Inspiration

Interview with MoveMeOn co-founder Nick Patterson

MoveMeOn was founded in 2011 to fill a gap in the recruitment market for providing select job opportunities to high quality candidates. We spoke to co-founder Nick Patterson, a former McKinsey consultant, about his iterative process of founding and growing a company.

Your website talks of your ‘first attempt’ to change graduate recruitment at Cambridge, what was your vision for that?

I set up a recruitment agency to place students in internships. When I was at university I did an internship at a small consulting firm, and I think the experience I gained from that was more valuable than what I might have gained from a larger firm. At that age you’re still ‘green’ and so rarely get the opportunity to pick up tasks with much responsibility in the larger firms, whereas at small firms the various different types of work have to be done by everyone, so you often get more opportunity to take on more challenging work. Equally the bigger firms are flooded with applications for a small number of places, leaving many students with no internship at all. I didn’t pursue it for very long but it taught me a lot about the recruitment industry.

What was the ultimate catalyst for starting your own venture?

I really wanted to start a company when I left McKinsey, but I didn’t initially have an idea. I ended up stumbling across it because of my own experiences. All of my peers in the city, particularly those in consulting, were being bombarded with calls from headhunters about potential job opportunities. The headhunters had very little idea of what I had done or what I wanted to do; they called with any opportunity that they thought was relevant to me based solely upon having worked at McKinsey. These phone calls were almost weekly and frustrated me and many of my peers. MoveMeOn came out of this – we thought the whole process could be improved. All it really needed was more transparency in the market; the top companies needed to know where they should be looking for the top tier employees.

I also really enjoy the energy you get from working at your own venture. One thing I’ve learned is that if I can see the immediate value in something I’m much more likely to throw myself into it, which is definitely the case with MoveMeOn. Projects in the past where the immediate value is harder to see or non-existent I found very frustrating.

How long did it take you to get it up and running?

From the initial idea to the website getting up and running took around three or four months. This was longer than we had originally planned, and the delays were mostly due to our not understanding the difficulties involved in building a website – a process which we outsourced and learned a lot from.

We had something of a classic startup story in that we made a fairly large pivot and changed the focus of our business further down the line. We had identified three main channels to use when trying to find a job:

1. Your personal network
2. Good headhunters
3. Jobs boards

We started out by effectively being a middleman between good headhunters and job seekers – this wasn’t the most efficient method, but it was necessary to build a strong network of candidates and develop some credibility in the market. Keeping our definition of MoveMeOn fluid was vital at this stage; it allowed us to evolve into the third channel – jobs boards. This proved to be a huge turning point for us and now is by volume and revenue the most valuable part of our business. It’s one of those industries that hasn’t caught up with what can be done online, creating a gap which we were able to fill very well. Often the problem with jobs boards is that there are too many listings, which makes finding the right job a time-consuming process. It’s followed a common internet trend. The past five years have been all about getting volume and choice onto the web. This has been so effective that people are now overwhelmed with “choice” and don’t know where to look. We envisage the next five years being all about filtering for quality. As such, we go for more of a hand-picked jobs approach, only posting the jobs that really excite us and we can see our fairly specific demographic of members working at and enjoying.

If you have sought funding for your venture, what funding options did you pursue?

We needed some capital expenditure early on but it’s not a capitally intensive company. We were lucky to be able to self-fund and were cash flow positive within a very short period of time (in the region of four to five months). We have been approached by institutional investors, so we’ve thought about getting more funding on a few occasions. Sometimes you do need an extra injection of pace and cash to burn through, but we decided that if we didn’t have a very good idea of what we would spend the money on, we weren’t ready for it.

Interview by John Sherwin

Posted by RIG Admin on August 31, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

USEUM – A case study in funding

Boosted by winning Athens Startup Weekend 2012, USEUM is described as “The social network for art, offering two key features; firstly an art archive i.e. the ‘Wikipedia’ of art that is built collectively, and then a podium for everyone to express their opinion and to publicly ‘Like’ and ‘Dislike’ aspects of art, as in all other subject-specific social networks.”  We spoke with founder Foteini Valeonti about her experiences in finding funding for her startup.

As part of winning ASW, you won the chance to pitch at HackFWD in the Pitch in Berlin V2 event.  Did you get funding for USEUM there?

