Startup

Startup Secret 37: To fail is to succeed

"Success gives you the credibility to talk about your failures."

--Osman Kent, CEO, Numecent

We celebrate success in entrepreneurship. Obviously. But Osman Kent, who's started several companies, says we really should keep it at arm's length. "Success is a bad teacher," he says. We're better off learning from successful people who have failed.

Osman says that, statistically, even the most successful people regress toward the norm. The chances are that if you are a big success at one job, you'll be less so at the next. The success comes from realizing why. … Read more

Startup Secret 36: You're big. But not that big.

"Take the money."

--Ruslan R. Fazlyev, CEO, Ecwid

Many of today's entrepreneurial heroes have a curious item in common: They turned down the big payout. Zuckerberg turned down Yahoo ($1 billion) and then Microsoft ($15 billion). Andrew Mason (Groupon) rebuffed Google's $6 billion. And Twitter's still a private company, to the consternation of everyone, including Zuckerberg. (See No Sellout, from Fast Company.)

Don't let that be a lesson to you. Not all big ideas are quite that big. The vast majority are not, in fact.

Ruslan is a very young Russian entrepreneur. His … Read more

Startup Secret 35: Trust the future

"It always works out at the very last minute."

--Megan Cummins, CEO, You Smell Soap

You win some, you lose some. But, ultimately, if you're a startup person, the balance comes up positive.

Part of that is attitude. Every failure, when you're starting a company, is just a bump on the road. A road you keep going down. Megan experienced this when she "won" the promise of a $105,000 investment in her startup, You Smell Soap, on the reality TV show, 'Shark Tank.' The show was taped in July, 2011. As of December, … Read more

Dogpatch Labs fosters innovation among early startups (video)

Much of the investment world is about relationships, says Ryan Spoon, a venture capitalist with Polaris Ventures and co-founder of Dogpatch Labs.

Dogpatch Labs was founded in 2008 as a place where early-stage startups could innovate. Entrepreneurs share work space, but more importantly it's a place where they can interact with each other and share knowledge, says Spoon.

There are no contracts or commitments for the startups participating in Dogpatch. The upside from an investment perspective is that Polaris gets a first look at startups early on. SmartPlanet visited Dogpatch Labs in Palo Alto, Calif., its newest office, to … Read more

Startup Secret 34: All in the family

Take your kids to work.

--me

At Stanford's StartX pitch event last week, I met Trent Hazy, CEO of MindSumo. It's clever; see my writeup. But I was honestly more interested in asking Trent if he was related to the Hazy whose name is on the awesome Steven Udvar-Hazy Air and Space Museum (an annex to the Smithsonian Air and Space) in Virginia. "He's my father," Trent said.

Which brings me to today's tip.

I have interviewed thousands of tech company founders. After the first few hundred, I started to ask my interviewees how … Read more

Startup Secret 33: It's a long game

"Play a game you can win."

--Rick Marini, CEO, BranchOut

There are very few green field opportunities. Most of the time, when you start a business venture, your success will have to come at the expense of another company. Obviously, no company gives up its incumbent position willingly.

Rick, whose company is a job-finder's network and thus aiming to be a direct competitor to LinkedIn, talked to me about taking on the big, public business networking site.

"If I just thought I could beat the competition," he says, "and that was it, I would … Read more

Data as a business philosophy

If there is one thing that startups can learn from the rise of Facebook it's that making sense of data you collect is where the money is.

Lots of companies collect data and do nothing meaningful with it. But thanks to new tools and the realization that knowing more about what your users are doing is the way to monetize, there are plenty of opportunities to take advantage the information collected.

In case you've been living in a cave, Facebook has filed to go public at an enormous valuation, based largely on the fact that the company has … Read more

Startup Secret 32: Doers over thinkers

"No career consultants."

--Jeremy Toeman, chief product officer, Dijit Media

Sometimes you need hired guns. People with specific knowledge to help you do something no one on your team has the expertise to do. Consultants.

But when running a startup, what you need in a consultant is serious operational and practical advice, and consultants with years of, ahem, consulting experience may not be able to provide what you need. Especially in the tech startup world, the landscape can shift extremely quickly.

"You want someone in touch, not removed," advises Jeremy Toeman, chief product officer of Dijit … Read more

Startup SpringCoin aims to help those in debt

If one Y Combinator startup is successful, it might have just gotten a bit easier to get out of debt.

SpringCoin (formerly DebtEye), opens its online doors this morning with the noble intention of helping you, or possibly someone you know, get out of debt. No, SpringCoin won't pay your bills for you, but through a combination of its "smart-learning software" and human expertise, it will provide a detailed plan to get yourself out of debt.

SpringCoin isn't without competition, though. ReadyForZero, a fellow Y Combinator alum that also boasts an investment from Dave McClure of … Read more

As it scales, Instagram shows restraint in all the right places

I was prepared to hate Mat Honan's latest feature on Instagram, the popular vintage-filter-photo app for Apple's iPhone. But to his credit, the Gizmodo writer made a little business problem immensely fascinating.

Honan tells a story of how Instagram blew up without blowing up--that is, scaled to 15 million users without losing uptime, industry credibility and each of its 10 employees' minds. The key is that Instagram shunned a Web interface, or a second or third app platform to support, and kept innovating in the narrow space in which they exist: a single photo-sharing app for iPhone users.… Read more