One of Quibi’s original sins was that it did not allow users to share videos or images from the app to social media. It also didn’t initially allow screenshots. It eventually reversed course on that, but by then it was probably too late. It provided no apparatus with which its content could go viral. No memes. No trending hashtags. It relied almost entirely on its own marketing to drive awareness.
All platforms that want consumer attention are in competition with one another. Platforms that use premium video to capture attention are in even greater competition. Whether you watch on your phone or TV, in bite-sized increments or long binge sessions, that is still finite time that must be earned. And consumers have finite resources to pay for all these things. Quibi thought by focusing on “in-between moments,” it was carving out a niche with less competition. But those moments are already saturated by social media. So in an attempt to not have any competition, Quibi made it so that everything was its competition. It competes with both Netflix and also TikTok. It competes with HBO and Instagram. Hulu and Snapchat. It’s an assault on all sides. The platform was done no favors by the rise of TikTok, which was becoming immensely popular in the US right as Quibi launched. If young consumers want to watch short-form video on their phones, they go on TikTok, which is free, wildly entertaining (some might say addictive), and can be consumed in whatever timeframe the user wants.
Quibi can’t do premium video as well as Netflix, nor quick bites as well as TikTok, falling somewhere in the meaningless middle (behind a paywall you can only access through your phone, no less). There is no audience for that.
But great entrepreneurs have a different response to the fear of failure. Yes, they’re afraid of failing, but they’re even more afraid of failing to try.
In work and in life, there are two kinds of failure: actions and inactions. You can fail by starting a company that goes out of business or by not starting a company at all.
Entrepreneurs need to be made of a different metal from the rest of the world. You have to have the courage of your convictions; you need to be irrationally optimistic; you need to be resilient; you need to be willing to accept the fact that most people will not understand what you're trying to do; and you need to willing to take risks, because you have a bee in your bonnet, which you want to pursue more than anything else in the world.
Startup founders, aspiring filmmakers, and would-be worldsavers “have to” be enthusiastic and positive. They have to sell their models—to skeptical investors, to potential hires, and oddly often to themselves—and many people struggle to hold both determined confidence and fundamental uncertainty in their minds at the same time. Instead, their brains use mood to encourage them to alternate. The euphoric half of the cycle is where assumptions are taken to their conclusion—where you collide your models with reality by building code, attempting to enroll customers, and so on. And the despair half is where those assumptions are challenged and questioned—where all of the fears and doubts and worrying bits of evidence that you’ve been holding off on looking at are allowed to come forward.
Our recommendation: the next time you’re working on something large, important, and very, very uncertain, don’t resist the occasional slide into despair. In fact, don’t even think of it as a “slide”—in our experience, it stops feeling like a slide as soon as you stop resisting it. Instead, recognize it for what it is—a sign that important evidence has been building up in your buffer, unacknowledged, and that it’s time now to integrate it into your plans.
Never let the circumstances of a moment supersede the size of your dreams.
We often, and rightly, describe the Founding Fathers as great, wise and noble men – which they clearly were. However, the Founders were not just upset about tea and taxes, nor were they strictly politically centered people – above all they were entrepreneurs and business owners who wanted to pursue their passions and dreams without the heavy hand of government controlling, regulating or determining their destiny.
The key to life is trying to find something you would do for free anyway and get paid for it.
Put yourself out there. Get started, do something and start small. The lower your startup costs, the easier it is to find profitability. Create value for others, and you'll be rewarded.
You say "I want to be an entrepreneur". That's your first mistake. Nobody is an entrepreneur for "wanting to be an entrepreneur". Entrepreneurship is not a career option nor a goal. It's a consequence of many actions.
Stop just thinking about it and make it happen. When you're young is the best time to start your own business, as you do not have the responsibilities you will have when you're older. The worst that can happen if you fail now is that you have firsthand experience to make your next venture a success.
Solve real problems and make cash. It’s really that simple, but all the hype makes it look like it’s complicated.
Entrepreneurs are scientists and the real world is their lab.
I have realized that, whether the company is in the tech space or not, there is a tech component to every business that needs to be addressed.
Lastly, and most importantly, I have been telling entrepreneurs for a very long time that their greatest strengths lie in not what they have but what they don’t have. It is all a matter of perception as what you may think is your biggest weakness can actually be the spark to the fire that fuels your success. This is the entire principle behind my upcoming book The Power Of Broke.
Regardless of what your particular niche may be, you need to stay singular in your focus. You need to understand that just because you are successful in one market does not be you will be successful in another.
One thing I stress everywhere I go is the absolute necessity to understand your market. That means studying your competitors, the condition of your market, where the market is going, the average lifetime value of your product, EVERYTHING.
If there's ever a point in your life when you want to take a risk to go start a business it's when you're young. Because when you're my age in your mid 50's, if you fail, it's a lot harder to recover from it, because your life span is much shorter, and you may not have the same level of energy.
Build your own dreams, or someone else will hire you to build theirs.
