jmaskell

It's not about fear of failing. I wouldn't do it again unless I was convinced the venture would be successful (and I think there's a significantly increased chance of that, based on what I learnt during the failed startup and since).

What I'm saying is that having equal co-founders gives you the ability to share the workload, emotional strain and get through the pain barrier.

It's obviously not impossible to build a huge business as a single co-founder, but it's unlikely that I'd want to do it again!

I believe that being a solo founder contributed to the failure of my startup. In short, it puts a lot of pressure on yourself, that can't be split with other members of the team. If the ship is sinking, you have to go down with it. Other friends and mentors can offer support, but they're not in the same boat as you. When times are tough, founders can help pull each other through.

I think the reasons described in the OP are more about having the wrong founding team. This is also why we have things like vesting - if someone decides not to work full time, consult elsewhere then they should lose part of their shareholding.

This is probably skewed by finance and a small number of extremely well paid bankers, hedge fund traders etc.

I've been living here for a few years, and the main killer has always been rent. I've been able to get this down by sharing with others, learning about nice but cheaper neighbourhoods (I live in Putney now), and being prepared to commute 30-45 minutes in to central London.

Aside from travel (~£120/month), other costs are similar to elsewhere in the UK. There are decent, well priced (<£10-15 per head) places to eat, drink etc.

A salary in the £20-30k range would require careful money management, but you can live comfortably on £30k+.

The urgency to interview, followed by the abrupt halt in communication isn't something that is unique to Silicon Valley or engineering positions. I had it a lot in London a couple of months ago for mostly product jobs.

It's incredibly unprofessional / downright rude - especially when so much pressure is put on to get you through the interview process quickly. It also means that I now have a negative opinion of a number of companies - and advise friends against applying or interviewing there if approached.

I've been in a position of hiring before, and while it's not nice to tell someone that they haven't got the job, it's the polite thing to do. Most people are reasonable, and it increases the chances of them recommending your company to others.

    also get used to befuddling even competent recruiters, at one startup I did almost every job in the place at one time or another, when looking for a new job it drove the recruiters crazy trying to place me

I had this problem - recruiters want a job title to pigeon hole you with. Their brains explode when they can't do this.

Unfortunately I'm not a programmer (I can write enough code to be dangerous) - but more of an ops/product/sales type person instead, so it was a bit harder for me to find something.

I was also surprised at how long it took our developer to find a new role - he was extremely good, got first interviews quickly but it took companies a long time to make a decision. And we're in London, where those skills are in very high demand.

It's definitely about having the right attitude. I was able to find a job that gives me a lot of autonomy, but also direction. At the moment, I quite enjoy letting someone else make the big decisions for me!

It didn't make enough to support the team. There was an argument for running it as a side project / one man business, but that wasn't something that I wanted to do (and investors supported/advised when making that decision).

The struggle was more around scaling the business. We had income, and raised some seed funding on the back of it (in order to go full time on the project). We didn't take further investment because we knew we couldn't scale and provide the return that investors would have wanted.

While running Vinetrade, I learnt a lot about testing ideas and getting validation with minimal effort. The MVP post was about some of these lessons. If I was starting again, I'd get that validation much more quickly (but it would likely be the same early validation again).

I got this a lot. I think it was the cause of me not getting a few job offers. It's good to pre-empt the concern and be clear about wanting to take what you learnt on to another project.

What I found hardest was trying to explain that I also didn't want the stress and emotional ride of running a company for a while - without coming across as lazy or unmotivated.

It's fine wine (£100 per bottle and up). Of which about 80% is Bordeaux.

I calculated those figures by looking at widely used market stats, and then the turnover of the UK's fine wine wholesalers.

  It seems to me that you are saying that if buyer and seller know each other then they would eschew the market for a more intimate trading arrangement.

This is exactly what I'm saying. E.g. Airbnb wouldn't work if hosts and guests already knew or could easily find each other some other way.

I hope so. I can definitely understand why investors prefer second or third time entrepreneurs so much!

Exactly. There's a wine trading company called Wine Networks - a branch of SK Group (huge South Korean conglomerate).

They're relatively successful, but are hugely inefficient (no tech).

It's a little more complex - a lot of our customers were trading wine to make a profit, and were far more price sensitive. They traded on the site in the early days.

Sadly, the novelty soon wore off, and it turns out the social element is one of the reasons why they enjoy their trading.

