I like to imagine that most entrepreneurs suffer from a bit of attention deficit disorder. It’s a trait that’s very useful when staying on top of what’s new.
I can tell you first-hand that A.D.D. has a downside, too. Any one of the products that my first startup launched might have been a home-run ball, had they not all competed for my own mindshare, let alone the mindshare of the internal ipi.net team.
The tendency toward A.D.D. is only exacerbated by the “real time” Internet where services like Twitter and Facebook open a veritable firehose of updates from a multitude of sources. That’s why I’ve found it so important to consciously focus on a select few things that rise above the noise for whatever reason.
Here are three specific threads that I think are worth particular attention in the “how to do a startup” stream:
- The Long Lost Formula for Startup Success – A real gem from across The Pond. The post is a reminder that real winners from the startup pool hardly ever happen because founders lock themselves away and work on what they think is cool. Instead, startup success is all about customer discovery and development.
- 7 Must-Haves for Scoring Venture Capital Cash – Even as a guy who’s twice-funded, it’s easy for me to forget that venture capital investors work in a very formulaic way. How “cool” your early stage idea is doesn’t have much impact on whether you’ll get a proper VC to put money into you. If you’re looking to shop your idea in Silicon Valley, this article should be pinned to your wall
- When It Comes to Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule – OK. Full disclosure. I’m partial to this article because I’ll hit the big four-oh in November, 2009. But the real point of this post, I think, is that there’s no substitute for experience – whether you get it early by failing often to succeed more quickly, or whether the experience comes the old-fashioned way with gray hair along the edges.
We’ll be back Wednesday, November 4th with a post about startup marketing. Thanks, in the meantime, for stopping back by twicefunded.com.