But the best companies become more, not less, idiosyncratic over time. They know that to do weird, they have to be weird. This idiosyncrasy has created a culture of beauty at Apple, of hacking at Facebook, of efficiency at Amazon.
But the greatest companies aren't an idea, they’re an idea machine.
An idea machine also invests in its idea generating capacity. A great company’s deepest innovation isn't in its product but in its being: a deeply idiosyncratic approach to hiring and working, accumulated through a million tiny acts of discipline and bizarre decisions, which alienates most outsiders, but draws a few in with the special, strange intensity of a children's story, as if it had been made for them alone.
Being in charge of something new starts the game all over again, no matter what you’ve done before.
Contrary to the stereotype, startups are a marathon, not a sprint. The truth is, you are not going to be a billion dollar company or acquired in the next 18 months.
It turns out ideas are the easy part. Execution is everything.
If a goal is truly visionary, it's going to be confronted by doubters, skeptics, and those threatened by its realization. As a result, there will always be walls put up on the way to achieving the objective. Some of the most capable people I've worked with know how to go over, around, or straight through those walls by virtue of their resourcefulness and sheer force of will.
If you attempt to protect an idea too early, you risk expending energy and resources protecting an unworthy, ill-formed idea.
I admire entrepreneurs who take risks and break new ground. They are the key to economic growth. Building a business is the single best and most effective way to create personal wealth. But it’s also true that most of those dreams are simply dreams and will never come true. A few who bet on them win big, but most lose some or all of their investment.
How do I pitch investors in the stage of ideation? I have one word of advice: Don’t! Ideas are ‘a dime a dozen’, as they say in the USA. What matters much more is whether you and your team can effectively implement your idea, whether customers actually want or need and will pay for what you propose to sell, and much more.
Instead of seeking capital, go find a paying customer (Yes, even before you’ve produced your product). Then find another one. As prominent venture capital investor Mark Suster, says, “Ring the cash register!”
Once the prototype is up, it’s typically the traction, partnerships, or early feedback that makes or breaks a startup's shot at a clean launch.
Fill your team with members who believe in your idea. If someone starts to doubt your company and what you're doing you need to get rid of them.
The novelty of working on something new fades pretty quickly.
Being a successful employee requires continually honing a talent for diplomacy and collaboration. In turn, you’re rewarded with security and a steady salary, with fewer of the headaches from which entrepreneurs suffer. Running a business on the other hand, is an all-consuming, all-encompassing venture, which totally invigorates some, and totally exhausts others.
I do believe that you can achieve more if you're willing to take risks. There's almost a total correlation between the amount of risk you're willing to take and then the amount of stuff you then potentially can get done.
People who say it takes money to make money are using the worst excuse ever. Create massive value for others by providing a solution where no other exists.
You've got to be passionate about it...I think people that look for great ideas to make money aren't nearly as successful as those who say, 'OK, what do I really love to do?
There are a lot of people that have dreams. I like to say everyone who has ever had a shower has had a good idea. It's the people who dry off and do something about them that make a difference.
Dream big. Start small. Plan well. Work hard. Inspire everyone. You will get there.
We have three general suggestions about hiring: (a) don't do it if you can avoid it, (b) pay people with equity rather than salary, not just to save money, but because you want the kind of people who are committed enough to prefer that, and (c) only hire people who are either going to write code or go out and get users, because those are the only things you need at first.
As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking." If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work. At the very least you'll move into proper office space and hire more people. That will change the atmosphere, and not entirely for the better. Now most of your people will be employees rather than founders. They won't be as committed; they'll need to be told what to do; they'll start to engage in office politics.
When you raise a lot of money, your company moves to the suburbs and has kids.
As a founder, you have to manage your investors. You shouldn't ignore them, because they may have useful insights. But neither should you let them run the company. That's supposed to be your job.
No one trusts an idea till you embody it in a product and use that to grow a user base.
There's nothing like users for convincing acquirers. It's not just that the risk is decreased. The acquirers are human, and they have a hard time paying a bunch of young guys millions of dollars just for being clever. When the idea is embodied in a company with a lot of users, they can tell themselves they're buying the users rather than the cleverness, and this is easier for them to swallow.
If you're going to attract users, you'll probably have to get up from your computer and go find some. It's unpleasant work, but if you can make yourself do it you have a much greater chance of succeeding.
If you want to start a startup, you have to face the fact that you can't just hack. At least one hacker will have to spend some of the time doing business stuff.
The failed startups you hear most about are the spectactular flameouts. Those are actually the elite of failures. The most common type is not the one that makes spectacular mistakes, but the one that doesn't do much of anything—the one we never even hear about, because it was some project a couple guys started on the side while working on their day jobs, but which never got anywhere and was gradually abandoned.
It seems like the best problems to solve are ones that affect you personally.
If you make anything good, you're going to have competitors, so you may as well face that.
What's wrong with having one founder? To start with, it's a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn't talk any of his friends into starting the company with him.
