10 Rules of Entrepreneurship, by Reid Hoffman and Evan Williams.
I'm juxtaposing these two Top 10 lists from founders of exceptional startups, LinkedIn and Twitter.
Reid gave his talk to SXSW 2011, and Ev gave his list as a talk to 106 Miles in 2006.
Look for disruptive change.
Aim big.
Build a network to magnify your company.
Plan for good luck and bad luck.
Maintain flexible persistence.
Launch early enough that you are embarrassed by your first product release.
Aspire, but don't drink your own Kool-Aid.
Having a great idea for a product is important, but having great product distribution is more important.
Pay close attention to culture and hires from the very beginning.
Rules of entrepreneurship are guidelines, not laws of nature. Entrepreneurs sometimes just make new rules.
Be narrow.
Be different.
Be casual.
Be picky.
Be user-centric.
Be self-centered.
Be greedy.
Be tiny.
Be agile.
Be balanced.
Be wary.
Yes, I'm tickled that Ev's ten rules go to 11, like our reasons why starting a company is hard.
This is great. Although it's not a numbered list, I always liked Jason Shellen's post on a similar note, "A little free product development advice": http://www.shellen.com/2009/04/little-free-product-development-advice.asp
Thanks, Zachary! I love this paragraph from Jason's post:
No one ships something perfect right out the gate. If you are doing it right, there is a good chance you will throw away most of the code every 6 - 18 months. Hell, sometimes you'll throw away the first product. Premature optimization is usually the main stumbling block of any small team. Go fast and learn from mistakes.
Reminds me of our recent thread, How do I learn to fail better?
Awesome list.
I was reading this today. Not exactly in the same vein, but still with the same spirit!
- Figuring out if anyone wants this as fast as humanly possible
- Figure out if anyone will pay for this, and how much
- Build a rinse-and-repeat economical marketing machine
- Figuring out if we can resell this idea in X industry
- Double our retention
- Get to X number of daily active users
- Raise paid conversions from 0.5% to 2%
- Prove to investors that your company is not a risk and that their money is pure gasoline to your engine
I like this list.
It's much more specific about how to survive an accelerator than Reid's list and Ev's list, which are much bigger picture vision lists.
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