Following up from my previous post about the notion of startups being hard, I’d like to address a similar issue around the idea of startups being “risky”.

There was a lot of . . . → Read More: What is more risky than a startup?]]> What’s more risky than being at a startup? Being in a job you don’t care about regardless of how “safe” it is.

Following up from my previous post about the notion of startups being hard, I’d like to address a similar issue around the idea of startups being “risky”.

There was a lot of semantical debate from my last post regarding what I meant by “hard” so I’ll start off by defining risky. In most cases, when people talk about the startup life being “risky” they are referring to job security. Because startups are so fragile and the margin for error much smaller than a business that has been around for a while with ongoing profits, job safety is always at risk.

My answer to that is: job safety is an illusion. The benefit you get by being at a startup with much less job security is significantly greater than the ongoing safety of a job you dislike. The reason? The professional decay you experience while being at a mediocre job that you don’t really like is, in the long run, much more detrimental to your long-term success.

When you are working at a job you love and are passonate about, you find yourself going above and beyond the call of duty without being asked. In fact, to you, you aren’t going above and beyond because there is no above and beyond. You enjoy it. You feel you are making a difference. You are interested in learning new things, interested in doing your best.

Another big issue with being in a job you don’t like is network decay. If you are interested in growing your career over time, becoming an entrepreneur, raising money from investors, or hiring great employees, you need a solid network. Job #1 for any burgeoning entrepreneur should be to pound the pavement at Starbucks and meet with as many people as possible. When you are at a mediocre job, you don’t care about networking. Why would you want to meet other people that are related to the mediocre job because they are probably mediocre too. If you love your job, you want to meet more people like you. You don’t always know it, but those connections will help you 1, 3, 5 years down the road in ways you never imagined.

The reason all of this is important is because job safety is a myth in today’s business world. I worked at one of the best and biggest high tech companies in the world in a job that any engineer would have loved to have had, but during 2008 there were grumblings that my department might be cut. Typically these kind of cuts are done with a clever not with a scalpel.  I like to think that if they had cut my department they would have spared me, but there are no guarentees. My manager didn’t seem to think he was all that safe. The worst part was my job (to me) was mediocre. My network had eroded over time (and mainly consisted of other disgruntled corporate types). My skills hadn’t eroded because I kept doing things outside work, but I can see how they would had I not had StatSheet.

To sum up, job safety is an illusion and you are just fooling yourself if you think you are better off working a medicore job long-term than exploring something you are passionate about (like a startup if that’s your thing). I’d rather work on something where I’m growing even if there is no promise for tomorrow than a crappy job that will one day pull the rug out from underneath my career.

StatSheet is . . . → Read More: Single Founder Startup: Using advisors as your co-founders]]> As I mentioned in my last post, there is a prevailing negative sentiment around the difficulty of running a startup. If you are a single founder startup (SFS), the conventional wisdom says the cards are stacked so much against you to barely make it worth trying. I’d like to call BS again.

StatSheet is a SFS, but I didn’t suffer from most of the issues that people claim as being problematic for a SFS. First and foremost (and by definition), a SFS doesn’t have co-founders. There is just one person. That’s true, but given the strong group of advisors I’ve established over time, StatSheet has felt like it’s had 3 or 4 founders at any one time.

When I was out raising money, investors commented on how generous I was to my advisors in terms of granting stock options. What they didn’t understand is that I didn’t use advisors in the traditional “low impact”, once a month way many startups do. I leaned on my advisors constantly. One advisor provided connections with investors and entrepreneurs. One gave me a lot of guidance with sales. Another has been a constant source of guidance and mentorship not to mention providing input during business development, strategy and acquisition discussions. I met with some of them on a weekly basis and in some cases more than once a week.

If you have an interesting business, you should be able to find good advisors. In my experience (including for the companies I’ve advised), advisors are willing to spend considerably more time helping their startups than the startups ask of them. And they don’t need 50% or 33% ownership to do it!

When I started StatSheet I didn’t set out with a plan to find a bunch of great advisors and use them as “co-founders”, it just happened over time. That’s one reason why networking is such a critical activity in the early stage of a startup. Bringing on advisors is a very capital efficient way to get access to a wealth of industry experience and talent without having to pay for it! And often times, it is an easy sell to bring someone on as an advisor. Being an advisor to a company is a badge of honor for successful entrepreneurs and business executives.

Don’t be afraid to give your advisors real deliverables. But the catch is that you have to be proactive. I see the advisor/startup relationship as similar to the mentor/mentored relationship. It is up to the startup or person being mentored to be proactive with the relationship. In every case I can think of (which includes me mentoring ~10 people in my career and being an advisor to 7 companies), the person being mentored or the company I was advising wasn’t proactive enough. They didn’t ask enough of me. You have to stay on top of it. Ask for a weekly call or meeting. Get due dates from them for specific deliverables. Follow up.

I’m talking about this in the context of a Single Founder Startup, but of course it applies to startups with any number of founders. Bottom line: MAKE BETTER USE OF ADVISORS. And since “advisor” has a certain “low impact” conotation, maybe we need a term for a more involved advisor. If you bring them on in the beginning, you could refer to them as “Founder Advisor” or “Founding Advisor”.

Around 2005 after I finished up my grad program . . . → Read More: Here I go again…]]> In 2002 I started my first “blog”. Blogs were new at the time and I was just getting my feet wet.  I hand created each blog post (with HTML!). I used that first blog to talk about various books I was writing at the time.

Around 2005 after I finished up my grad program at MIT, I decided to revamp the blog and got it running under WordPress 2.0.  I was going to cover general updates about things I found interesting. It wasn’t that interesting. I was doing some cool stuff, but I was still working at a large company so it wasn’t very easy to be open about it.

Now, 8 years after I started my first blog, I’m on version 3. I’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.0 (which is pretty nice) and I’m starting from scratch again. This time around I’m going to blog about my latest passion: StatSheet. Actually, it will be more than that. I’m going to write about my experiences as an entrepreneur, most of which run counter to conventional wisdom. I’m going to try and write at least one decent sized post a week. We’ll see.