Startup Lessons Learned

MAY 27, 2009

Im going to be speaking on June 3rd at an event sponsored by the Technology Entrepreneurs Exchange (TeXchange), "the premier networking organization in Texas for business executives and entrepreneurs to meet, exchange ideas and share experiences." The visionary’s lament The Superbowl ad test Lo, my 57692 subscribers, who are you?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 26, 2009

And they expose the startups to a vast network of mentors, none of whom get paid for their involvement. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 8, 2009

When we became a standalone network, it didnt matter how easy it was to add new networks, since we never did. Worse of all, the plaintext codes we were used to sending were considered non-authoritative, since they could be pulled off a third-party network. It had a pretty good technical design.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 29, 2009

For example, I’ve talked often about our belief that an instant messaging add-on product would allow IMVU to take advantage of a network effects strategy. When we became a standalone network, it didn't matter how easy it was to add new networks, since we never did. This happened quite often in the early days of IMVU.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

Pick a similar product that they do use, and ask them "who was the first person you know who started using [social networking, mobile phones, plasma TV, instant messaging.]? For companies in the early-adopter phase, you can play "the earlyvangelist game" whenever a customer turns out to be too mainstream for your product.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 15, 2009

Processes that, in the Industrial Age, were tightly scripted, with predictable outcomes, must in the Networked World, become adaptable, contextual, and focus on getting measurable (often surprising!) results rather than specific scripted outcomes. Thanks for the post, Eric. Very well-thought-through.

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Gregg Fraley, Author of Jack's Notebook

SEPTEMBER 23, 2014

Case , you may recall, was co-founder of AOL. The UK, Canada, France, Sweden, Australia — and 23 more countries — all beat the USA for percentage of web penetration. He correctly identifies the reasons why Chicago, Denver, Cincinnati, and other smaller cities are becoming vibrant centers of start-ups.

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Up and Running

NOVEMBER 19, 2014

Finland, Norway, Sweden and Denmark are close runners up, leaving the rest of the world trailing sadly behind. As reported by entrepreneurship.org , even when women have the skills needed to run ‘high-impact ventures, the lack of strong networks can dwarf their growth.’ Make the WOW Pledge.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 20, 2008

Excepting for cosmically co-incidental success stories, the fuzzy requirement stuff never congeals as a holistic engineering exercise. I also have to include this caveat: we werent purely a software company - we built telecom network devices, hw and sw. Software Eng. here who spent a couple years in Eng.

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 24, 2009

These individuals, possessing talent, experience or real-world networks, will continue to function as ‘virtual gatekeepers’ in the next-generation media industry. Though technology tools and Web 2.0 ideas (e.g. Second, mass-marketing will continue to play an important role in creating awareness of products and services.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 11, 2010

High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand. High-profile startup Friendster had first-mover advantage in the social networking space, but created openings for competitors when it could not scale to meet demand.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 19, 2009

Lessons Learned by Eric Ries Saturday, September 19, 2009 Support the Startup Founders Visa with a tweet Its been an exhilarating first day here in Washington DC for the Geeks on a Plane tour. We can remedy it by creating a special visa for startup founders. I think the benefits are a no-brainer. 2gov.org will take care of the rest.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 27, 2009

For founders, I think it also has another big attraction: the ability to avoid a lot of " free vs paid " arguments. For network-effects businesses, like Skype , just being on the network is enough to create value. These are companies that generate revenue by offering a free product with an upsell or premium version.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 23, 2009

fbFund REV featuring Eric Ries The Lean Startup Host: fbFund Type: Education - Lecture Network: Global Date: Thursday, June 25, 2009 Time: 1:30pm - 3:30pm Location: fbFund REV Garage Street: 164 Hamilton City/Town: Palo Alto, CA RSVP Here So, if you are in the Bay Area and want to swing by Palo Alto on Thursday afternoon, come join the conversation.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 11, 2009

This model has not translated well to the world of social networking, because customers of social networks engage sites in a different way than customers of search engines. Social network page views are much more likely to be internally focused; ads are more of a distraction. As a result, CPI advertising is incredibly cheap.

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Hearpreneur

MARCH 15, 2016

Has your immigration from Sweden had any impact on how you approach your business? We also have a scientific team, consisting of three chemical engineers in addition to Jan, who is the founder and the inventor. Network with other entrepreneurs and learn from their experiences. In other words I knew nothing about mouthguards.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JUNE 22, 2009

Some startups fail because the founders cant have this conversation - they either blow up when they try, or they fail to change because they are afraid of conflict. We went through another pivot when we switched again from instant messaging to social networking. Thats why its so essential to have a co-equal problem team.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 22, 2010

One last suggestion, which is a technique I learned from my IMVU co-founder Will Harvey. All the usual ideas are good ones: I support inviting more women to speak at conferences , the creation of women-centric networking events like Women 2.0 There was one notable exception: Sweden.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 7, 2008

For example, if any of the mobile ad networks gets major traction, they may become a dominant way that people discover new apps. If the rating in the App Store is based on usage, I am sure those popular social networking applications are sure to be in the top and the hot seat always. The observation sounds strange.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 9, 2009

Could we have built the first college-based social network five years before Facebook ? In fact, I remember sending him and his obscure-to-me co-founder (aka Reid Hoffman ) a bug report early-on, instead of taking them up on their offer of an in-person meeting. Maybe, but the thought never even entered our minds.