“Although it was a great opportunity, pitching in Berlin was very tough and we didn’t get funding.  The other startups had already been through previous funding rounds and had been in existence for at least 6 months.  USEUM was still under construction at this stage so a completely different proposition.  That said, I think had I done a live demo of our mobile app I would have increased our chances of funding greatly as the live demo at ASW was what really counted in our win.”

So after that, what sources of funding did you pursue?

“Well, we felt the best route at this stage was to bootstrap our company and create a minimum viable product using the least possible funds.  Starting out with this model worked well, but we couldn’t take it very far due to some legal expenses.  I decided I didn’t want to get a loan for the business or go to friends and family for funding, so instead set about looking for angel investors.”

“I successfully found 3 investors who were willing to back USEUM.  What I learned from this process, was that to find the best angel investors, you just have to find the people who share the same interests as you, and who can really click with your idea.  In USEUM’s case it was people who are into art and Greek entrepreneurship, so a perfect match.”

Would you use a similar method to get funding again at future rounds?

“Obviously we will give priority to our original investors, as they are the ones who believed in the team and the idea in the first place.  If still further capital is needed we might seek similar angels, although our strategy is to assess all options so we would also talk to some VC’s.  We are lucky enough to have a revenue model from our USEUM Gift Shop though, so as long as we are covered by that we will delay fundraisers and build our value.”

Interview by John Sherwin

Posted by RIG Admin on August 7, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Inspiration, Management Tips, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

“This is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done”

Matthew Painter is co-founder and CTO of import.io, a startup currently in private beta that aims to revolutionize the way that we access, collect and analyse so called ‘big data’. We caught up with him over lunch to find out about his background and how he became an entrepreneur.

Import.io is rooted in some serious programming, how did you become interested in computers in the first place?

I had my first computer when I was 5 or 6, a Commodore VIC-20, and I started programming soon after that really. I started off using Commodore Basic, and soon enough was spending time trying to program role playing games and similar sorts of programs. When I started at Cambridge I was studying Maths but in my 3rd year I switched to Computer Science. This was a fairly easy decision to make given that I’d always loved programming and that I’d had previous experience with it.

And how did you first become involved in startups?

On graduating I left to a startup called headporter.com. This operated on a simple premise: it supplied student unions with IT services (e.g. websites, membership card schemes, email lists etc.) in return for access to all of their databases and the ability to resell data to companies doing target recruitment and similar things. We had signed up all of the Russell Group universities when some unfortunate circumstances meant that we had our finance pulled. This was a blow as we had to walk away from what we had spent quite some time building, but I enjoyed myself while there and I took a wealth of experience with me. Following that I did some consulting before joining Yahoo to build a Yelp competitor. Surprisingly this had an atmosphere much like a startup because it was a small team working on their own project within the company. This was going very well until poor annual results caused Yahoo to shut down the project in order to focus on their core business areas and cut costs.

After this a friend approached me saying he was working on some tech within a large organization that had a lot of opportunities. He found it constrained working within that environment though and thought for a chance of real innovation they would need to start their own company up. Having enjoyed my first start up experience and liking the idea I didn’t hesitate to get involved and it’s been a great decision – this is the most exciting thing I’ve ever done.

As CTO what sort of challenges do you face most often?

As CTO you’re not just a technological person you’re also a businessman, and one of the challenges we face is balancing risk and reward and making trade-offs accordingly. With startups the challenge is always about balancing efficiency with quality, and this manifests itself at many different levels. One of these might be human resources, for example the Google founders personally interviewed their new employees until the company grew so much that this was no longer possible – a clear trade-off of their time that they thought was worth it. The right workforce in a startup is crucial to deliver results under very tight time constraints, particularly when bootstrapping. I have to make these judgements regularly as we are currently going through an angel round, but we have to keep focusing on the business itself and not compromising the quality of it while we raise funds.

What processes have you gone through in terms of funding?

We started off bootstrapping for as long as possible. We were lucky in that Kusiri (import.io’s predecessor) was self-funded and cashflow positive very quickly so this was not as painful a process as it can be for some startups. It was pretty clear though that to really get a world class company off the ground you do need investment – you need cash to burn through. If you don’t put money into it, you’re not going to get anything out of it.

Finally, as someone who studied computer science, why do you think more American computer scientists enter into entrepreneurship than their British counterparts?

