Raji Bedi

Photo

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:12:02 -0400

"The satisfaction of waking up to write down a fleeting thought."

Sat, 09 Mar 2013 14:21:11 -0500

“The satisfaction of waking up to write down a fleeting thought.”

Fortune Cookie: I guess what goes around comes around.

Fri, 18 Jan 2013 23:27:48 -0500

Fortune Cookie: I guess what goes around comes around.

Simple Syrup

Wed, 16 Jan 2013 22:03:58 -0500

Simple Syrup

A day in Detroit (click right/left arrows to scroll)

Wed, 14 Nov 2012 00:08:00 -0500

Street facing window art off of Woodward Ave.

Retail! Pop-up shop for now, but potentially permanent.

While just a stone's throw from so many exciting renovation projects, Capitol Park remains undeveloped for now. In the distance you can see the back of the Book Cadillac. Campus Martius is behind me.

A look through the glass ceiling at the newly branded "Chrylser House".

The Guardian Building Lobby is breathtaking, and there is a great little cafe in the center of it.

Woody the Vernors Gnome at Pure Detroit in the Guardian Building. He's supposed to be winking...

Inside of the Guardian, Pure Detroit has a clock found at the Packard Plant.

An unbelievable little building in the Financial District. Look at that detail!

Christmas in Detroit.

A Christmas present to Detroiters.

A day in Detroit (click right/left arrows to scroll)

Survey Highlights re: Freelance mobile designers and developers.

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 15:06:00 -0400

A few weeks ago I sent a survey to freelance developers to collect data on major pain points during mobile development projects. Several results came in, but not enough to be able to draw meaningful conclusions. If you haven’t filled the survey out, please do. Otherwise please share it with freelance mobile developers in your network.

CLICK HERE TO TAKE THE SURVEY

Survey highlights (“General Thoughts”) :

“Think more! But don’t just focus on the idea, focus on the UX. I cannot stress this enough, the experience needs to be solid. A user without any previous interaction should walk in and know exactly what to do.”
“One of the major challenges in my practice is that the usual project is structured in a way that makes collaboration between designers and developers difficult.”
“…a lot of my initial conversation with a client is ‘Apple doesn’t allow that’”
“Most people I deal with have more money than brains. It can be very frustrating.”
“It’s [mobile] still a new concept with 1000 ways to do everything and no ‘set’ or ‘accepted’ standard of [measure]… as things progress, mobile projects will stop being so much like the ‘wild west’ and start being more predictable.”

[ ] Edits mine

All social apps end up becoming content apps, or else.

Tue, 18 Sep 2012 01:43:00 -0400

A social app can’t start out being social when nobody is using it yet. For that reason, social feature apps first need to be (1) seeded with founder-generated content (inorganic) or (2) play well in single-player mode. When early users are baited with something to keep them busy, they may get just enough utility out of the app to produce their own content and, in turn, grease the social mechanics of the startup.

If everything works as planned, the seeded content is just the opening act for the social feature. But this outlook might be a little short sighted. Several startups have come to a head, showing that their social engines were actually missing a gear. The two that stand out are Foursquare and Twitter.

Both are rooted in social and each has amassed a large user base. Each found a large enough market of content-creators, people checking in and tweeting, to keep their metrics “up and to the right”.

But as the novelty of their features began to wear, both companies had to get a handle on the real value of their business.

In the case of Foursquare, check-ins plateaued but not after generating an incredible amount of valuable data. The company retreated back to the garage and recently emerged with a brand new app. While “checking in” is still important, it is no longer featured. Their data hatched what appears to be a new strategic direction that centers around discovery and…content. All hail the king!

Social apps are apprentices to content kings

To gain mass relevance, social apps can’t afford to stay social (bold, huh?). They have to become content businesses. If not for any other reason, the number of content consumers dwarfs the number of content creators.

