Excellent point. On a related note how does one legally manage vesting in the case of a merger between two startups? I'm considering a merger with another founder. My startup has been around for a little longer. Any thoughts?
"and can stand up to a million users isn't worth anything until somebody finds it useful."
Often times it takes a team and not an individual to build something somebody wants. The complexity lies in its functionality and it does not have to do everything for everybody.
If I am not mistaken you are referring to scaling production and marketing and possibly premature diversification while I am referring to scaling development to meet the needs of that initial customer base.
Extrapolating these little nuggets of wisdom to every situation is meaningless. For instance it simply does not apply to a startup that is looking to build something complex. And in that case you absolutely need to scale before someone else does and pushes you out of the game. Small before big does not make sense, unless small is a meaningful and reasonable number.
"If I were LinkedIn, I'd sell. Facebook is going to crush them."
Where's the intersection?
I like linkedin. I've had a few recruiters and business folks contact me through there. I'd be very reluctant to put my career stuff on fb. Perhaps some people mix business and pleasure?
Good comment. A recent article from businessweek talked about the 10 top employers favoured by new grads. Three of them were fed. agencies, one established accounting firm, google, etc. New grads crave job security, comfortable lifestyles, cars, houses and growing bank accounts. After racking up large student loans you can't blame them. And this would be a major impediment to them starting a business in general.
I think this article refers to maybe 0.05% of new grads.
We are working on a wireless hw/sw/fw startup. Of late I've had at least one Web2.0 person express an interest in working for us. I expect we'll find many others who find the web startup scene boring.
Aruba, Starent, Infinera are hot 2007 IPO's of note that were recently in the news. None of them were started by 20-somethings.
I think this site and the referenced bloggers have a software-centric focus. There may well be a significant number of successful 20-somethings in software businesses. But software is a subset of technology and one cannot apply the observations here to technology in general.
Consider this: the global market for communications equipment exceeds 1 trillion dollars -- there's a lot of opportunity there for domain specific expertise that often times requires an advanced degree and experience in the industry. Companies such as Qualcomm and Broadcom are other examples where the founders were well-established in their careers, i.e. not 20-something.
Yes there are a few inaccurate generalizations here. Another gem is: "Only a disproportionately minute number of discoveries traditionally came from directed academic research. "
Having said that the essence of the article is quite interesting.
Please include some people from the infrastructure world. Founders of companies like Cisco, Juniper, Qualcomm, etc. Even smaller chip companies. How did these people get started?
This writer uses Tivo as an example of something that could not have been founded by older people. Well actually Tivo was founded by Silicon valley veterans Barton and Ramsay. Not exactly young. More like 40+ somethings. Bad example.