I think LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner said it best regarding this topic: "being an asshole was way easier than putting in the work and showing the compassion required to be a good leader."
Thanks so much for your encouragement! Your comment made my day. I've saved tons of interesting business stories after reading many books and blog posts over the years. Would like to share them on this site going forward.
You probably don't need this bit at all, but I feel unsolicity advisey. And in case it helps anyone else: One of the top 3 decisions I've made this year was simply to blog once a week.
This post today is on Hacker News and doing awesome. Tomorrow's likely won't be so lucky. Or next week's. Sometimes the Twitter followers grow a ton, and then it stalls for weeks.
Just keep doing it. Sometimes someone very important and influential finds that old post everyone else seemed to ignore months ago. Sometimes it's just a single email that says, "This really helped me today."
After doing it long enough, you realize looking back, it all built on itself. None of it was wasted.
Yup, totally agree. Running a blog is definitely a marathon. I did make the mistake of giving up too early in previous projects. So I will take this lesson to heart. Thanks so much for reminding me this.
Since I've read that "innocent" book, I'd like to give another perspective. Many entrepreneurs are not willing to get into the consumer goods business because of the giant competitors like P&G, Unilever and Coca Cola. That's why innocent's founders emphasised starting "small" in their book. They started the business in a kitchen and eventually won the battle (sort of) by creativity. That's why stories like innocent and Method are so inspiring.
They contacted me before saying if I'm willing to pay for the $3,000, I will get the top 100 award. It's a joke. But there are still so many companies willing to pay them every year in Asia. So sad.
Just curious, what methodical process did you follow? Did you first test the market using tactics similar to the lean startup approach? Thanks for your advice.
Basically, make a list of known problems that you're well suited to solving, rank them by criteria, fail a lot, bang your head against the wall, and eventually things start to stick.
For example, Quantcast. Konrad had done an applied stats company and I had a big data background. So we think about insurance fraud (sales cycle too long, concentrated customers), starting a quant fund (which is more fickle, the market or investors?), etc, or ad targeting.
Ad targeting. Big, fast growing market, and it's all script kiddies except for google (this was 2006). But where do you get the data? I knew that publishers hated comscore and Nielsen with a passion. So, free measurement service and provide targeting along with. Then, how to promote it? Using SEO. Create a web page for every site so that it shows up when a webmaster searches for his site name. Once you have have petabytes of data, hire PhDs and give them powerful tools. And voila, powerful as targeting with a unique data advantage and publisher relationships.
You want big market, fast sales cycles (aka easy customer decisions), fast growth, slow witted competitors, and most of all don't even start unless you know how you will promote and sell it. I'm partial to b2b because consumer is so random, it's a tipping point thing and there's almost never any technology involved.
Cool problems are cool problems. Find them, choose the one you can solve.
I guess what I mean by success is not only about profitability. I consider that changing the world positively in a large scale is a success. So I think kiva, spacex, yelp and yammer are all successful startups/organizations.