Twitter and Foursquare are lucky to have droves of data they can use to cook content. We’re just now starting to see that transition come to form.

Foursquare’s emphasis on “explore” widens its appeal to much larger audience of people that has no interest in becoming the mayor of anything. They just want to find a good coffee shop nearby.

Similarly, Twitter’s growth is stunted by people saying “I have nothing to tweet”, unbeknownst to the fact that they can join the service and…not tweet. Their new “discover” tab, daily email digest, and hashtag pages are all meant to give these prospective users something to consume without any social pressure.

Switching into high gear

The value of a business is more easily measured by the value of its content. We’re starting to see the first wave of truely organic “social content” companies, and there is a lot to learn from their effort. Here are a few of my takeaways:

1. Start social, still. It’s harder to back into social than it is to start with it. Creating content discovery around a rooted social mechanic is valuable. It’s a key differentiator from content-first apps.

2. Base product decisions on both creators and consumers. Users that do not create content are considered “passive”, but that’s not always true. They may be your most loyal and frequent users.

3. Talk content, now. Fundraising as another “social app” is next to impossible these days. Don’t assume your audience understands the value of your user-created content.

4. Think about “organic content” from the outset. What data are you collecting? How will it be useful in the long run? How valuable is it?

5. Make it easy to learn from your content. You’re going to need to index, curate, collate, query your data to learn from it. Create an infrastructure amenable to doing that.

As social startups scale and start to climb back up to the top-of-the-funnel, it will be interesting to see if they can displace content incumbents like Yelp. Then we can officially say that content apps are more effective if they start social.

Foursquare before and after

Mon, 10 Sep 2012 15:25:00 -0400

There is a lot to learn from the work other companies do. As a co-founder of a mobile startup, I find it really helpful to learn from how other apps iterate. Foursquare is a particularly beautiful app that has recently gone through some dramatic changes.

The app now…

Standardizes UI (profiles, persistent tab bar, etc)
Puts “features” where they belong (lists, etc)
Transitions from consumer to content
Highlights more than just checkins (tips, pictures, likes, etc)

What’s your take on the strategy their redesign is built on? Comment below.

Discount or cap? A spreadsheet that shows what happens when a note converts.

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 08:28:00 -0400

Venture math can be tough. Terms like convertible note, discount and cap can complicate a seemingly easy process. A convertible note is a debt instrument typically used when a company first begins to raise capital. The valuation of the company is determined at a later date, after a Series A investment. This is when a note converts to equity at the previously agreed upon terms. A discount and cap are typically included in those terms. A discount gives a note holder’s small investment a little bit more purchasing power. But with a discount, there is no limit to the valuation of the company. That’s where the cap comes into play. A cap limits the valuation of the company to a pre-determined price. In other words, it protects early investors (note holders) from being diluted to oblivion. Owning 0.0004% of a company sucks for someone who took most of the risk, and a cap prevents that from happening.

While often spoken in the same sentence, a cap and discount are never used at the same time. They are mutually exclusive. When a note converts, the more generous of the two options is used. That depends on what the valuation of the company is, and the amount being raised in the Series A, among other things.

The terms of a note can vary dramatically, but the most common include a $3m cap, 20% discount and 8% interest. So, how much does the team own after the Series A (when the note converts)? It’s tricky to figure that out, so I put together the attached spreadsheet to help.

How it works

In this spreadsheet, a note holder converts using whichever of the cap or discount results in a lower share price. But calculating a share price is tricky. This spreadsheet will help take you to the promised land.

For me, the key to calculating share price was learning what “effective valuation” means. ”Effective valuation” is sort of like the “enterprise value”, commonly used when talking about publicly traded companies.

Enterprise Value = Market Cap + Debt - Cash

The enterprise value is the amount an acquirer would pay for a company. In this exercise the enterprise value is the “valuation”. But the market cap is what’s used to calculate share price, so we have to solve for it. Assuming there is no cash on the balance sheet, we solve for market cap by subtracting the debt from the enterprise value. The market value of debt depends on if the discount or cap is being used, therefore it’s the “effective valuation”.

