24 karma · joined August 13, 2008
https://youtu.be/uB4FqfIX9JY?si=VokrpZM8xAhLxdVN&t=184
Crazy times growing up back then.
I opted to be really transparent about it because a.) I didn't want it to be a surprise when I texted in the middle of the night that I wasn't able to make it in to the office and b.) I wanted to work for someone that would be supportive when things went sideways. I was lucky and found a great person to work for who became a very good friend.
There are enough people today that either deal with depression personally or know someone that deals with depression on some level or another. If I was hiring you, I'd want to know about it upfront. I've always told my employees that I can deal with bad news, but I hate surprises.
I'd own it and I'd explain how you handle it and how it won't impact your performance and this is why. I'd be pretty impressed with someone coming to me saying BTW, I've got this issue, but let me show you how I handle it and assure you that it won't be an issue if I work for you.
It is better to sell to early than too late.
It sounds cliche, but focus on building a great, easy to use product.
Don't let a single customer be too much of your revenue.
Disqualify quickly.
I wouldn't do remote teams.
Let the market dictate your product direction, not the engineering team.
Vital few is so insanely important.
Avoid shiny things syndrome.
From there, we cold called / emailed like maniacs - 'here is what we are working on, here is the problem it will solve, here is why you need it, can we have 20-minutes of time to walk you through this?' We leveraged every possible network connection that we had.
When we got people on the phone, we actually showed them mocks of what their site would look like with our platform (lots of Photoshop). Explained that about how we wanted to get them in a beta program, and how much would they pay?
It was a ton of hustle, but we had 10-customers when we launched that were generating a little bit of revenue and willing to give us quotes in the press or get on stage at events.
It is more of a larger, enterprise sale, so it won't work for all companies, but we were essentially selling something that we were building in parallel and wouldn't accept free for an answer.
Managing a bunch of 15 - 19 YO's is pretty challenging and as schools continue to get their budget raised or cut, based on attendance, it will be more important to manage attendance vs. GPA / performance. Having kids safely in school, with butt in seat in class, will be continue to be a driving KPI.
Human beings aren't cattle, but an education system built around preparing kids for a 9 - 5, factory job, is essentially a cattle farm.
The cynic looks at $320M price tag and wonders why I don't have better schools for my kids and DARPA doesn't have a better video of this thing.
But totally cool to pay for government pawns.
I remember reading a quote from Bono where he talked about the crab mentality of his home town (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality). One of the reasons I avoid Facebook is that it is just an easier way for that network and the poison thinking that you mentioned to flourish.