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IDO GREEN: Hello, and welcome to GDL-IL, Google Developer
Live Israel, and thank you for joining us.
Today we're going to speak about startups, and I'm going
to share a few of the tips and advices that I have after
starting six companies so far in the past 18 years.
And if you have any questions or comments, just please feel
free to either pass them on the chat here or just ask them
in the end of this Hangout.
So without further ado, let me just share with you a few
slides that I prepared.
And basically, what we're going to cover in the next 10,
15 minutes will be some of the main things that I see more
and more when I'm working here with startups.
And for those of you that are in the Tel Aviv area, I highly
recommend you to check out campus Tel Aviv, that we are
basically devoting and helping startup to bootstrap and to
leverage the knowledge that we have here in Google in order
to bootstrap their initiatives and to make sure that they are
leveraging and using the right technologies at
the starting point.
So who am I?
My name is Ido Greene, and I'm Developer
Advocate with Google.
You could reach me out after the show or any time that you
have any comment or feedback on one of the products.
We basically acting as Developer Advocates and not as
evangelist, because we like to devote at least 50% of our
time to listen to developers-- it could be
developers in startups.
It could be developers in big organizations--
and to bring those comments and feedback back into the
engineering groups.
I'm mostly focusing on Chrome HTML5, Chrome
OS, and Cloud platforms.
And if you have any other things that you would like to
touch on, please feel free to ping me, and I'll try to
redirect you to the right people that taking care of the
so many other platforms and APIs that we
have here in Google.
I'm mostly active these days on G+.
And you could reach me out at plus.google.com, and then just
+greenido as one word.
And greenido as one world will work also on Twitter, and you
could, of course, check out my blog.
By the way, all the slides of this show will be in the
footnotes of the Google Developer Live event, and of
course on my blog.
So first and foremost, when we are starting a company-- and
I'm hearing it a lot when I'm talking with young
entrepreneurs--
basically, make sure that you don't thinking about the exit
strategy from the beginning.
If the only thing that is guiding you is how can I sell
this thing as soon as possible, you're probably not
going to build it to last, as Jim Collins said, but you're
going to build it to flop with a high probability.
So planning for legacy or planning to build something
that will last for many years, much more healthy approach.
And I like this quote from Mark Cuban, because it
emphasizes exactly what I said, but in his
own words, of course.
A few things to keep in mind, and that's basically, I guess,
the first step that each and every entrepreneur needs to do
before they're starting to run on their venture, is to do
research and thorough research.
Today we have sites like AngelList and many other, as
like second market and just Google it.
But try to find if someone is already answering this
specific pain point that you recognize.
And keep in mind that companies that are active and
basically are doing business in the market, let's say for
quite nice time in the past, are quite efficient, because
the ones that aren't efficient aren't there anymore.
So it's not a healthy point of view to say something like,
the company that I'm executing against is just too slow, too
dumb, too inefficient.
Keep in mind that if the company's active--
it might be that some cases, there are inefficiency in big
organization, and of course you want to tap and leverage
them, but keep in mind that in a macro view, most companies
are quite efficient.
Technology is becoming commodities more to emphasize
that if you are building yet another app, or you are
launching a feature that is part of a bigger [INAUDIBLE],
like let's say for example, a startup that will hold all
your photos in the Cloud.
It's just yet another feature that Facebook, G+, and many
others could and actually now already doing it.
But let's say that they didn't provide this specific service.
It's just yet another feature, and this is
the last point here.
You want to try to avoid it, because if you already worked
on it for two years and then this big gorilla, or giant, if
you will, is executing against, you're basically in
the path of the elephants, and you don't want
to be in this path.
Aim for the real need.
I see more and more NGOs and VCs and actually entrepreneurs
as well, they're trying to emphasize this point of let's
build companies that are built on real computer science and
not just another hack here and there.
And I think it's very important, because in the end
of the day, you do want to make sure that you are
building something that will be meaningful.
Let me try here just to make sure that you see my screen.
And let's, again, try to share it, because I think I saw that
you lost it.
Hopefully, you're seeing my slide.
Coffee drinkers get it right.
Actually, I just rephrased what DHH from 37signals said.
He spoke about drug dealers, but I like to speak about
coffee drinkers.
And as an addicted coffee drinker myself, I know exactly
what does it mean.
And here, we're coming to say something like build an
amazing, great product that people will be addicted to.