Once you have the effective valuation, you can calculate the share price for the Series A investor, and then adjust the share price for the note holder. Click into each cell to study the formula used - it makes more sense visually.

Random notes regarding the spreadsheet

The spreadsheet provides a visual for what has been explained by many others, on many different sites (I learn easier this way). It can be a good resource to send to family/friends participating in early rounds. However, there are easier ways to relay the information. For example, using back of the envelope math, you can figure the cap table out without a number of shares (see the rows labeled “equity” for the formula).

So, take the spreadsheet with a grain of salt (I’ll post updated versions here, if necessary). The spreadsheet is not a suggestion on how to do your fundraise, and it’s certainly not legal guidance. It’s just another helpful resource (hopefully), among many.

Lastly, what are you doing tonight? Download doingtonight from the iTunes app store and see how doingtonight is reimagining life at night.

Edit: Most Series A investors will want to create an option pool. There is now a second worksheet in this updated document that shows the effect of creating an option pool. This is version 1.1.

Edit (12/4/2012): There was a small reference error in the spreadsheet that has been resolved in this version.

DOWNLOAD THE SPREADSHEET HERE (FREE)

Not your grade-school social studies

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 17:44:00 -0400

When I arrived on campus at the Univ. of Michigan in 2001, a group called Komposit dominated the party scene in Ann Arbor. Komposit was causing waves on campus, down from the Blind Pig, up to the Church on Church.

Throngs of people flocked to their gigs so often that they should have earned school credit. The smell of vinyl burning at the DJ’s fingertips lingered in the air. B-Boys from Element One and dancers from Funktion and 2XS lit up the living rooms of house parties all around campus. An eclectic crowd who “thought they could dance” didn’t stand idle. They shouted in glee and ripped moves from their favorite music videos (remember those?) . High on jungle juice and hip hop, these parties were spiritual to some.

But curating that sort of experience was no joke. These guys were entrepreneurs, and throwing parties was their business.

Komposit started to wind-down after my freshman year. So, I mixed with other promoters on campus and noticed patterns in how they drew crowds and affected life at night.

Promoters had a deep-seeded relationship with influencers. They had followers, friendships and reputations to maintain. But, the thing is, in 2001 there was no Facebook, Twitter or…Google+. There were no Klout scores and Crowd Sources, let alone time to dial-up email. Rather, promoters plastered light poles and littered the floors of crowded hallways with postcard-size fliers. They socialized parties in cafeterias, cultural shows and commons rooms. It took took old school hustle to get the word out about parties.

After years of flicking fliers, shaking hands and working ropes, promoters picked up on nondescript social cues that moved masses. While they made their work seem automatic, they were engineers of offline game mechanics, incentive, and rewards - all topics way ahead of their time.

Promoters unknowingly authored a study on “social” that still hasn’t been written.

…to be continued.

Photo

Thu, 26 Apr 2012 12:36:00 -0400

"Twitter’s IPA will earn them higher dividends than money-hungry patent trolls will yield."

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 16:03:08 -0400

“Twitter’s IPA will earn them higher dividends than money-hungry patent trolls will yield.”

Organizing Social Activity Around Time

Wed, 04 Jan 2012 03:35:00 -0500

The proliferation of “feature” apps has caused a huge signal-noise imbalance. Check-ins, deals, status updates, photos and others offer an incomplete picture of siloed activities.

But organizing feature activity around time, makes activity streams more useful and easier to consume.

Take the new Facebook Timeline for example. I may post a status that reads “Just passed my exam!”. I also have a Spotify integration that broadcasts that I am listening to Celebrate Good Times by Kool and Gang. Lastly, I post a picture of me popping some bubbly via Instagram. As individual snippets of information, my friends may either be moderately entertained or generally annoyed at my frequent broadcasts. But when viewed in aggregate, each activity centers around a single, and much more palatable “event” plotted on an axis of time.