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Startup Lessons Learned

FEBRUARY 28, 2009

I was constantly coming up with arguments to save it: that we couldnt be sure that the feature wouldnt be useful later, that maybe some customers liked it even though most didnt, that it wasnt consistent with our company values to become a proprietary IM network. But code written that doesnt help the company succeed is a sunk cost.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JULY 31, 2009

I hope people will use this to recruit and share jobs/candidates in their own networks, letting retweets etc. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. carry the word out wider.

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Mucker Lab

SEPTEMBER 7, 2015

Interview with my Everipedia Co-founder Theodor Forselius (AKA “Tedde”) by Mahbod Moghadam. One of the main reasons I got involved with Everipedia is that I really like the ethnicities of my cofounders. Sweden is pretty much my favorite non-Iran country. Are there any cool, Mucker / YC esque accelerators in Sweden?

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 18, 2008

And in some markets its decisive, because of well-known network effects (as happened with Microsoft, eBay, and many others). But if your product category doesnt have strong network effects, word of mouth alone is not usually enough to fend off a competitor who also has a quality product. So what model will prevail on the iPhone?

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Startup Lessons Learned

AUGUST 1, 2009

For startups that are tempted to mimic this behavior, I suggest reading the great account of the early Apple in Founders at Work.) The customer understands experience, and social networks, since they make pervasive p2p economically viable, accentuate customers' ability to mirror each other and articulate customer experience.

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Startup Lessons Learned

MARCH 13, 2009

Founders push for it. In some ways, founders are even worse. My experience is that many founders actually have a deep anxiety that maybe they are not succeeding. This trend is so strong, this is actually a question I recommend to screen potential investors: "How do you know its time to launch the company?" Thats how to "launch".

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 5, 2008

Spray files across cheap disks on your network. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. MogileFS - "Distributed (meta) file system. Pay less for storage.

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Startup Lessons Learned

SEPTEMBER 8, 2009

The IT and networking "big boys" rule and any start up apps are summarily squashed on the premise that they may upset the status quo re: IT infrastructure. The US is headed to be a second rate or third rate power if policy isn't changed to permit new and ground breaking applications to operate in large networks.

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Startup Lessons Learned

OCTOBER 6, 2008

The site is now a sad footnote in the history of Social Networking Services. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. How did they do it? By listening to their users.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 7, 2008

My responsibility at the time I joined the company was to develop a product that is to be deployed on a social network (hint hint, FB). ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Startup Lessons Learned

APRIL 7, 2010

I’ve previously documented that early-on in IMVU’s life, we made the mistake of building an IM add-on product instead of a standalone network. When you read stories of successful startups in the popular and business press, you usually hear about how the founders anticipated several of these challenges in their initial vision.

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San Francisco Lean Metrics Design 154

The Startup Magazine

MAY 3, 2024

Jairo Trad, CEO and co-founder of Argentinian company Kilimo , dreamt of a solution to optimize agriculture’s water usage, uniting environmentally-concsious companies with local producers to operate in the region’s main watersheds. trillion problem, and also a cost on the environment.

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Startup Lessons Learned

JANUARY 4, 2009

This is true of most web application servers, caches like memcached, and all of the network infrastructure that connects them. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th.

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Transformify

DECEMBER 14, 2015

According to business mogul and SpaceX founder Elon Musk we may be travelling into space. Even in the late 70s and 80s companies were setting up networks of branch offices and teleworkers. With no workplace, pioneering nomads are setting up co-working spaces all over the world to accommodate whoever decides to travel through.

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Startup Lessons Learned

DECEMBER 16, 2008

Facebook , LinkedIn , and other successful social networks have elevated this technique to a high art. ► August (2) SXSW Case Study: SlideShare goes freemium ► July (4) Case Study: kaChing, Anatomy of a Pivot Some IPO speculation Founder personalities and the “first-class man&# th. Organic notifications.

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Viral San Francisco Lean Continuous Deployment 140

Austin Startup

MARCH 10, 2017

The SXSW Conference is a melting pot opportunity for global professionals at each level to network, interact and learn about what’s next in the world of culture, technology and entertainment. In the film world this year’s documentary highlights are Walk With Me, Stranger Fruit and Barbecue.

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Cracking the Code

JUNE 24, 2021

Co-founder and CEO Nicolas Brusson spoke to me about BlaBlaCar’s early ambitions to be a European rather than local country winner and its progression to global player. You then came back to Europe and joined a venture firm before co-founding BlaBlaCar. How did you go from VC to founder?

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