Yesterday
I attended the Churchill Club’s Startup Success
2006 in Palo Alto, CA where Guy Kawasaki moderated a panel of successful
entrepreneurs who willingly shared their secrets to success. This panel is responsible for extraordinarily
useful services such as: LinkedIn, JotSpot, Photbucket (I use all three) as
well as Third Rock Mining and Jajah (which I’ll be checking out today). For those of you who do not know Guy Kawasaki, he does a great job of
weaving together many ingredients to make a meaningful event. He is always an entertaining and informative
host—see his TieCon West “Art of the Start”
presentation to see what I mean.
Here is the panel
- Lauren Elliott - Third Rock Mining – Founder
- Ried Hoffman - Likedin – Co-Founder, CEO
- Joe Kraus - JotSpot – Co-Founder, CEO
- Daniel Mattes - Jajah – Co-Founder, CTO
- Alex Welch - Photobucket – Co-Founder, CEO
Since I
was wiped out by a cold, I decided to enjoy the general message and networking
rather than take detailed notes. However,
there were a few themes that popped, and out of respect for Guy, I’ll list
the “top- 10”
- Get a product out early and iterate – “If you’re not slightly embarrassed by your first version, you waited too long”
- Distribution Channel – make sure you can really get your product/service to its intended audience.
- VCs will look for a $50-250M liquidity event – make sure that where you want to go before you decide on VC.
- Celebrate your
successes -
Celebrate each victory along the way
- Be persistent (Joe), but not stupid (Guy) – Great story of how Excite refused to admit defeat and scored a big win.
Events like these help keep me focused on what is important in a startup while I'm deep in a different world working on an MBA. Babson has a one-day event next month called Venture Sartup--we'll see how the ideas translate.
Thanks to my dinner table mates Bryan, Will and others for an enjoyable evening.
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