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How to Decrease the Odds That Your Startup Fails

Both Sides of the Table

Most of this advice boils down to an argument in favor of basic planning before starting a company or raising money. In many ways the fact that it has become so cheap to start a company and relatively cheap to raise angel/seed money that we as an industry have gotten lazy on basic planning. Incumbent Strengths & Weaknesses.

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How to Start a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

March 2005 (This essay is derived from a talk at the Harvard ComputerSociety.) You need three things to create a successful startup: to start withgood people, to make something customers actually want, and to spendas little money as possible. One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire.

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How to Fund a Startup

www.paulgraham.com

November 2005 Venture funding works like gears. A typical startup goes throughseveral rounds of funding, and at each round you want to take justenough money to reach the speed where you can shift into the nextgear. It wasnt because they werent accredited investors that I didntask my parents for seed money, though.

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From Nothing To Something. How To Get There.

techcrunch.com

Inevitably, the excuses begin: I need to hire people to build the product. I need money for the servers. No raising money. In later posts I’m going to get into more detail on specific topics like hiring, raising money, what types of ideas have the potential to get big, finding your founders, and the like.

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Top Startup Advisor Paul Graham Just Warned Against Taking Google's Money

www.businessinsider.com

Google Ventures has made more than 100 seed investments, Maris said, including some past and present Y Combinator companies, and is making one to two new ones a week. Parse, one of the most-anticipated startups in Silicon Valley these days , went through Y Combinator last year and raised seed money from Google Ventures , for example.