Entrepreneurial Proverbs

03 Jun 2006

Came across this post (and this one as well)the other day and it struck a bit of a chord with me.

Here’s my favourites from each of the sections (Starting, The Idea, People, Product, and Money)

*Starting *– I’m a pretty big fan of Momentum builds on itself. I’ve been with a start-up for the past few years now and have seen it grow from 2 people to 52 people. We’ve done the VC and I’d attribute most of the company’s success to our ability to build momentum. There wasn’t an established market 3 years ago, we built iterative with some people loving what we did, and some hating it. Above all else we built on our successes and tried to avoid making the same mistakes. Sales builds momentum, development builds momentum and marketing builds momentum. Without an ability to build momentum, where are you? I also hate to lose, but that’s another story.

*The Idea – *Having been through a bit of this, I’d have to agree most with Give people what they need, not what they say they need. When we were starting out, it wasn’t possible to give customers what they said they wanted. Hell, even today it’s not possible and it never will be. You’re only going to be successful if you have some understanding of the business/industry and are able to build a roadmap that doesn’t change every day and is able to best satisfy a significant percentage of customer demands, but not all of them.

People – Three is fine; two, divine** **is a funny one. We started out with three founders, narrowed to two, and now only have one still with the organization. That being said, it’s not my favourite one from the list. People are the most important asset a company can have, and for me personally I want to work with people I like and share a common commitment to excellence. I guess *Work only with people you like and believe in *is the closest item to that but they’re all quite good.

I’ll follow-up this topic up on a subsequent post, but I suggest reading the entire list yourself. O’Reilly did a good job.