In a sense there's just one mistake that kills startups: not making something users want.
If you have a list of all the things you shouldn't do, you can turn that into a recipe for succeeding just by negating.
In some fields the way to succeed is to have a vision of what you want to achieve, and to hold true to it no matter what setbacks you encounter. Starting startups is not one of them. The stick-to-your-vision approach works for something like winning an Olympic gold medal, where the problem is well-defined. Startups are more like science, where you need to follow the trail wherever it leads.
You have to be prepared to see the better idea when it arrives. And the hardest part of that is often discarding your old idea.
One reason to launch quickly is that it forces you to actually finish some quantum of work. Nothing is truly finished till it's released; you can see that from the rush of work that's always involved in releasing anything, no matter how finished you thought it was. The other reason you need to launch is that it's only by bouncing your idea off users that you fully understand it.
Perhaps there's a rule here: perhaps you create wealth in proportion to how well you understand the problem you're solving, and the problems you understand best are your own.
However, the phenomenon of serial entrepreneurship would seem to call into question our tendency to explain success as the product of chance.
It's true that every great entrepreneur is first and foremost a designer.
We knew we'd need more funding to reach that goal. We also knew that the boom was going to end. Since we didn't expect investors' faith in our mission to survive the coming crash, we moved fast to raise funds while we could.
All failed companies are the same: they failed to escape competition.
...being the first mover doesn't do you any good if someone comes along and unseats you.
I used to think the billion dollar Silicon Valley start-up thing was the only business worth starting. But as I've gotten older and a bit more experienced, I've come to realize that there is a lot of value in small, simple cash-flow businesses that generate $1,000 or more per month and pretty much run themselves. So consider starting a few of these first before you try to change the world.
I've been my own boss for many years now, but the more time I spend trying to build businesses the more I appreciate the benefits of being an employee.
The biggest risk in life is not risking. Every risk you take in life is in direct proportion to the reward.
In a nutshell, Mr Christensen’s insight was that it is not stupidity that prevents great firms from foreseeing disruption but rather their supreme rationality. They do “the right thing”, focusing on better products for their best and most profitable clients, often to the point of over-engineering (how many Mach and Fusion blades does a chin need?). But that is “the wrong thing” if it blinds them to the threat from poorly capitalised upstarts offering cheaper stuff in markets too obscure to worry about. Such threats can swiftly turn existential if the rivals move upmarket and go for the jugular.
Founders of startups are often quick to sell up, rather than building their ventures into big global companies.
Genius? Nothing! Sticking to it is the genius!...I've failed my way to success.
You are going to go through periods where you feel like you've made a big mistake. As your friends progress along more established paths, you'll often feel like you're falling behind. Get comfortable with it. It's the life you've chosen. And when you do go through those times, just remind yourself that you won't be the one, fifty years from now, telling your grandkids you wished you tried starting a company.
Founding a company doesn't entitle you to lifetime tenure. Like every employee, you have to earn and re-earn your standing - and companies are pretty unsentimental about that stuff. If you stop being useful, you get quickly shuttled to the side. That said, the Founder does have a distinct advantage that comes with the title, and with that a unique opportunity to contribute. It takes self-awareness, and the confidence to hand over the reins, but it can be a very healthy and productive long term role.
When I was a boy I used to uh... I used to read all about Edison and the Wright brothers, Mr. Ford, they were my heroes. Rags to riches, that's not just the name of a book, that's what this country was all about. We invented the free enterprise system where anybody, no matter who he was, where he came from, what class he belonged to, if he came up with a better idea about anything, there's no limit to how far he could go. I grew up a generation too late, I guess, because now the way the system works, the loner, the dreamer, the crackpot who comes up with some crazy idea that everybody laughs at, that later turns out to revolutionize the world, he's squashed from above before he even gets his head out of the water, because the bureaucrats they would rather kill a new idea than let it rock the boat. If Benjamin Franklin were alive today he would be thrown in jail for sailing a kite without a license. It's true. We're all puffed up with ourselves now 'cause we invented the bomb. Dropped the... Beat the daylights out of the Japanese, the Nazis. But if big business closes the door on the little guy with a new idea, we're not only closing the door on progress but we're sabotaging everything we fought for, everything the country stands for. And one day we're going to find ourselves at the bottom of the heap, instead of king of the hill having no idea how we got there, buying our radios and our cars from our former enemies. I don't believe that's going to happen. I can't believe it because if I ever stop believing in the plain ol' common horse sense of the American people there'd be no way I could get out of bed in the morning.
Some people are really worried about what the competition thinks. Or what their friends will think. Or what's cool in Silicon Valley. Or even what their investors think. When instead they should be caring about what their users think, and whether they're staying true to their own vision.
It hurts to find out your ideas are dumb, so you have to really want to know the truth more than you want to feel comfortable.
A lot of people want to make a product, not a business. What's the difference? The latter makes enough money to pay the bills. I get it: products are exciting; commerce is banal and a little grubby. But until it's a solid business, it's not sustainable.