Naming a startup is something that I feel is both overrated and underrated. How can it be both?
It's overrated because there are a great deal of example of companies with names that were meaningless, hard to spell, nonsense, spelled incorrectly, or had some other problem but due to a great product or other factors the company still ends up being very successful.
It's also underrated because there are also tons of examples of startups that used their name to be memorable, add to their brand identity, explain their service, or provided some other major benefit that's so valuable it's hard to measure.
The original post here is good, but I'd advise startups to take naming very seriously, try and match your name with a .com domain if possible, but that it's also not going to break you.
A great name and a bad product will fail. A great product and a bad name will still win.
True, there are some negatives for entrepreneurs to use convertible notes. It all comes down to what you're comfortable with and what the investors you want to have are comfortable with. I'd much rather have someone like Fred Wilson invest in priced equity than get convertible debt from an investor who's less experienced, helpful, and connected.
Facebook implementing a similar thing as Turntable could indeed be a threat for them. Having such a huge user base gives them a lot of power in this type of situation, but the focus of a startup can often beat the focus of a larger company putting a team on a "feature".
Congrats to Turntable on the success thus far. It's definitely a fun product with a lot of potential for where they can take it. Let's hope that there aren't legal troubles down the road.
Great point how beyond the key roles of making money and hiring and firing a CEO basically has to take on the role that is most missing from the company at any point in time. If the company is heads down getting the product out the door, you're a product manager. If you are in the midst of a marketing launch, you are the VP of Marketing...
- This already is happening. There are far more developers and entrepreneurs trying to build lifestyle/small businesses than their are trying to raise VC funding and shooting for the moon. It's just that the media and people don't care about them, and really why should they? Nothing against those businesses as I've had my own lifestyle business, but when there are so many of them and they have such a smaller number of customers and users it's not that interesting to read an article about a web application that has 1,000 users.
- Why does the house of cards need to fall down? Is it a house of cards? Without getting into bigger global economy issues, isn't a system that has created companies like Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc. pretty good?
I think both sites serve vastly different purposes for me.
Techmeme = What's the whole blogosphere talking about, what's hot, and let me see some different takes on the same subject.
Hacker News = What can I learn today, what blog post on some lesser known entrepreneur's blog is really insightful, what article can I read about someone's tech infrastructure setup, etc.
At different times I'm interested in one or the other. If I had to be on a desert island with one though, it'd be HN.
Definitely focus on the CS/hacking in college. Business skills are much easier to acquire from real-life work experience, reading business books, etc. The "business" education you get from majoring in business or getting an MBA is less applicable in an early stage startup than actually being able to build things.
It's overrated because there are a great deal of example of companies with names that were meaningless, hard to spell, nonsense, spelled incorrectly, or had some other problem but due to a great product or other factors the company still ends up being very successful.
It's also underrated because there are also tons of examples of startups that used their name to be memorable, add to their brand identity, explain their service, or provided some other major benefit that's so valuable it's hard to measure.
The original post here is good, but I'd advise startups to take naming very seriously, try and match your name with a .com domain if possible, but that it's also not going to break you.
A great name and a bad product will fail. A great product and a bad name will still win.