I’d say there is an element of truth to that, American society is a lot more entrepreneurial in general with people more motivated to start businesses. The UK has entrepreneurial people but our culture is more risk averse and we don’t have the same background motivation pushing us forward. Take Silicon Valley for example, people there have been brought up in an environment that will surely breed more entrepreneurs. If we get a few big successes in the UK people will become more motivated to get involved. More encouragement for young people to do computer science and coding would also have this effect. I’m very keen on this, so we were involved in SVC2UK last year, and this year we’re hosting a team for Young Rewired State. YRS fosters the sort of growth we need to see more of in young people.

Interview by John Sherwin

Posted by RIG Admin on July 27, 2012 at 10:00 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Can successful entrepreneurship be learned?

Dr. Markus Perkmann is a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College Business School, where he researches innovation management, technology development and organisation theory. We recently sat down to talk to him about his views on how entrepreneurship is developed.

How would you define entrepreneurship?

Entrepreneurship involves some kind of high impact activity that does something new – not just a sole trader. It often is unsuccessful, but has the potential to  lead to success and strong growth. That’s what makes entrepreneurship  really valuable: doing something new and taking a risk. The risk is an interesting thing – it’s about who takes the risk. The question is really what kind of risks entrepreneurs are taking. Good entrepreneurs are good at taking risks with other people’s money because that allows them to scale others’ resources. The other people trust them with their money because they think they’re more likely to be successful than the average person. There are very few entrepreneurs who will have the money to do it by themselves. It necessarily involves pooling resources from different resource providers, and those resources are at risk. It’s not just about personal risk; it’s about constituting a good risk for a potential resource provider.

Can entrepreneurs be created?

Can entrepreneurship be learned in terms of students going through entrepreneurial societies? – I’m going to do a research project asking that very question. With entrepreneurial societies at universities, for example, does going through such a socialisation process make entrepreneurs? From a sociological standpoint, it’s a question of identity and role models. If in your social context there are people who will provide an entrepreneurial role model, I would think that people looking at these role models would be more inclined to consider entrepreneurship as a legitimate identity to adopt. You can see a similar phenomenon in the dot com boom. There were groups like First Tuesday, bringing in people and trying to convey that entrepreneurship is an option, that it’s something that’s there to be learned and studied in a certain way. Think of retail nowadays: no one would think of having one shop or restaurant – everyone thinks of having a chain. But that had to be learned, built. In this sense being an entrepreneur is a constructed model that people take on.

The other thing you could say here is that a lot of entrepreneurship actually comes out of existing organisations. You talk about university spin-outs, but the more likely case is company spin-outs. A lot of Silicon Valley foundings essentially came out of other companies, like Intel which came out of Fairchild semiconductors. Whole industries were created by people leaving their former employers, sometimes with teams, founding a new company, taking their learning and doing essentially the same thing. Large, bureaucratic organisations are paradoxically the most fertile ground for entrepreneurship and start ups.

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on May 4, 2012 at 1:21 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

What route should students take to become a successful CEO?

Peter Collins, currently the CEO of Permasense, has obtained a PhD Computational Fluid Dynamics and an MBA prior to his various managerial and director roles. He built on his knowledge and skills as an engineer prior to management.

This is perhaps the conventional way to proceed in one’s career, but there are many other opportunities for newcomers these days. The British schooling system creates a dilemma for students at numerous stages. Having to graduate with only few A-levels suggests that you are required to narrow your focus down at a very early stage. However, individuals’ personalities only shape after “teen” years, where confidence and ability to manage others become evident. So there is no clear-cut answer to which is the best route to take.

In order to get an understanding of which route successful CEOs prefer, we asked Peter whether he feels his career advancement was the key ingredient in his success or whether if he could go back in time, would he have done it in any other way…

I have no regrets…

Engineering based businesses are best run by engineers. You cannot build a great engineering business without knowledge of and passion for engineering, as you cannot build a great hotel business without a knowledge of and passion for hotels.

It’s a pity that more engineers don’t remain in engineering, in particular to build engineering businesses…

Posted by Paul Higgins on April 13, 2012 at 11:37 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Inspiration, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Customer (and Patient) Control – An Interview with Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli

Dr. Mohammad Al-Ubaydli is founder and CEO of Patients Know Best, a personal health record system designed to put the patient first. By giving patients control of their own health records, the system allows more efficient and effective relationships between doctors and patients, as well as between doctors and specialists comprising teams of care providers. Patients Know Best is based in Cambridge, UK.

