Most Popular
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As a technical founder, what considerations did you make for your first hires? What skills were you looking for to compliment your own? Did you look for a "hustler"?
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I love hustlers. One of SimpleGeo’s engineers is a kid from Montana that went above and beyond in the hustle department to score a job with us. Early employees should all exhibit a bit of hustle.
As for technical skills, I look for people with orthogonal skills to mine. I’m very good at systems architectures, framework design, backend systems, etc. I’m not very interested in or good at HTML/CSS/JS, iOS, Android, etc. so I look for those hires first depending on the needs of the product.
Most importantly, do not hire for a specific skill. Look for craftsmen who are naturally curious about all sorts of technology and coding. Make sure your interview questions reflect this. e.g. Don’t ask, “In PHP5 how would you implement an abstract class?” Instead ask, “What’s the difference between an abstract class and an interface.”
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What advice do you have for someone who is headed to the valley to make their first pitch?
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The easiest way to answer this is to simply say, “Do the exact opposite of what your parents would tell you to do.” Don’t wear a suit. Don’t worry about in-depth business plans. Don’t worry about not swearing.
As far as the meetings go you’ll need a pitch deck and enthusiasm for your product. Make sure you’ve thought of all of the possible angles someone might take to say no and have counters for them. That being said, these investor meetings are a lot like first dates in that you’ll know almost immediately if the investor is interested in you, your product, and your market.
More mundane pieces of advice include renting a car as you’ll be running all over the peninsula where there’s not great public transportation or taxis, rent a hotel near your first meeting, and spend the day relaxing the day before.
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What essential tips do you have for someone trying to woo investors?
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The essential tip really is that you need to know who you’re wooing to begin with. Think of investors just like dating. If you’re a very liberal, tattooed guy, who likes beer I doubt you’d consider dating a Southern Belle from Atlanta. Same goes for investing. Manu Kumar, for instance, is very focused on infrastructure and plumbing startups. Dave Morin, on the other hand, is a product guy at heart and tends to focus exclusively on consumer product plays when he invests.
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Should I financially compensate my mentor/advisor? How (equity/cash/etc)?
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Yes. This is usually in the form of equity. Depending on the advisor’s participation I’d say 0.25% to 0.5% on a two year vesting schedule is perfectly appropriate.
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Why did you go work for another startup before starting your own? Would you advise every aspiring entrepreneur to do the same?
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I think it’s absolutely critical that entrepreneurs spend time in the trenches. I spent 10 years over two separate web booms before starting my own and the experience has proven invaluable. Or, as I like to call it, it was the longest case study in how not to run a startup ever. Even if it’s only for a year or two, you’ll learn so much from the inside.
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Is it advisable to begin to market your startup to tech publications, newspapers, and other related bloggers while your startup is still in the concept phase?
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I don’t think so. I’m very Apple in my opinion on this: don’t announce products until they’re ready to ship.
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How did the Attachments.me team (Jesse and Ben) get acquainted with you?
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I met Ben at the MeshU conference in Toronto. We were talking about side projects we’d been tinkering with when I told him about the prototype of attachments.me that I’d built and was collecting dust. Ben had just finished his Master’s in NLP and sentimental analysis and was excited at the prospects of hacking on this kind of data. It wasn’t long after that that Ben mentioned his buddy Jesse was interested in hacking on the frontend.
A few months later they left their respective jobs and decided to try and raise money for attachments.me. It wasn’t long after that that they’d raised their first round and were off and running. Really stoked for those guys.
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Do you think location matters when starting a startup?
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Not really. I think all you really need is high speed internet, close proximity to a decent airport, and a desire.
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Are you someone who likes to create more than run a startup? If so, how are you fulfilling this at SimpleGeo?
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I’m definitely someone who prefers to be the creator rather than the operator. I don’t think the creation process ends the day you found the company. We’ll always be creating new products, new features, etc. at SimpleGeo.
The trick, I think, is to put in an appropriate structure so that you can focus on the one of the two that you like. For Matt and I, that meant hiring Jay Adelson to be CEO and hiring/promoting people into positions of authority to handle those day-to-day operational needs.
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This is a real question. Do you where t-shirts? Would you pay to where a shirt with just a logo like "Mashable" for instance? What price would you for sure buy it for?
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I pretty much only wear t-shirts. I don’t buy clothing with logos/brands on it usually.
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What advice would you give a developer interested in working for a start-up?
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Be sure you’re constantly dabbling in new frameworks, languages, etc. You should be involved in communities like GitHub and Forrst. Join an open source project. Commit patches, etc.
Given that startups live on the technological edge the majority of their lives and need to evaluate talent quickly, participating in these manners is super important.
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So is Matt a tech guy too? So the key to focusing on what you really want to do in the company, is to get enough funding to hire people. How hard would it be for a non-tech co-founder?
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Matt is technical, but not a coder. He’s an expert at CSS, HTML, design, Photoshop, etc. His skills perfectly compliment mine on that side of things.
I think it’s always harder for completely non-technical founders. Matt had valid, tangible skills, that we leveraged early on. Sometimes it takes a while for non-technical peoples' skills to become relevant to startups.
This doesn’t mean non-technical founders should be discouraged. It just means you’ll likely have to bring on a technical founder (either designer or coder) and/or outsource the production of your product. Taking a different path isn’t always wrong.
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I have heard that startups can take away from family. Should I really avoid creating a startup if I have a family of four?
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I think a family of four is hard work, no matter what your day job is. Startups require a lot of time and effort, which will naturally conflict with your familial duties. Startups are hugely risky, usually lack serious healthcare, no vacations, etc. These are all rather antithesis to family dynamics.
Does this mean you shouldn’t? Of course not, but you should be realistic and ensure your partner and family are on board with such an endeavor.
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In a start-up do you have to work every day? no vacation.
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Downtime is critical to avoid burnout. We work long hours, but everyone I know takes time to step away. At Digg and SimpleGeo, every employee got 20 days of vacation a year (2x the national average here in the US).
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Do you think that it is better to get something just right or to release it even when it's a little rough around the edges? We want to get our idea out to the world, but we don't want to risk a hard critique and not have a second chance.
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I’m very much of the Apple mindset here. You need to do two things: 1. Be militant in your first version’s feature scope. The original iPhone is a perfect example. It lacked copy and paste, it lacked the app store, it lacked an address book! 2. Only release a feature or MVP (Minimally Viable Product) when you’ve got it polished to perfection. Again, Apple’s approach to copy and paste is a great example of this in action. They waited until they’d gotten it, in their view, perfect and then released it.
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In what areas have you failed in your business? What lessons did you learn from them? How did they create more opportunities and insights for you?
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I’d say the top two things that caused major issues at SimpleGeo early on was growing the team too quickly and attempting to solve too many of our customers' problems at once.
Growing the team too quickly taught me that companies can have growing pains just like adolescents do. It takes time to properly craft and curate your company’s culture. Hiring too many people too quickly can cause problems in those areas.
Going too far and too wide on your product offering too early in a company’s history can be really problematic. You’re left being the jack of all trades, master of none in your customer’s eyes. I think it was one of the founders of Instagram that said it best, “Every great product starts out as a really well done feature.” (Or something like that, I’m paraphrasing.)
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