Inspiring comment....

I just read this comment on www.avc.com by elie siedman....thought i should keep it permeneantly and so copy pasting it here....

The comment follows.

I've lived the ups and downs and downs and ups of entrepreneurship and my experience has been that when you look back on those days when you were in the trenches fighting for survival, you'll see them, through the lens of nostalgia, as the "good old days". By contrast, scaling a fast growing startup that has found its market fit is stimulating and exciting but, at least for me, sits nowhere near as prominently in my minds list of proud moments.

My last entrepreneurial run went from 2000 to mid 2006 with a true "go to the light" near death experience throughout most of 2002. The business ultimately found its market fit and had a high growth phase from 2003 to 2005 (from 7 people to more than 200 during that time). Through the miracle of memory, I now remember 2002 very fondly as a source of pride, learning, and character building. But at the time it was not fun - on the contrary, it was as scary as I would let it be.

I've been watching and reading about startups since I was in high school and knew it would be what I tried to do when I read Startup by Jerry Kaplan while in college (still a great book for entrepreneurs). I've observed again and again that for every rapid success like Facebook, there are 100s of overnight moderate successes that took 10+ years and will never make it to the business papers and blogs. It's really a marathon, not a sprint and sometimes your worst enemy is your own psychology or the psychology of the naysayers who inevitably crawl out of the woodwork. After all, it's easy to be a critic and when things don't follow a perfectly straight curve to success, if you allow yourself to, you'll hear plenty of them.

On the hard days, I sometimes look to Parson's rules of life: http://www.bobparsons.me/19/robert-ca-not-eat-r... They are all great but number 2 and number 3 are, to me, the things that ring true on all too many days of the entrepreneurial endeavor.

2. Never give up. Almost nothing works the first time it's attempted. Just because what you're doing does not seem to be working, doesn't mean it won't work. It just means that it might not work the way you're doing it. If it was easy, everyone would be doing it, and you wouldn't have an opportunity.

3. When you're ready to quit, you're closer than you think. There's an old Chinese saying that I just love, and I believe it is so true. It goes like this: "The temptation to quit will be greatest just before you are about to succeed."

And the last comment - startups are uncertain until they are not and when they stop being uncertain, they are no longer really startups. If you sign up for being an entrepreneur or working in startups, that's what you are signing up for. On the particularly hard days I ask myself whether there is anywhere I'd rather work (or anything I'd rather be doing including sitting on a beach) even if it meant more money or less uncertainty. And on those days I realize that I really do have the best "job" in the world.

Two thoughts from my father to close the comment, the first of which he told me when I was a teen: "There will always be someone smarter, richer, more accomplished, or better looking so to find satisfaction and meaning, you'll have to look within". Nothing truer could be said about entrepreneurship. I've never had a huge homerun - the kind of thing that gets you into the business press. But I don't value my contribution to innovation and creation any less than the names and stories I read about in the press. All entrepreneurs - large and small - push the ball that is society and humanity just a bit forward. Larry and Sergei are the ones we read about in the press but their insights - large as they were - were built on the shoulders of countless unnamed others who are mainly not rich and certainly not famous. Entrepreneurship and innovation is a "noble profession" (borrowed from Randy Komisar's recent comments http://entrepreneur.venturebeat.com/2010/04/23/... ) for all of the people who are involved in it - those with their names in lights and those who grind away anonymously. Society and humanity benefits very little - or not at all - from the untold numbers of rich people who became truly rich by hacking the financial system (to quote Mark Cuban) - and benefits massively from the countless numbers who - despite stress and lack of financial reward - devoted their working lives to innovation. The failures matter by the way. The iPhone for which Steve Jobs gets credit was built on the backs of countless other handheld computers that were before their time and whose investors and employees "failed".

And closing with a joke from my dad "what's experience?" "It's what you get when you don't get anything else"

SMS business idea

SMS business.

Here is an idea i have been thinking about... and even proposed to someone in this space.
Though the Idea is good (according to me ha..ha...ha..) ... making it work is
a big challenge.

I call it "Pincode.com" ... this name is probably influenced by reading somewhere...probably rajesh-jain's blog.


You tell me (through sms) where you are right now with your pincode... i will give you what is exciting right now happening in the pincode.

Exciting: Events, Sale (discounts), Hotels etc.,etc.,

U show my SMS and redeem ...