1)   Before Patients Know Best, had you ever thought of doing something entrepreneurial, or did the drive really start with the problem and solution you discovered?

I started with something entrepreneurial in a sense because I knew I was going to start my own company. I was setting myself my own syllabus, so I went through medical school having learned how to program; I was just teaching myself how to write medical software and the intention was that I’d basically solve problems for physicians. And that’s what I did during medical school. I also grew up in Cambridge, and in Cambridge… I was told in school that when you’re in Cambridge, you start your own company, so I believed them. I knew I would do that one day. The final piece for me was learning business, so I worked for a management consultancy in the States, in Washington D.C. While there, I saw the problem that I thought, “OK, this is really important I could commit to, I can see myself dedicating the rest of my life to solving this because it’s really important.”

Beyond that, there’s also a business model behind solving this problem, and I guess I just wanted to solve this for myself. I was facing the problem as a patient, trying to organise my care, trying to manage my health. I spent a year sulking that no one was doing it, and 2008 came along and I said, “You know what, I’ve literally written the book, so I have to do it. Let’s just go and do it.”

2)   How much has the service evolved since you started as a result of patient and physician input? What developments do you foresee with regard to the service in the near future?

We started with an embarrassingly minimum viable product. We took all the classic startup advice, start with the minimum market product: we launched with only one feature. I came back to the UK and I began asking for interviews from my friends who were doctors and then asked them to recommend other doctors to speak to. They weren’t saying, “My problem is I don’t have a PHR.” They said, “My clinics are overrun with patients and I’m always late in helping my patients. There are budget cuts, I can’t get enough staff…” All these very clinical, very operational problems. So I just began building up clinical problems, and I thought, if you use the patient as an asset rather than a liability, we can help. What’s the minimum feature they would need, that they would pay tomorrow, to use? And the one thing they said was, “We want to send messages to patients across institutional lines, if the hospital wants to send a message to the patient and cc the GP, or GP send a message and cc the social worker, for example.” And that was the only thing we launched with.

To give you some contrast, the UK government spent tens of millions on Healthspace, which is their sort of attempt at a patient portal. And only after they went through that sort of tens of millions did they get the feedback of, “I don’t really need any of these features, but I really need to send messages.” So then they began trying to do messages, but by then they’d spent so much money, no one was going to give more money to develop the software any more. So, we started from that feature and every single other thing you see in the software is because a doctor, a nurse, a patient sat down and said, I need this, or I’m stuck on this.

The whole thing top to bottom has been built by the user saying what they need; we respond every two weeks by putting out new features. From our perspective, it’s great because we’re only building stuff that people care about, but also our users are huge evangelists. Every commissioning customer who uses us can point at a part of the screen and say, “That was mine.” And then they go and tell all their friends, “Go and use this software because that was mine. And also, whatever you tell these guys, they’ll do it in two weeks. They really respond really quickly and I’ve never had a software company do that with me.”

3)   In one of your customer videos, Gary Hotine describes looking for something that would be like “Facebook for Patients.” I’m curious to know how apt a description you feel that is for Patients Know Best.

A lot of our users describe us as the Facebook of healthcare. When we trained patients in the beginning, the docs were kind of worried that the patients wouldn’t understand how to use the software. When we sat down with them, most of the trepidation was that they did not believe the docs had actually handed over the records and given them control. But as soon as they get there, they’re like, “Oh, I see, that’s like Facebook. I’m good.”

From that point onwards they just go ahead and use it. It’s like Facebook in the sense that it’s a very easy method of communication, pulling data from everywhere and it can send lots of places. It’s not like Facebook in the sense that we’re not selling your data and we change the terms of use every week: we are not confusing our financial benefit with your privacy desires.

4)   When you started, I’m guessing it was pretty much just you. How did you then go and assemble a team? What qualities did you look for?

