JOE CONYERS III

Start with the ending

bijan:

When there’s no pretending,
then the truth is safe to say,
Start with the ending,
get it out of the way - David Wilcox

When I was in undergrad people would often ask me what I wanted to be when I grow up.

Then after college people would ask what was my 5 year plan or my 10 year plan.

I had no idea. I was really living in the moment.

And nowadays, in my personal life and in my work life, I still tend to focus on the here and now.

But with young startups, I often suggest early stage companies to think about the ending at times. At least quarterly.

What is the ending?

The day you run out of cash.

It’s not uncommon for an early stage company to raise seed or Series A capital that does not take them to profitability. That’s true for a number of our portfolio companies. Consider, Boxee, Twitter and Tumblr. Those companies clearly did not generate revenue but all of them were able to successfully raise follow on rounds. That’s because they made signficant product progress with the first invested capital.

Founders should think about what you want your company to look like when it raises the next round of capital. And then work backwards from there. How do you make that happen? Who do you need to hire. What do you have to learn. What do you have to create. What should you focus on ?

Don’t get me wrong. Focusing on the here & now and executing is the name of the game. But it’s worthwhile to start with the ending from time to time.

A friend asked me for advice: startup or big company

bijan:

Last week a friend called me looking for advice.

He was working on his own thing for the past year or so but it hasn’t really taken off. Now, his personal life requirements make it necessary that he joins a company in the near future.

He has an offer to join a few different startups or take a senior role in a large established company.

His question: Should I do the startup or big company? And one day I want to work for a venture back startup again so will the big company thing help or hurt for my next thing?

My response:

-First, I asked if he loved any of the startups. His answer: not really

-Then I asked if he liked the people at the big company and would he learn a lot and have the opportunity to be successful. His answer: yes.

This was the easiest call I’ve had in sometime. I told him to take the big company gig.

Look, I love startups.

But the reality is that they are hard, risky and stressful at times. I believe you should only join a startup if you are inspired and love the vision, people and product. And you will have far more responsibility in a startup than in any large company position. That’s the beautiful stuff you get back in return for risk.

Of course, there is huge potential upside if options become valuable at some point — but that shouldn’t be the primary reason for joining a startup.

fimoculous:

“Which NYMag Approval Matrix quadrant do you browse first?” is the new “Which Sunday NYTimes section do you read first?”

Formated and loaded Win 7 - What did I forget to install?

I kept thinking a few weeks back how little I use installed software.( in favor of the cloud.) This list begs to differ:

Firefox

Digsby

Filezilla

Sequiaview

Tweetdeck

Woopra

VLC + codecs

Utorrent

Last.fm

Itunes

Word/Office

Putty

Git

Notepad++

Boxee

DaemonTools

Mirc

Skype

Wireshark

Defraggler

Winrar

Chrome

Sqlite

Vim

Vmware

Ruby

Rails