Essays
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- Programming Bottom-Up - Страница 1
- Lisp for Web-Based Applications - Страница 3
- Beating the Averages - Страница 6
- Java's Cover - Страница 12
- Being Popular - Страница 14
- Five Questions about Language Design - Страница 24
- The Roots of Lisp - Страница 28
- The Other Road Ahead - Страница 29
- What Made Lisp Different - Страница 44
- Why Arc Isn't Especially Object-Oriented - Страница 45
- Taste for Makers - Страница 46
- What Languages Fix - Страница 52
- Succinctness is Power - Страница 53
- Revenge of the Nerds - Страница 57
- A Plan for Spam - Страница 65
- Design and Research - Страница 72
- Better Bayesian Filtering - Страница 76
- Why Nerds are Unpopular - Страница 82
- The Hundred-Year Language - Страница 90
- If Lisp is So Great - Страница 97
- Hackers and Painters - Страница 98
- Filters that Fight Back - Страница 105
- What You Can't Say - Страница 107
- The Word "Hacker" - Страница 114
- The Python Paradox - Страница 117
- Great Hackers - Страница 118
- The Age of the Essay - Страница 125
- What the Bubble Got Right - Страница 131
- Bradley's Ghost - Страница 136
- Made in USA - Страница 137
- What You'll Wish You'd Known - Страница 140
- How to Start a Startup - Страница 147
- A Unified Theory of VC Suckagepad - Страница 159
- Undergraduation - Страница 161
- Writing, Briefly - Страница 166
- Return of the Mac - Страница 167
- Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas - Страница 169
- The Submarine - Страница 173
- Hiring is Obsolete - Страница 177
- What Business Can Learn from Open Source - Страница 183
- After the Ladder - Страница 189
- Inequality and Risk - Страница 190
- What I Did this Summer - Страница 194
- Ideas for Startups - Страница 198
- The Venture Capital Squeeze - Страница 203
- How to Fund a Startup - Страница 205
- Web 2.0 - Страница 217
- How to Make Wealth - Страница 222
- Good and Bad Procrastination - Страница 233
- How to Do What You Love - Страница 236
- Are Software Patents Evil? - Страница 242
- The Hardest Lessons for Startups to Learn - Страница 248
- How to Be Silicon Valley - Страница 255
- Why Startups Condense in America - Страница 260
- The Power of the Marginal - Страница 267
- The Island Test - Страница 275
- Copy What You Like - Страница 276
- How to Present to Investors - Страница 278
- A Student's Guide to Startups - Страница 282
- The 18 Mistakes That Kill Startups - Страница 290
- Mind the Gap - Страница 297
- How Art Can Be Good - Страница 305
- Learning from Founders - Страница 310
- Is It Worth Being Wise? - Страница 311
- Why to Not Not Start a Startup - Страница 316
- Microsoft is Dead - Страница 324
- Two Kinds of Judgement - Страница 326
- The Hacker's Guide to Investors - Страница 327
- An Alternative Theory of Unions - Страница 336
- The Equity Equation - Страница 337
- Stuff - Страница 339
- Holding a Program in One's Head - Страница 341
- How Not to Die - Страница 344
- News from the Front - Страница 347
- How to Do Philosophy - Страница 350
- The Future of Web Startups - Страница 357
- Why to Move to a Startup Hub - Страница 362
- Six Principles for Making New Things - Страница 364
- Trolls - Страница 366
- A New Venture Animal - Страница 368
- You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss - Страница 371
We're really excited about your project, and we want to keep in close touch as you develop it further.
Translated into more straightforward language, this means: We're not investing in you, but we may change our minds if it looks like you're taking off. Sometimes they're more candid and say explicitly that they need to "see some traction." They'll invest in you if you start to get lots of users. But so would any VC. So all they're saying is that you're still at square 1.
Here's a test for deciding whether a VC's response was yes or no. Look down at your hands. Are you holding a termsheet?
22. You need investors.Some founders say "Who needs investors?" Empirically the answer seems to be: everyone who wants to succeed. Practically every successful startup takes outside investment at some point.
Why? What the people who think they don't need investors forget is that they will have competitors. The question is not whether you need outside investment, but whether it could help you at all. If the answer is yes, and you don't take investment, then competitors who do will have an advantage over you. And in the startup world a little advantage can expand into a lot.
Mike Moritz famously said that he invested in Yahoo because he thought they had a few weeks' lead over their competitors. That may not have mattered quite so much as he thought, because Google came along three years later and kicked Yahoo's ass. But there is something in what he said. Sometimes a small lead can grow into the yes half of a binary choice.
Maybe as it gets cheaper to start a startup, it will start to be possible to succeed in a competitive market without outside funding. There are certainly costs to raising money. But as of this writing the empirical evidence says it's a net win.
23. Investors like it when you don't need them.A lot of founders approach investors as if they needed their permission to start a company—as if it were like getting into college. But you don't need investors to start most companies; they just make it easier.
And in fact, investors greatly prefer it if you don't need them. What excites them, both consciously and unconsciously, is the sort of startup that approaches them saying "the train's leaving the station; are you in or out?" not the one saying "please can we have some money to start a company?"
Most investors are "bottoms" in the sense that the startups they like most are those that are rough with them. When Google stuck Kleiner and Sequoia with a $75 million premoney valuation, their reaction was probably "Ouch! That feels so good." And they were right, weren't they? That deal probably made them more than any other they've done.
The thing is, VCs are pretty good at reading people. So don't try to act tough with them unless you really are the next Google, or they'll see through you in a second. Instead of acting tough, what most startups should do is simply always have a backup plan. Always have some alternative plan for getting started if any given investor says no. Having one is the best insurance against needing one.
So you shouldn't start a startup that's expensive to start, because then you'll be at the mercy of investors. If you ultimately want to do something that will cost a lot, start by doing a cheaper subset of it, and expand your ambitions when and if you raise more money.
Apparently the most likely animals to be left alive after a nuclear war are cockroaches, because they're so hard to kill. That's what you want to be as a startup, initially. Instead of a beautiful but fragile flower that needs to have its stem in a plastic tube to support itself, better to be small, ugly, and indestructible.
Notes[1] I may be underestimating VCs. They may play some behind the scenes role in IPOs, which you ultimately need if you want to create a silicon valley.
[2] A few VCs have an email address you can send your business plan to, but the number of startups that get funded this way is basically zero. You should always get a personal introduction—and to a partner, not an associate.
[3] Several people have told us that the most valuable thing about startup school was that they got to see famous startup founders and realized they were just ordinary guys. Though we're happy to provide this service, this is not generally the way we pitch startup school to potential speakers.
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