The timeline amplifies the utility of feature activity because of the added context. It’s not unlike a conversation about analog vs digital.

I spend a lot of time thinking about the marriage of social and time, which is why we think doingtonight is exciting. Stay tuned for some updates on how the app is progressing.

Understanding Facebook Connect

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 20:19:00 -0500

Every social app suffers from a chicken-egg issue, where density is required for the real utility of the app to emerge. As a result, many app developers use Facebook Connect to accelerate and simplify the process of adding social connections. But there is often some amount of manic push back from user’s who do not want Facebook all up in their business.

I recently revisited a blog I wrote several months ago about social neutrality, and came across a section that I thought was worth reblogging. It may help clear up how and why app developers are using Facebook Connect.

The proliferation of Facebook Connect, and the success of sites using it, is slightly curbed by the hesitancy users have to share their information with an unfamiliar website in order to gain access. But this will change over time as people realize sites using Facebook Connect may be better stewards of their information. This is because the connection with Facebook is two-way. A user can allow Facebook to share certain information about them with the application, while the application can choose what information to share with Facebook. This means that certain behaviors, like announcing that you want to booze, may be better served originating on a different system that leverages your existing social graph on Facebook, but keeps those behaviors separate from that graph. read more

The American Routine: Why Everyone Needs To Be An Entrepreneuer (Republished in TechCocktail)

Wed, 21 Dec 2011 14:38:00 -0500

The American Routine: Why Everyone Needs To Be An Entrepreneuer (Republished in TechCocktail)

The American Routine: Why Everyone Needs To Be An Entrepreneur

Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:14:00 -0500

These days, students are paralyzed by rising tuition rates and astronomical amounts of debt. The prospect of becoming a young entrepreneur is mind-numbing, if not absurd.

However, entrepreneurs have an out unlike their peers. According to the Kauffman foundation, the entrepreneurship index was highest among the least-educated Americans, moving from 0.49 percent in 2009 to 0.59 percent in 2010, suggesting an increased number of people pursuing entrepreneurship out of necessity.

This achievement-gap has titanic effect on the economy. According to a 2009 study by McKinsey & Co., if the [academic] performance of low-income students had been raised to those of their peers, annual GDP would have increased by as much as $670 billion, or 5%.

In today’s system, academic achievement is no longer a sufficient proxy for ability - especially for entrepreneurs. The definition of achievement should stretch beyond “academics” and into “ideas”. The result shifts the focus of the commentary to the entrepreneur and reads: If the performance of uninformed entrepreneurs were as favorable as the informed, mentored and connected, returns would increase by billions of dollars, or a gazillion %.

Queue the rise of angels, VCs, incubators and accelerators looking to fill their funnels. People like Peter Thiel pay kids to “stop out” of school, hack their education, and start innovating right away. If young entrepreneurs don’t take Thiel’s bait, some consider dropping out to join programs like Y Combinator, which have emerged as legitimate post-secondary alternatives. The economic value created is undeniable. According to the NVCA, venture-backed companies employed 11 percent of the total U.S. private sector workforce and generated revenue equal to 21 percent of U.S. GDP in 2010.

One thing preventing further acceleration of job and wealth creation caused by entrepreneurs is the misaligned incentives of the education system. Continued economic uncertainty and an inflating tuition bubble amount to a principal-agent problem. The education system’s lean counterparts, however, have emerged with a disruptive solution. Prioritize outcome over income.

Y Combinator, TechStars, and the rest of the burgeoning incubator scene are giving academic institutions a run for their money with a pay-for-performance type model. The programs are a semester long with admission rates akin to top tier universities. Payment for the program is tied to the performance of the company. The program takes X% of the business and work with entrepreneurs to make their (100-X)% worth something. As a result, entrepreneurs don’t just leave the program with paper certificate, but with a pronounced ability to earn real paper. The green kind.