It started with just me having the idea and doing some of the research in the States and then deciding I needed to go back to the UK to start it. Cambridge was the place to do so, both as my home and because I’d heard that Cambridge receives 7% of all VC funding in all of Europe. It’s just a crazy number. So I came back to Cambridge and just did a bunch of things to start building the team. I emailed the CEO of Cambridge Network and said, “I’m coming back to the UK, I’ve trained as a programmer and I’m starting this company; I have no team, no product, and no customers. Who do you think I should talk to?” “Let’s have coffee.”

I think he took pity on me, but he said, “You know you should talk to Ian, he’s a CFO of VC backed companies and I think he’ll talk to you.” It turned out we shared the same pub, and we kind of just spent 2 hours the first time talking about the company and he thought it was really interesting. Over the next four months, the poor guy, Ian, taught me accounting. And then eventually he became a member of our board of directors and CFO of our company. So he was the first really heavyweight executive to commit his time to the company.

Then from the development side, I started by just getting some contract developers to build the proto-type and then some other ones to build the final software. We now have developers from the UK (obviously), but also the States, from France, from India, just a real international team. And they tended to have some experience with healthcare in the past that meant that they were as frustrated with healthcare as I was. And so they’re quite evangelical.

In parallel with that, I got a meeting with Dr. Richard Smith, who was the former editor of the British Medical Journal. It took me six months to get a meeting with him—because everyone’s trying to get a meeting with him—but I knew when I was reading his editorials as a medical student, he was always on the patient’s side, often to the anger of his colleagues and medical professionals. But he’d always be on the patient’s side. I knew that if I could just get a meeting, he’d get it. And sure enough, he got it and he agreed to new meetings. And then one day, he agreed to be chairman of our board of directors.

As you build that core team of world class people, it’s just easy to get people. Everyone then wants to join up.

Posted by Aaron Ralby on March 16, 2012 at 5:23 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Management Tips, Product Development, Real World Lessons | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

Why I started Rapid Innovation Group

We recently sat down with Shields Russell, Principal and Founder of RIG, to talk about the company’s beginnings and his evolving thoughts on working with entrepreneurs.

Why did you start RIG?

“There are essentially three capabilities involved in starting a high growth technology company: solving a real problem for a customer; designing and building something that addresses it; and then taking the product to market.

“I’m not good at the whole equation. I am not a technologist or a product person. I’m interested in taking products to market, products that solve the right problem, by which I mean a problem that really matters to the customer and that they will willingly pay to resolve. 

“So when I started this project I wanted to create a specialist firm that was focused on the unique set of challenges that affect early stage, potentially scalable technology companies.

“The challenge was to find a business model that would enable us to develop and retain the expertise necessary to tackle these early stage issues, and in that way, RIG is quite innovative.

“I have never really considered working for someone else as a serious option. I like the freedom to create. That is what is important.”

Has your view on working with entrepreneurs has changed since you started RIG?

“I value blind faith and passion less. I appreciate much more the virtues of systematic business building and risk mitigation simply because I know that if more entrepreneurial companies adopted this type of approach, the probability of their success would be much higher.

“A lot of success still has more to do with luck – being in the right place at the right time – than it has with design. Passion is a pre-requisite but it is overrated as a prime driver of success. Lots of people are passionate – that doesn’t mean they are successful.

“Learning and the ability to iterate are far more important. Being an entrepreneur implies taking a risk but the smart entrepreneur is the one who knows how to limit and reduce risk.”

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on December 9, 2011 at 9:49 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

"Kodak failed because they weren’t able to innovate"

Dr. Markus Perkmann is a Senior Research Fellow at Imperial College Business School where he leads the Business Model Innovation theme. Having worked earlier in his career as Head of Innovation and Strategy at a software start up, we talked to him about his experience of working in a growth stage company and his transition into academia.  

“The exciting side of working in a start up is the opportunity to improve something, to try and do something new, and working together in a small team to make it happen. It’s about the chance to be successful by trying to envision what you could do and the prospect of developing a new product.

“The challenge is that you always know more with hindsight; that’s called experience. The resources were available, and hence we embarked on the project, but obviously nobody is always in the most ideal position possible. A combination of economic context and more specific factors led to a situation where not everyone can be successful. Technology is a winner-takes-all market, so by definition only a few can succeed. So if your company fails, it’s not necessarily a personal failure; you know that you are competing in a tough context where only very few succeed. The lesson you take away is that in order to succeed you need to put yourself in the best position possible, by working with the best people possible, and accessing the best resources available. You are not necessarily aware of these constraints the first time round, but by learning from failure you will gather the experience to do better the second and the third time round.”

