The first place I'd look would be the UX around your onboarding process and if it encourages immediate use of the product. Without further details it is tough to say.
2,100 karma · joined April 22, 2010
Maybe I'm mistaken, either way, it is good to see people coming to his aid.
1/Cash burn rates at startups: Recently @bgurley and @fredwilson have sounded a vivid alarm -- http://online.wsj.com/articles/venture-capitalist-sounds-ala...
2/I said at the time that I agree with much of what Bill says (https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/511617992757506048 …), and I want to expand on the topic further:
3/New founders in last 10 years have ONLY been in environment where money is always easy to raise at higher valuations. THAT WILL NOT LAST.
4/When the market turns, and it will turn, we will find out who has been swimming without trunks on: many high burn rate co's will VAPORIZE.
5/High cash burn rates are dangerous in several ways beyond the obvious increased risk of running out of cash. Important to understand why:
6/First: High burn rate kills your ability to adapt as you learn & as market changes. Co becomes unwieldy, too big to easily change course.
7/Second: Hiring people is easy; layoffs are devastating. Hiring for startups is effectively one way street. Again, can't change once stuck.
8/Third: Your managers get trained and incented ONLY to hire, as answer to every question. Company bloats & becomes badly run at same time.
9/Fourth: Lots of people, big shiny office, high expense base = Fake "we've made it!" feeling. Removes pressure to deliver real results.
10/Fifth: More people multiplies communication overhead exponentially, slows everything down. Company bogs down, becomes bad place to work.
11/Sixth: Raising new money becomes harder & harder. You have bigger bulldog to feed, need more and more $ at higher and higher valuations.
12/Therefore you take on escalating risk of a catastrophic down round. High-cash-burn startups almost never survive down rounds. VAPORIZE.
13/Further, to get into this position, you probably had to raise too much $ at too high valuation before; escalates down round risk further.
The blog post author then goes on some further back and forth about specifics.
Why does the article keep referring to him as Professor instead of Doctor?
We want to make it convenient for employees to have access to what they want, when they need it. We want employees to be able to have access to all the work files/tools they would need whenever they are near a computer. We don't want to have an emergency come up on a weekend and cause it to force someone to come into the office, or to be able to say "I'm out of town, sorry."
We also want employees to feel safe using the computer for personal things. We've considered something like offering a stipend that covers new hardware and the employee gets to keep us assuming they continue to be employed for X amount of time.