Tying payment with the performance of entrepreneurs is working. In a recent infographic published by Gist, entrepreneur failure rates for TechStars (6.5%) and YC alumni (22.2%) pale in comparison to “home-schooled” entrepreneurs (40%).

Early in an entrepreneur’s career, ideas are typically overcooked and strategies are raw. For that reason, the same infographic highlights that VCs appear to favor founders that rely less on degrees and more on experience. Adil Wali observes, “VCs are in the student loan business. They are paying entrepreneurs to learn and make mistakes.”

“Learn” being the key word. An entrepreneur’s pursuit can be described in one variant of the word’s definition: “to gain knowledge or understanding of or skill in by study, instruction, or experience”. All three of which are pillars of the above discussed incubators and accelerators.

The alternative definition more accurately describes the University’s interpretation of “learn” which is simply, “to commit to memory”. The problem is, machines can also commit routines to memory.

During his commencement speech at the University of Connecticut, Alan Greenspan describes how workers need to break their routine in order to sidestep the end of work.

“The growth of the conceptual component of output has brought with it accelerating demands for workers who are equipped not simply with technical know-how, but with the ability to create, analyze, and transform information and to interact effectively with others.”

In Race Against the Machine, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee discuss why.

“The root of our problems is not that we’re in a Great Recession, or a Great Stagnation, but rather that we are in the early throes of a Great Restructuring.”

In A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink describes this restructuring as the onset of the Conceptual Age.

“We’ve progressed from a society of farmers (AGRICULTURAL AGE) to a society of factory workers (INDUSTRIAL AGE) to a society of knowledge workers (INFORMATION AGE). And now we’re progressing yet again (CONCEPTUAL AGE). The future belongs to a very different kind of person with a very different kind of mind – creators and empathizers, pattern recognizers and meaning makers. These people…will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.”

So where do creators and meaning makers hang out? In his TED talk, Steven Brown discusses where good ideas come from. He highlights coffee shops in particular, as a conjugal bed where people from different backgrounds and fields of expertise come together and share. “It’s a space where ideas have sex”. Other settings (under)serving a similar cup-of-community are campuses.

Universities are perfectly positioned to “pimp” ideas. Campuses are carefully curated environments of people from all corners of the worlds studying Science, Technology, Engineering and Math (STEM). But the only thing preventing ideas from brewing are the ideas themselves and the incentives to have them.

Universities need to network disciplines together around an axis of ideas. No discipline is mutually exclusive. Students should be encouraged to see the science behind art, the math behind technology, the music behind the assembly line. Blurring disciplines can clear vision and precipitate ideas that create gobs of economic value.

Ideas and entrepreneurship are company-size and industry agnostic. Whether an entrepreneur starts a company, or joins an organization of entrepreneurs, having ideas and being able to execute on them is a coveted quality for forward thinking organizations. Dating as far back at the 70’s, companies like 3m give their employees 15-percent time to work on projects and ideas unrelated to their day-to-day. Google gives employees 20-percent time, and that percentage is trending upwards. More and more companies need employees to be entrepreneurs.

But rich rewards and great joys are only in our future if the education system creates and coaches entrepreneurs. Rather than have students slave over syllabi, the system should focus on affecting achievement on the periphery by inserting “idea” into the core curriculum. The lack of “idea” has stymied the American Dream perpetuating the blasé American Routine. It’s a deep seeded institutional problem that is clotting progress and needs to change.

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from (TED Talk)

Mon, 21 Nov 2011 10:44:00 -0500

Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from (TED Talk)

The 11th hour entrepreneur

Thu, 20 Oct 2011 12:47:00 -0400

When the sun is out and birds are chirping, everyone’s an entrepreneur. Days are spent filling pretty slides with buzzwords, hacking APIs, and reading TechCrunch. The kitchen is stocked and ping-pong table is polished. Good times, baby! The only question is, “Will I become a billionaire?”. This will last forever, right? A shake of the magic eight ball bubbles up your answer - “Don’t count on it.”

