Startups in 13 Sentences
Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple statistical spam filter that inspired a new generation of filters. He’s currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.
If there were 13 things he could tell an entrepreneur in a startup scenario, they are as follows:
- Pick good co-founders
- Launch fast
- Let your idea evolve
- Understand your users
- Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent
- Offer surprisingly good customer service (I always like to reference zappos.com for the mecca of customer service)
- You make what you measure
- Spend little
- Get ramen profitable
- Avoid distractions
- Don’t get demoralized
- Don’t give up
- Deals fall through
You can read the details to each of his 13 sentences here.
There are many other suggestions out there on the web for startups and entrepreneurs, the most widely known being the Entrepreneur website. Look for more entrepreneur and startup tools and resources in future posts on this site!
MF
About the Author: Mike is the founder of this site, www.mikefanelli.com He has extensive professional experience in accounting and financial analysis, and is currently a licensed CPA in the state of North Carolina.