This is just like creating a virtual world on the SMS-cloud....similar to www ...but a volatile data which vanishes every week or month. Some of the data can be everyday updated (totally contrary to www where the data resides for 10's of years).

What this calls for is million dollar investment to cover even part of a big city like Mumbai or Chennai.

Ultimately this can boil down to page-ranking level which i call "Cell ranking"

Based on cell ranking we can give more to a cell and block a cell....like how a page-ranking works now the Google.


Kasi

Today I am happy....

Today I am happy.

I was musing about what i did ... whether that was right or
wrong... it ultimately boiled down to ..."I am right".


Today i received the draft agreement from the client. They
have agreed to pay what i asked... i knew i am not asking
too much...9-lacs for beautiful software (every creators view
of their product is beautiful) is not more.

Anyhow let me have this momentary happiness ... I will wait
until the cash comes to my company bank account then i will
announce to other stake holders.

I wanted to make this blog short... so that i am not overwhelmed by the
"I am right".

Kasi

Fail quick

Failing quick.

This is called testing the water... you test the water and decide quickly whether to carry forward or fail and quit.

What is the point in quitting after you start?? This is a biggest dilemma any entrepreneur goes through... he never wants to quit. sometimes even after knowing that He is
gonna fail... that adamant thinking ... somehow I will make it.... without knowing ... which how and ...what how...


That is the mantra of "be prepared to fail"...

Serial entrepreneurs have quit many... why? Because they fail
quickly and quit.


Failing quick is the mantra within BE PREPARED TO FAIL MANTRA.

If you fail quickly and quit... there is a good chance that you will attempt again and next very quickly and start and achieve success quickly. If you fail every 7-8 years and start again...u r done within 3-4 fails before your life comes to an end!!!


Fail quick...get up back...start again...fail quick...start again...fail quick...start again...succeed. then start and succeed....then start and succeed...Now you know how to succeed...

But alas there is this Oxymoron say from the past...
"Early bird gets the worm" and
"Success comes to one who waits"...

This mantra of fail quickly combines this two... Start EARLY
and wait...if you can sense you will fail...then fail quickly and go and wait where
you get the worms.

Failing quick in business...

Is there a time limit before we say a start up is going to bite the
dust?


I had run a company earlier... during that time one of the
GUJJU (gujarat fellow told that 1000-days). I donno how far
it is true (because when i asked one more gujju he rejected
it).

He said we wait for a fellow to make some profit until 1000-days around
3-years if he still struggling...then that means he is very
positive about what he is doing...but only circumstances does
not support him. So other people in the same business give him
links (not money) for his business so that he can come up.


Is that really a good number? 1000-days for a start-up to make
profit?

I would say yes. It takes about a year to build something good.
and it takes another year (to complete whatever left over) to
make the markte feel that there is something coming from
this company. The company and awareness gets created.

If in the 3-rd year the product is not speaking then there
is something tremendously wrong.

i) product is not good.
ii) product is not accepted by market
iii) Product is way ahead of time
iv) did not value competitor and act
v) the basic business plan needed a revisit 1-year back.
vi) so on and so forth.

So if traditional failing is measured in 1000-days why people tell ... if you want to fail... then fail quick??

There is a famous quote in entreprenuer world is if at all you fail .... fail quick.
We will see why fail quick is important in the next post.

Be prepared to fail

"Be prepared to fail"...

This is one of the quotable quotes for an entrepreneur.

It may sound like an oxymoron. Why should i be prepared
to fail when i building something to lost long. Is that
not absurd? Am i building something to fail? That clearly
says what i am building is wrong...then why should i
build it?


The statistics says that 1% of startup only survive and become
big. Let us say even 5% for an argument shake. Does that
mean 95/100 people start something to fail?

Is that the 95 peoples thinking about starting a business
is wrong?

what does this say?


For a startup to stand and survive and become big there
are multiple stages and multiple environmental challenges.
A startup can fail at any stage because of error or
change in environment. We can never control the environment
and it portraits things at its own will.

So what you have in your hand and control is what you
do and not the environment and the market.
Sometimes,

i) startup fail because they are well ahead of time.
ii) Market demand has changed by the time the startup product comes out.
iii) You may be making X-compenent which fits into A market... but
because of B A-market could have vanished.
iv) Just because your competitor has money and muscle could
crush to non-existence.

and a lot more.

So it is very important for any startup company to envision
failure and learn and change course and fit the market.