It’s a ten hour drive to the crossroads you don’t see coming. You are almost where you need to be, but your car is running out of gas. Progress is stalling. When you roll to a stop you will have two choices. Abandon the car and head home, or push it the rest of the way.

If you are an 11th hour entrepreneur, you will take a deep breath, dig your feet into the ground and heave. You will slip occasionally only to hang on with a white-knuckled grip. Hands on your hips, you know you have to give your project one more last ditch effort. It’s an effort steeped with all grits and guts, with no guarantee of glory. But your aches are curbed by the thought of getting to where you want to be.

Questions at the cross roads

What car am I driving? What you are driving has to be worth saving. How big is the market? Is this a product or a feature? What’s the competitive landscape and are the incumbents up for re-election?

What drives you? Your project has to be something you are willing to go the extra mile for. You will do anything it takes to solve a problem. But pushing forward requires discipline because there will be plenty of temptations whizzing past you.

…the dangers of indiscipline increase with temptation. Which means, interestingly, that determination tends to erode itself. If you’re sufficiently determined to achieve great things, this will probably increase the number of temptations around you. Unless you become proportionally more disciplined, willfulness will then get the upper hand, and your achievement will revert to the mean. - Paul Graham

Who is riding with me? It’s hard to push a car by yourself. Finding other people that are willing to ride into the 11th hour with you is critical. As bad as you might want it, you can’t do it alone. Pandora is an example of a company that chose to survive the 11th hour despite facing seemingly insurmountable pressure. The survival of the company can be attributed to the dozens of employees who stayed with the company without pay for as long as 2 years.

Whose name was on the credit card? There are others that want to see you get to where you need to be, so they paid for your gas. But when the gas runs out, they expect you to push it as hard, for as long as it takes. They wouldn’t have funded you if you didn’t have muscle.

Some of the tech worlds most prolific visionaries had car trouble, and asked these questions.

You know I brooded for a few months, but it was not very long after that that it really occurred to me that if we didn’t do something here the Apple 2 was running out of gas and we needed to do something with this technology fast or else Apple might cease to exist as the company that it was. - Steve Jobs

Like Apple, some of the most disruptive companies have been built in the 11th hour.

While choosing to fight in the 11th hour doesn’t always lead to glory, sometimes the right decision feels wrong. After thinking about the above questions, it’s time to make a decision. Abandon the car and head home, or push it the rest of the way. Are you an 11th hour entrepreneur?

Motor City Mojo: The Startup Renaissance In Detroit (TechCrunch)

Sat, 24 Sep 2011 12:44:00 -0400

Motor City Mojo: The Startup Renaissance In Detroit (TechCrunch):

So while it’s easy to look at Detroit and feel discouraged by what’s going on, spend an hour with one of Detroit’s entrepreneurs and your mindset will change. Raji Bedi, the founder of doingtonight (think Plancast for where you’re going out tonight), put it well with an emphatic statement. “We don’t want your pity or to be someone’s charity project. We want Detroit’s startup companies to stand on their own.”

A non-technical founder's hustle

Sun, 18 Sep 2011 17:43:00 -0400

Many (not all) very successful startups have been founded by a hacker and hustler, and there is an ongoing debate on the definition of their roles and weight of their responsibilities. Needless to say, how a hustler spends his or her time is less obvious than a hacker. If you are the “idea person”, what do you do when it’s time to execute? Here are 10 things that make up a non-technical founder’s (NTFs) hustle:

1. Product Development: You may not be able to code, but you should still be able to speak the language. Even a small amount of technical wherewithal will come in handy in a lot of ways. A NTF should be able to describe (understand) the stack, manage requirements, test the application, etc. It is a tech company, after all.

