Ideas Are Cheap, Building is Hard

Non-technical entrepreneurs are constantly on the hunt for a technical co-founder. Former Digg Creative Director and Milk co-founder Daniel Burka says he constantly hears from people who have the ‘greatest idea ever’ and they want to know how to get it built. “Ideas really are cheap, building is hard,” he says. “So build it yourself or become friends with people who can build it with you.” Burka says hiring people to build your product is exactly the wrong approach – it’s expensive and you’ll end up with an inferior product. “Don’t know how to build an app or don’t have any friends who can build it with you? Then you’re doing it wrong,” he says. “Quit running around trying to raise VC cash so you can hire that dream team. Go hang out with product builders until you’re friends with them and you’ve learned some technical skills as well.” And Burka says you can’t ‘network’ to find technical people – you have to go out and make real honest-to-goodness friends.

Burka started making friends in business when he was really young – he was your typical lemonade stand young entrepreneur. “My parents encouraged my siblings and I to do business-type endeavors from a young age, but always with a focus on the craft as opposed to the economics,” he says. “So, we ran lemonade stands when we were little, baked bread for a nearby campground in middle school, and grew flowers and melons one summer in high school. In all of these things, the goal was to produce something of quality that people would want to purchase.” Then in eleventh grade Burka started a web business with a few friends in the attic of his parents’ century-old farmhouse. That business eventually morphed into a company called silverorange, which is still active today. But despite his lemonade-and-web-design businesses, Burka says he wouldn’t consider himself an entrepreneur first and foremost. “I’m a designer who helped start a few companies,” he says.

The company that became silverorange started in 1996 as Whitelands Studio, which helped digitize museums’ collections. “This was great work (and it paid better than flipping burgers) and we learned a great deal about building websites and running a team,” he says. They merged teams with another local company to form silverorange in 1999, and since 2007 Burka has played a more back-seat role in the team, though he meets with the other founders occasionally to talk strategy.

His first businesses weren’t centred in a startup hub, but rather Prince Edward Island, a small eastern Canadian province with less than 120,000 people. “There are only a few web companies that operate from Charlottetown, so you can be both physically and intellectually isolated in many ways,” he says. “But it’s a beautiful place and the lifestyle there is very relaxed and extremely affordable. Recruiting talent is surprisingly easy with good computer science programs. It’s absolutely possible to start a world-class company there, as silverorange has proven, but there are some challenges.” Now that he’s built companies in Silicon Valley, he says there are obvious benefits there such as strong networks, ready cash and a culture where risks are encourage. But he says there are downsides to the Valley. “It’s very expensive, it’s much easier to get distracted from your core work, it’s easy to get sucked into a fishbowl mentality, recruiting is much more competitive, and peer pressure can push you to take stupid risks.”

Burka was the fourth employee at Digg, the social news sharing site started by Kevin Rose. It was his first experience in a small startup and also his first time leading a design team, so he says he benefited greatly from having experience in many types of projects before joining the company. “If a first-time entrepreneur already has experience building and shipping products, I’d say wholeheartedly that they should join a small startup,” he says. “However, someone who has little real-world experience would do well to work with more senior people, perhaps. Just don’t go to a huge corporation where you risk being ignored – find someone you greatly respect and convince them to take you on as an apprentice.” Burka worked at Digg’s Creative Director until the company reached almost 100 employees, and says he took several lessons away about running a successful company. “I learned the value of hiring great teams and how difficult they are to create. I now put much greater emphasis on recruiting, even when I feel too busy to put the time into it,” he says. “I also learned a lot about decision-making with larger teams. When you’re less than 10-14 people, making decisions is very efficient, but as teams grow it becomes immensely more difficult to still make decisions efficiently without alienating people whose opinions should be heard.”

Burka is also one of the founders behind Pownce, a social networking and microblogging site that was started in 2007 and was shut down in December 2008 due to lagging traffic. Burka started the company with Digg’s Kevin Rose and entrepreneur Leah Culver, and says two out of the three founders had demanding full-time jobs at the time. “The primary thing I learned is don’t start a company when two thirds of you have full-time gigs,” he says. “It was a demanding couple of years and when I look back, it’s incredible how much we actually got built with our small over-worked team.” He says the team also learned a lot about community engagement at Pownce. “We had a wonderful, passionate, and occasionally rancorous group of users and we had a great relationship with them. From early on, we put emphasis on staying engaged with the community and we brought in a great part-time community manager to help us stay on top of things. This attention made a great deal of difference for the company.” When asked if he looks at Pownce as a success, Burka hesitates to give a yes or no answer. “Do I think Pownce was a success? Well, I think the product had a great deal of unrealized potential. But! It was a good ride and we all learned a lot from it, which we’ve exercised in projects since.”

These days Burka is one of the co-founders of Milk, a mobile application development company based in San Francisco. He’s working with Kevin Rose again on the project, and so far they’ve announced a $1.5 million round of funding (with participation from a who’s who list of investors including Ron Conway) and the first app, Oink. “Starting Milk was a pretty easy decision,” Burka says. “Kevin and I had been discussing creating this kind of company for several years and suddenly things aligned where it was possible to go ahead and do it. We’ve both wanted to work with a small group to execute on several ideas that we’ve had percolating. Milk gives the ability to focus on several challenges at once with the kind of nimble team that can build kick-ass products.”

Going back to his point about building vs. hiring to build, Burka says his biggest piece of advice for would-be entrepreneurs is to build things. “Coming up with the ‘greatest’ idea isn’t as magical as you think it is,” he says. “Writing up a business plan isn’t very helpful. Go out and make a product. Maybe that product won’t be your big thing, but you’ll learn a ton and each successive product will get continuously better.” He says he’s taking his own advice at Milk. “We have one large idea well into production, another smaller idea three quarters complete, and a few more large ideas in the hopper,” he says. “Milk doesn’t have a five year plan or even a two year plan. We’re going to make several projects. When one of them is a success, we’ll cross that bridge when we get there.” He says they’re unabashedly figuring it out as they go along, which he thinks is the only rational approach. And he’ll do it all with a little help from his friends.

—

Interested in learning more about Daniel Burka and his advice for founders? He’s taking your startup questions LIVE Friday, July 15th at 2pm EST. Submit a question or read his full Q&A at sprouter.com/dburka.