What brought you to innovation and entrepreneurship in an academic sense?

“The study of entrepreneurship is a relatively new area in studies of organisations and businesses. Perhaps in other areas of management research, the topics have become a little stale. The classical area is strategy and administration – how do you administrate a big organisation? But the study of new organisations and what drives people to found new organisations is relatively new, and as such, there’s a lot of research to do. It’s a growing field, and there are lots of opportunities.

“The same holds true for the study of innovation. Innovation is essentially a renewal force in the economy that emanates from organisations. Innovation is really the driving force of survival for organizations; in the long term it’s an intrinsically important topic. If organisations don’t innovate they die. There are lots of examples of big organisations, like Kodak, that failed because they weren’t able to innovate or take advantage of their innovations.”

Posted by Jessica Tayenjam on December 1, 2011 at 1:51 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

"One of the biggest challenges was finding out how big could our business could be"

I recently had the opportunity to speak to Carlos Mendes, Co-founder and Product Manager of WeListen. WeListen offers an enterprise innovation management software tool, InnovationCast, which companies can use to drive innovation within their operation from the idea to the final product.

I asked to him to tell me more about the reasons for founding WeListen, developing InnovationCast and any challenges that they experienced during the start-up phase.

“Four of us co-founded WeListen several years ago. We were already colleagues so we had professional experience but we were looking for an opportunity to do something different. The basic idea was to join forces and start up a company together. We started as a project-based company and, at one point, we began working with Mota-Engil to help them organise their collaboration infrastructure.

“During that engagement, António Meireles, who was in charge of Innovation Management at Mota-Engil, came to us with the challenge to devise something better that would improve the way employees collaborated within the company and to support innovation management. The initial idea was to take a solution from the market and add some customisation to ensure that it was a good fit between the needs of the company and the existing product. In the end, we could not find any one solution available that could address all their needs such as:

• How can we support all of our innovation management process within the company?
• How can we turn our ideas into value?
• How do we engage our people to drive innovation?

“This lack of an existing solution for all these aspects drove us to produce InnovationCast. We created a solution for this from scratch. InnovationCast is not only a way to enable innovation from within a company. Our aim is to allow companies to innovate at a sustained rate. Not only does it allow a company’s internal workforce to provide innovative ideas, but it also allows external suppliers and buyers to help address any challenges.

“One of the biggest challenges for us, and this may be shared by other start-ups, was finding out how big could our business could be. Sometimes you get customers to provide solutions to but it is not always easy to keep the company going on a sustained basis. Since we started as a project-based company, we were working with clients that had different projects and problems to address.

“We had projects coming in, which was good for us, but we had difficulty focusing on a particular area. From the beginning, we always had the idea of creating a product based on social technology. We didn’t know what that product would be. On the one hand, working on different projects for different companies was good because we were finding out as a company what was possible for us to do. On the other hand, it can be difficult to choose what you want to do as a start-up that has a clear focus area.

“We had so many ideas that it was easy to want to do it all, but obviously we had to put our mast in the ground. As a startup, you need to understand what you want to do and what real assets you have to build a business.”

Posted by Guest Author on September 1, 2011 at 12:52 pm in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Product Development | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)

         

"In a startup success is in a ‘to-learn’ list not a ‘to-do’ list"

In the presentation below Suneel Gupta, Groupon‘s VP Product, gives an interesting perspective on “managing hypergrowth” in a company that became the fastest in history to reach $1bn in revenue.

Whilst large organisations typically manage projects by thinking about ‘to-do’ lists, Gupta (referencing Sean Ellis) says that in startups it makes much more sense to think about ‘to-learn’ lists.

I like this distinction because it recognises the fact that growth-stage companies constantly come across new challenges that are not yet fully defined. As a technology Founder/CEO your role may change from designer to developer to salesman to recruiter to manager within the space of a year.

It’s difficult to know specifically what you have to do until you’ve started doing it, so think about what you have to learn instead.

See the full video by clicking below.

Posted by Paul Higgins on August 17, 2011 at 11:32 am in Entrepreneur Viewpoint, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration | Permalink | Comments (0) | Trackback (0)