We did. I had a year of experience (on the operations side), our sales guy had several years of experience.

Many people in the industry were surprised when we closed - they fully expected us to do well. There are a lot of buyers who are very price sensitive (and happy to do things themselves / hunt around for bargains) - they assumed we'd scoop them all up in time.

That would have taken a lot of money (to buy stock), and expose us to a lot more risk. Investors were backing us for the disintermediation.

I quite strongly believe that someone with an understanding of tech, the ability to build something, and take a position on stock, could make a lot of money in this market.

Exactly. I'd have had to lie and mislead investors to get the money. That's fraud and something I wasn't prepared to do.

They were buying a lot for consumption too. Drinking (or gifting) a bottle of Lafite or Petrus is a good way to show how wealthy you are.

We tried this. The middle men simply weren't willing to pay for software (or at least enough to build a viable business).

It's a very antiquated market - with a lot of independent traders. Their view on software (particularly web based) is often that it's something you can get a teenager to build on the cheap and isn't worth spending real, hard cash on.

We knew exactly what the problems were - we just had a vision for how to overcome them and how things could be different. Every business starts as an idea, with a set of hypothesis to validate (even if you don't realise this at the time).

It was tough to decide to stop - but when you take a step back, look at the data we had, it was the right decision.

Consumers/collectors wanted a better deal (they were paying minimum 10-20% to middle men when buying and selling).

We did a lot of customer development work (and were customers ourselves) to validate these issues. The problem was keeping people on the site - they reverted to email and phone once the novelty of doing it online had worn off.

There was a huge bubble, that popped. Our timing was off completely (a lot of our target sellers want to sit on their stock until prices go back up), but the other problems we faced (outlined in the post) were greater.

As for wine prices - they're starting to creep back up again. It's an interesting commodity - a finite amount is produced each year. It tends to improve with age, while supply decreases and demand increases.

Prices increased so much (more than the normal 10-15% per year) because newly minted Chinese people got a taste for it and bought everything they could get their hands on.

Agreed. It's an interesting lesson for tech focused people.

I think you can get around this by introducing social or gaming elements to the product. We didn't have the resources or the time to try that (and the size of the opportunity/market didn't justify the investment required).

A lot of proponents of home working seem to ignore one of the big reasons people may want to work in a centralised space (be it an office, co-working space, somewhere else..) - the interaction with other people.

I hate working at home - I get cabin fever, bored and lonely. I prefer being around other people and having that interaction (IM, video calls just aren't the same). I like a change of scenery during the day.

It's nice to have the option to work from home when necessary (e.g. to avoid having to take a sick day, wait in for a delivery etc) - but I'd hate to do it every day.

I don't doubt that the nature of offices will change (e.g. I find it hard to imagine that cubicle farms have much future), and that the number of people working remotely will increase, but I'd be very surprised if offices disappear completely.

I should have been more accurate - the bank would be liable if the customer charged back and couldn't reclaim the money from Vinetrade (e.g. we'd ceased trading).

There isn't huge risk for the buyers - all wine in the warehouses is insured at full replacement value. It's more of a hypothetical "what if" or worst case scenario.

Thanks! Our preference was actually to take debit cards only - but regularly got told that it's all (credit cards too) or nothing.

There were two big problems with the banks:

1. A number of wine investment companies took card payments but never bought the wine. So the bank was liable for the money lost in those situations - and as a result that put a blanket ban on all fine wine companies. We were able to talk Barclays around on this.

2. Storage of wine would be handled by a third party warehouse. If they screwed anything up (e.g. broke the case, had a fire, and insurance refused to pay out), there was a chance that buyers could get the money back through their bank if they paid by credit card.

and for us when we did accept this:

3. Getting the fees to work with our model - we wanted to offer a fixed fee for trading cases, but all banks / payment services wanted to take a percentage, including for debit card payments (hence my point about doing more work to get the model to work payment charges).

Obviously fraud is a major concern, and is something that we do a lot of work on as we scale up (e.g. at the moment we're manually processing all orders, taking ID for anyone buying more than £10k total etc). It's not something that we're naive too and we're definitely not going to launch a completed automated system without adequate processes in place.

I'm not sure about the rest of Europe, but the UK works pretty much like this. Lots of cashback, store vouchers or airline miles.

I guess the card companies win either way - in interest on people who rack up debts (enticed by the benefits) and also on transaction fees charged to merchants when the card is used.