What’s the difference between a hacker, magician and hustler? (via Quora)
- The hacker does it and tells you how he did it.
- The magician does it but doesn’t tell you how he did it.
- The hustler doesn’t do it, but will tell you all about how he did it.

2. Design: If you can’t build it, at least draw it. Leave the customer facing design stuff to the professionals, but learn how to wireframe and draw detailed work-flows. In addition to typical desktop applications (Fireworks, Photoshop, etc) there are plenty of other less expensive options you can use for this.

3. Customer (User) Acquisition: No startup’s idea is unique. There are 100 other entrepreneurs developing the exact same thing somewhere in the world. So while technical differentiation is important, figuring out how to acquire more customers than the other 99 entrepreneurs is a huge challenge. Coming up with that strategy is arguably more valuable than anything else in a company’s early stages.

To be an entrepreneur requires great optimism, and a very strong belief in how much customers will love your product. Unfortunately this same attribute can also lead entrepreneurs to believe that customers will beat a path to their door to purchase the product. This frequently causes them to grossly underestimate the cost it will take to acquire customers. - David Skok

4. Selling: A startup’s first few customers are the hardest to get, and the most important. They’ll have a huge something to do with everything. So not only do you have to sell well, but also sell strategically. Since you probably won’t have much of a budget for a dedicated sales team, chalk that up as another thing the NTF has to do.

One of the hardest things for me to get used to, as a geek/artist/writer in business, is the constant disappointment of sales. The harsh reality, however, is that many leads will not turn into clients, no matter how exciting they might seem at first. And yet each lead must be given attention, enthusiasm, dedication, and so on, if it is to have any chance at all of turning into a sale. - Dharmesh Shah

5. Customer (User) Relationships: Unless you have an enormously sticky application with subscription revenue and an irreplaceable value proposition, you should constantly stay in front of customers. That may be via email, phone or meetings or even less binary ways like blogs, tweets and white papers. You should keep demonstrating competence to the people paying for, downloading, or clicking your product.

72% of founders find out that their initial intellectual property is not a competitive advantage. - Startup Genome Project

6. Customer (User) Feedback: A product of your relationship with the customer is feedback, and you should be ready on the intake. The challenge is that all of your customers think that have the best idea for your product. Filter the feedback to make sure your technical team is spending their time on the right things.

…entrepreneurial leaders sometimes forget that in startups, you can’t allow a “corner case” to derail fearless decision making. - Steve Blank

7. Market: The market changes in real time. While you may have started with 99 competitors, there may be 999 after year 1. It’s on the NTF to stay on top of what’s happening in the market today and what people are building tomorrow.

Do whatever is required to get to product/market fit. Including changing out people, rewriting your product, moving into a different market, telling customers no when you don’t want to, telling customers yes when you don’t want to, raising that fourth round of highly dilutive venture capital — whatever is required. - Marc Andreessen

8. Outreach (investors, mentors, media, etc): Whether you need money, mentorship or media attention today or not, it’s always a good idea to keep in touch with people in these areas. To get any of them you’ll need strong relationships, which can take a while to build. If you are actively seeking an investment, expect that to take up a majority of your time.

50 coffee meetings. It should stick in your head as a metaphor for networking. For getting outside of your comfort zone. For starting relationships today that won’t pay off for a year. - Mark Suster

9. Hiring: This is arguably the hardest thing to do on this list. These days you have to sell harder to good talent, than you do to raise money. Ask Sonar, a company offering a “zero gravity experience” to new hires, among other things. Perhaps they took “sell the dream” too seriously?

The rule of thumb is that it takes 3-6 months to hire a really good person. - Jason Cohen

10. Culture: Guess who is buying the beer, ordering swag, organizing ping-pong tournaments and arranging hackathons? You better hustle.

Etsy drinks their own kool-aid. Their office and culture embodies their product.