guess I'll never understand how, in this world, getting funded is some sort of end. Getting funded means you now have the cash to become a real business, rather than having a two-man team eating ramen and sleeping on the floor. But it's still only the beginning. What proportion of funded startups end up failing? I'll fathom it's a lot. And if you get funded, then flame out, are you a success?
Getting funded isn't the end, and you'll really, really be hard pressed to find anyone who will tell you that in SV, regardless of how much people want to tell you that's the case.
Most people have a goal of selling their company, no? I mean, our tax code is such that it makes far more sense to sell a company than to just take money out the usual way, even if you get the same amount of money total. If you sell the company, you pay a much lower capital gains rate, wheras if you take profit either as a distribution or as salary, you pay much more. (If you take profit as a dividend, you pay corp. income tax on it, then you pay capital gains on it; if you take it as salary/bonus, of course, you pay FICA and everything.)
You can sell a company based on it's current earnings, or you can sell a company based on it's anticipated future earnings. When you get investors, you are doing the latter.
Of course, then you need to figure out how to cash out; but certainly that's easier after getting funding than before.
Personally, I'd prefer to think of it as selling (perhaps only part of) the company rather than "taking funding" - I mean, I'd be okay saying I'd stick around and help out for a number of years (for enough money, of course,) but once you have investors, it's not really yours anymore anyhow; it's more clear to all involved, I think, if you think of it as a sale.
> Getting funded means you now have the cash to become a real business, rather than having a two-man team eating ramen and sleeping on the floor.
See, I don't understand how businesses that can't even bring in enough money to pay their founders get funding.
well, they bring money, some of which you [usually] get to keep, and you lose [varying degrees of] control of the company. It sounds like selling [part of] the company to me.
>Taking money from the company and quitting is called embezzlement.
Hm. I'm pretty sure that if you take your salary/bonus, then quit, that's not embezzlement. I'm pretty sure the same goes for selling your share of the company. (there may be other agreements that go with the investment that prevent you from selling your share, or even that have penalties for you quitting, but it's not embezzlement.)
The most amazing thing, to me, about technology is how it enables such small groups of people to positively affect millions. Lamenting that this is possible without hiring thousands of people seems like a such a narrow and scared mindset to me. It completely ignores huge swaths of possibility and potential.
With agile, sometimes the word is used to justify a rigid excess of ceremony, or as a firewall for lazy developers to hide behind to avoid being responsive to non-engineering members of the organization, or as an unrealistic attempt to turn software development into an assembly line of a bunch of jack-of-all-trades "cross-functional" team members ("specialists? we don't need no stinkin' specialists!"). But the core observation of agile is that writing huge planning documents and spending weeks perfecting PRDs and GANTT charts at the outset of an engineering project and then using these to derive project timelines and costs is inefficient, and that "delivery to QA" 3 months over an arbitrary schedule and 70% over an arbitrary budget is a classic failure mode for this approach to planning. Instead, a focus on building self-organizing, trusted teams who are delivering working software frequently and iteratively, and gathering customer feedback and adjusting "the plan" after each delivered increment of software can result in both happier developers AND happier customers.
Similarly, "lean startup" CAN be synonymous with "changing my mind about what business I'm in and 'pivoting' every 3 weeks", but really the core observation could be summarized as "build things people want", with all these new-fangled buzzword-y tools like customer development interviews, business model canvases and even "pivoting" as a means to this end. While the Ries book is useful, Steve Blank's The Startup Owner's Manual (http://www.amazon.com/The-Startup-Owners-Manual-Step-By-Step...) is phenomenal and the ideas there certainly "transfer very well outside the world of tech start-ups."
Take what works, leave what doesn't, ignore the hype and think critically.
Idea generation is a learnable skill, and once you can generate a bunch of viable ideas, you can select the best one. I think this is better than going with the first "brilliant insight" that pops into your head and deciding it's your lifelong passion.
Also, lean works outside of tech -- remember those infomercial products that took 6-8 weeks to order? That's because they didn't get the products built until they received enough orders. And while they might not change the world, AirBnB, Heroku, Dropbox, Reddit, GoCardless, Exec et al. seem set to leave pretty big craters in it.
More common story is to build some successful project/company, then to build the real thing.
Elon Musk started with Zip2, Tony Hsieh started with LinkExchange.
A pivot is a change in strategy without a change in vision. You cannot have a pivot without vision (that's just wandering around).
Wasn't Facebook an MVP that he put up primarily on a whim? Seems like he derived his "passion" from the fact that it was blowing up.
In fact, weren't Apple, Google ... etc built in a similar fashion? Maybe big vision works best once you have lots of resources and experience.