How to be a business Guru from Seme; the Mps and Governors have promised to avail funds for the same... Getting the chance to meet a successful entrepreneur before they make it big is an opportunity that a lot of us would kill for. The chance to have a conversation with a young Bill Gates or Warren Buffet before they made all their money – when everyone thought their ideas were crazy or that they were full of themselves – would lend a lot of credibility to the challenges and situations faced by most budding entrepreneurs today. “Founders Discuss Success factors” is a recording of a panel hosted in 2007 which boasts of participants such as Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, Chad Hurley, cofounder and former CEO of YouTube, Elaine Wherry, cofounder of Meebo and Jeff Jordan, who has been involved in senior positions at major companies such as Ebay, Paypal, and Walt Disney among others. They talk about what helped them succeed where countless others before them had failed, giving us the chance to pick the brains of these brilliant young entrepreneurs before they had truly established the credibility they’ve now found in their billion dollar empires. What’s most interesting about this particular panel is the fact that some of these speakers were interviewed relatively early in the founding of their now wildly successful businesses. In 2007, Facebook only had 16.25 million registered users, about half of who visited the site every day, making it the 7th most visited site in the US at the time, compared to the 1.06 Billion (yes, billion with a ‘B’) active users today. Mark Zuckerberg was then a 23 year old CEO who had started the social network website in his campus hall and led its growth and expansion to the behemoth it is today. Chad Hurley was, at the time and until 2010, the CEO of YouTube, which was sold off to Google for $1.65 Billion before it had ever made a profit. To top it off, he has a degree in Fine Arts, and was not a tech major as most would presume one of the founders of the world’s top video sharing site to be. Here is their advice: 1. Participate in existing industries but bring a unique approach to it. The entrepreneurs acknowledge that all they’ve really done is find a way to simplify doing things that people were already doing. People were already sharing information with their friends, Facebook just made it easier and faster to do so. People already sent video links to each other; YouTube just brought all of that together in one place. They identified a need and filled it. So do the same, and simplify your business – make it easy for everyone to use and adapt into their daily lives. Show people efficiency and better ways of doing things that they have always been able to do, and people will naturally gravitate towards your service. 2. DO NOT reinvent the wheel. It is said that you have to be arrogant to succeed as an entrepreneur. It’s this same arrogance that makes one want to start from scratch, to redo every single step even when you know you’ll only achieve an existing result. Don’t try to “invent” what already exists unless you’re sure you can do it better. It’s not only a complete waste of time, but also dramatically stunts your growth rate. Stand on the shoulders of the giants that went before you, and learn from their mistakes so you can grow through their experiences instead of your own. Build on what already exists, because it allows you to start ahead of those who came before you so you can go much further than they did. 3. A solid business structure must be built early on. Do not take it for granted, because your business structure is your business’ proverbial roots. A strong foundation must be set, and the direction that you want to take your business determined beforehand, usually in the form of a business plan. No, these aren’t just for showing to investors. They help you create a big picture for your idea, and help keep you on track whenever you’re in need of direction. Starting early, staying focused and being resilient is more often than not the line that defines successful ventures from ideas that don’t take off. 4. Making money off of your idea: Balancing the need to keep the service affordable with the need to keep food on your table as a founder is a hard act to pull off. Companies like YouTube, Tumblr and even Google initially had a hard time figuring out how to make any money without compromising the quality of the product they offered by flooding their UIs (User Interfaces) with ads. All the entrepreneurs chose quality over instant gratification, and chose to take smaller paychecks or none at all initially choosing rather to focus on developing and perfecting their product. Google co-founders, for instance, were resolute on keeping the search page clean devoid of ads in spite of the numerous offers they got. 5. Surround yourself with good people. Know what’s important to you and the future of your business, and figure out ways to identify those with the same beliefs from those without the same motivations. This will save you a lot of heartache down the road; be it with employees, partners or investors because it means that you’re all working towards the same vision, not trying to split the company’s resources in half to pursue different directions. 6. Be optimistic. Be paranoid. These are the cardinal rules of successful entrepreneurship. The optimism is the faith that you have in the potential of an idea. But before you invest your life savings into your billion dollar idea, do a quick search just to be sure that no one else has had this idea before. That’s the paranoia – and it comes in handy when one is shopping their idea around. Due diligence is the name of the game. Earn the respect of potential investors by showing that you are aware of the market for you product, the competition in that space and that you know exactly what you’re going to do to counter it. 7. Murphy’s law. “Everything that can go wrong will go wrong.” Be prepared for that, and manage the challenges as they come. However, founders who sleep with their phones under their pillows will be driven crazy by the constant ringing. You have to intentionally create time to relax; taking time out for yourself or else you’ll burn out pretty fast. A good analogy for this is a baseball pitcher. They keep their eye on the position they want the ball to land all through their swing, yet look away at the very last second so they can look back and refocus. So take a moment to refocus yourself – to remind yourself of the big picture. If you can’t do it for your own sake, then do it for the sake of your business. 8. Selling the business/idea versus not selling; Chad Hurley who sold YouTube in 2006 said: “We were growing so quickly and we had some decisions to make. We didn’t want the service or our communities to suffer because we couldn’t access the resources we needed. We had a good relationship with Google and it was an opportunity for us to accelerate development by using the infrastructure that they already have in place so that helped us decide that selling would be a good move for us.” Mark Zuckerberg, “Whenever you choose not to do something like that (sell), there’s obviously some risk involved but I think that if you have the type of situation that we have where our user base is doubling every 6 months, user engagement is higher here [on Facebook] than anywhere else on the internet, and there’s nothing that indicates that it’s going to slow down, then there’s really no need to reason to sell. The way we see it, there’s no reason why, in two years, we won’t have hundreds of millions of users.” And he was right. From what they’ve both said, if you have the capacity to scale the business on your own then by all means keep it. However, if it gets to the point where it has outgrown you as the founder and you need access to more resources to continue running it, selling might just be the right option for you. 9. Being first to break into the industry; The fact that other companies exist in the space that you’re considering entering should not deter you from trying to enter that market. As the VC moderating the panel said, “First movers are way over hyped.” You need to be the best company that best meets the user need and a lot of times, first movers are those who build something before the market was ready, or before technology existed to fully take advantage of their product or before the things that would really make their ideas work came together. It’s dangerous to be the first entrant into the market because they are more likely to be a lesson on what not to do for companies that come after them, rather than a success story. As it is often said, ‘Pioneers are martyrs’. However, it takes some special skills to create a product, a market and dominate it or be the only, just as Apple have done or James Cameron who conceptualized the movie ‘Avatar’ years before the technology to create 3D movies existed. 9. Being first to break into the industry; The fact that other companies exist in the space that you’re considering entering should not deter you from trying to enter that market. As the VC moderating the panel said, “First movers are way over hyped.” You need to be the best company that best meets the user need and a lot of times, first movers are those who build something before the market was ready, or before technology existed to fully take advantage of their product or before the things that would really make their ideas work came together. It’s dangerous to be the first entrant into the market because they are more likely to be a lesson on what not to do for companies that come after them, rather than a success story. As it is often said, ‘Pioneers are martyrs’. However, it takes some special skills to create a product, a market and dominate it or be the only, just as Apple have done or James Cameron who conceptualized the movie ‘Avatar’ years before the technology to create 3D movies existed.
Posted on: Sun, 29 Dec 2013 14:15:32 +0000
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