Aditya Kothadiya's Blog

Targeted Audience: Entrepreneurs

Background: Whenever I stumble upon any compelling article related to
Startup or Entrepreneurship topics, I link those resources in my blog.

Jason Goldberg is writing an interesting series on his blog – Lessons Learned From Startup CEOs. I read few posts from that series, and here are my favorite learning notes.

Jason Goldberg, Founder, ex-CEO of JobSter

The CEO’s job is to create value.  Determine early on what the keys to value creation are in your industry and map a path for value creation for your business.   Return often to measure how you are or are not creating value.  Weigh business decisions based on whether they contribute to value creation or not. Avoid paths that do not contribute to value creation regardless of how sexy or fun they might be.  Narrow the focus as much as possible.  Get one thing right then move on to the next.

Try to ride some powerful existing waves vs. just creating new waves.  Find some big and important industry trends and ride on top of them. It is very very hard to create your own industry trends.  Be careful about getting out too far ahead of any wave.

Technology companies are all about the product. Getting the product right is critical before aggressively going to market. 

Have fun.  Everyone looks to the CEO everyday to set their own moods and expectations.  Being CEO can be lonely — someone once said to me that CEO is the loneliest job in the world as there are days that your board hates you, your employees hate you, your customers hate you, and your family hates you — true.  That’s why you need to make sure to have fun every step along the way.  If you are having fun, people will see that and they will follow your energy.  Remember, behind every wrong turn is a better path.  And remember, that the beauty of startups is that you get to try, try, try again and again and learn a ton along the way.

Jonathan Abrams, Founder, CEO, and Junior Computer Programmer at Socializr

Focus is difficult but crucial. Until your product is complete, your technology solid, your customers or users happy, and your sales or traffic growing and near critical mass, most other things do not matter. A startup CEO can waste a lot of time on premature marketing, business development, partnerships, PR, consultants, board maintenance, etc. before the company is really ready for those things.

Hire based on passion, not resumes. If you attract candidates based on your prestigious investors, be wary. If you lose candidates because you don’t have prestigious investors, they weren’t the people who you needed anyways.

A startup can get more done in the same amount of time than a large company, and needs to, but a startup is still more like a marathon than a sprint. Things will still take longer than you expect to get done, and you will make mistakes. Making mistakes is ok, as long as you get more things right than wrong each week, and correct the things you get wrong. Avoid irreversible mistakes.

Losing control of a startup to investors puts founders and common shareholders in a vulnerable position and may not improve the company’s execution or increase the company’s chances of success. Surrendering the corporate governance of a company to the wrong people is typically an irreversible mistake.

For a software or Internet company, overall execution depends on engineering execution in the first few years — make sure your stuff works! A technical founder should stay involved in the technology until it does.

To read more lessons from more startup CEOs, read Jason Goldberg’s blog – Social Median.

Note: To read more articles from this series, please visit Startup and Entrepreneurship Resources.