Founders Lessons Learned - Part 4: Venture Capitalists

1. If you are presenting the business plan to VC you don’t know and you can’t trust he won’t get the idea and build it somewhere else; it is better to present a plan for something related to the idea not the whole picture to judge what is the reaction of VC and get to know him.
2. Don’t get frustrated from VC when you present ideas, and they mention low experience, this is considered an advantage more than a disadvantage. For start-ups, VC looks into team spirit & idea more than experience.
3. Expect the following questions from VC:
1. What is your background?
2. Too young, how many years of experience?
3. Do you have management experience?
4. How are you going to make money if you are going to give it away for free?
5. What's the revenue mechanism?
4. VCs always have deals and back-doors technical people don’t like, sometimes you might want not to share all ideas with your VC.

Founders Lessons Learned - Part 3: Business plan

1. A business plan is nothing more than your own communication to a person not sitting in front of you—an imaginary person who will read it. Try to answer every possible question that that person could raise.
2. Writing a business plan is a MUST, it will crystallize your thoughts to communicate your ideas with somebody else.
3. Business plan is all about showing your momentum.
4. Having a business plan for big scope, having complete vision distributed on several phases shows your strong vision for the idea and its growth.
5. Business plan should tell:
1. What the company is going to do?
2. What problem it is going to solve?
3. How big the market is?
4. What the sources of revenue for the company are?
5. What your exit strategy is for your investors?
6. What amount of money is required?
7. How you are going to market it?
8. What kind of people you need?
9. What the technology risks, marketing risks, execution risks?
6. Funding in business plan, it is always better to prepare the figures before you present your idea, and you should be having multiple numbers in mind, i.e.:

1. Required x, for completing the whole idea.
2. Required y, for handling … number of customers.
3. Required z, for making a POC to show your idea can actually work to VC.
4. Required w, for covering specific region.

Founders Lessons Learned - Part 2: Team

1. Succeeding alone is very hard, it is all about team work.
2. Having a good team is half the way to success.
3. Harmony between team members is a MUST for success.
4. When you are searching for founders to share the idea with you; look for people that have skills you don’t have; don’t look for people who are the same like you.
5. Own your team by:
1. Treat them good.
2. Treat them like family.
3. Care / look after them.
4. Always listen, maybe an idea from youngest team member be the company next hot product / feature.
6. Acquisitions: It is a painful experience as merges cause lots of people to be laid off, this is the case all the time, and this is the whole idea of merges. If your company pass by this situation try to make it as short as possible to continue doing business.

Founders Lessons Learned - Part 1: Idea

1. Uncertainty at the beginning is quite common; just try your best to make your vision clearer by time.
2. Necessity is the mother of the invention: If you needed something & searched quite sometime to find it, and ended to build it up, why don’t you think someone somewhere is looking for the same thing.
3. Idea; always search for added value of your solution (Why someone will buy / invest in your idea):
1. Unique: Idea that is not implemented before.
2. Idea that solves known issue in unusual way.
3. Optimize something.
4. When you feel sleepless; don’t waste this time trying to sleep, instead spend this time in ideas that you'd normally just throw out in creative thinking.
5. You should feel that this idea is very important to you.
6. You not only need to think how to attract customers, but how to keep them as well (Own your customer).
7. Secrecy: You will need to share your ideas with some people, think more about this before you do it, take care that someone may steal your idea. At early startup, you only have the idea; nothing more, what will you do if you lose it?
8. Failure several times is the common, no-one succeed without suffering multiple failures, just write down what you have learned from your failures.
9. Adaptation:
1. Modifying the idea / target or part of it might happen, just make sure to revisit your plans to comply with the modification.
2. Switching from technology to another might happen, just learn to do the right thing with the right tools.
10. Having multiple skills is a MUST: It is not always you do what you like to do, but you should do what must be done.
11. Think of partnership, it will save you time, & money with lower risk.

Founders Lessons Learned - Intro

Learning from others is the best in order not to re-invent the wheel and fall in the same mistakes others already did. For founders, it is a MUST as lots can't afford bad start.

I have collected some lessons learned from my readings, & experience. I summarized them in bullet points in the following blog posts:

1. Part 1: Idea
2. Part 2: Team
3. Part 3: Business Plan
4. Part 4: Venture Capitalists
5. Part 5: Architecture
6. Part 6: Project / Product development
7. Part 7: Operations
8. Part 8: Marketing

The following are the references for such tips:

1. Book: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days. ISBN-10: 1590597141 | ISBN-13: 978-1590597149
2. Magazine article: Arrajol Magazine interview with Greg Booth, Zippo President and CEO.

I will keep this post and related posts updated whenever I read more books or learn new experience hopping this will help some founders / start-ups. Also, I'm open for input from readers as comments and I will update the posts as well.