And yeah, you could give free samples, and you could give
short espresso cups.
But in the end of the day, you do want to make sure that your
experience, your service is amazing, and people get
addicted to it, and they are keep using it on a daily
basis, hopefully even more than that.
Keep in mind that usually efficient organizations are
actually delivering and building themselves in a way
that they will act as efficient as possible.
And in this case, it's just coming to show what we learned
in "Freakonomics," that drug dealers organization are
exactly mimicking what McDonald's is based on in
terms of the hierarchy and how managers are delegating
responsibilities.
And it's true in the startup early days you don't need to
pay too much attention to it, because each and every member
is wearing lots of different hats.
But you do want to put organization and structure and
objectives and [INAUDIBLE] results and make sure that
everyone is running through the same goals.
If you are not sure about why users are dropping you or are
not [INAUDIBLE]
you want, just go to the drawing boards or try to
improve and iterate quickly on your product.
And we'll touch about it a bit later.
Hiring the right people, I think it's one of the most
problematical challenging aspects.
You want to make sure that at least the core team is
composed of people that you really admire, people that
could do lots of things and do it with a very high quality.
Do everything that you can yourself in the early days.
It not only will give you more runway, because you'll be more
efficient and you'll leverage the cash or any other
resources that you have better, but because it will
force you to hire and start spending your capitalization
only when you must.
Don't pass on great people.
That's another hard lesson that I learned myself.
Usually, those people are very busy, very active, and when
you are lucky enough to meet one of them, and you see that
they and your venture are on the same page, definitely go
and do whatever you can in order to put them on
the boat with you.
We know today that CVs and actually any resume that
candidates will give you composed for many years of
irrelevance.
And one of the best things here is not only to make sure
that you are giving some problems and see how the
candidate is thinking, but just try to start small, and
in some cases, if the candidate is already working
as a freelancer, it might be better just to try before you
hire him for full time.
And that could actually make expectation and be for the
benefit of both sides.
Empower your team.
I think that it's crucial that the cofounders and the
management team will know that they are there just to
delegate and make sure that they are giving their
developers, designers, product leads, all the [INAUDIBLE]
and capabilities in order to build what they
think is the best.
And Jim Collins, that I mentioned before, wrote some
several amazing books that I highly recommend you to read,
like "Built to Last" and "Good to Great." And he's describing
a level five leader as the top level of the
leader it could be.
And you could think of someone like Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos
of Amazon as people that you want to mimic, but behave, of
course, nicely.
Good is fine.
One of the things that we're seeing more and more in
startups is the trying to polish too much things.
And of course, it's always gray, because you do want to
have this amazing, magic experience.
But on the other side of this equation, you do want to focus
on your most valuable product, service.
And sometimes you just want to get it out, get the feedback
from your users, and then iterate and
improve it over time.
So the main point here is not to wait two years down the
road and then put something in the air and get real knowledge
from your users on what it does to them, but be agile and
try to take small decisions that are much better to
encapsulate, and then just keep iterate on them very
frequently.
I think Google is a great example for doing exactly
that, even in a large organization,
not only in a startup.
In a startup, in my last startup, we actually called
ourself more of a--
looked at ourself more as a small car, not a small boat,
but basically you're enjoying the ability to pivot quickly
and to move quickly.
And that's something that you really want to grasp and take
it to your own hands an advantage, because big
organizations are moving much more slowly.
It's true that when they are taking the decision and they
are moving, they are the elephants on the path, and you
don't want to be on their path.
But at least you could pivot quickly and avoid them.
So the main point here is to keep in mind that your money
that you raised and the resources that you got are
very limited, and you probably need more than you expect, so
try to be as efficient as possible and execute as
quickly as possible.
When we're coming to speak about a business and not a
startup, I think it's just connecting us to the first
point, which is try to avoid this la-la-land or this
ever-lasting land that some people are living in.
And don't neglect the ability to monetize or to leverage the
ability to have this other side of the equation of
revenue or some kind of revenue stream.
And I mentioned, of course, that people that are building
just to exit are basically, with a high probability,
building to flop.
Beliefs and reality, I see some of the young
entrepreneurs that are coming here to the campus, and we're
mentoring them, coming with sentences like
the first two here.
And in most of the cases, it's very, very far from reality.
So the only way that you confirm yourself that you know
what your users really want is after you launch a product,
and you have the metrics, and you measure them.
And as you all know, you can't manage what you can't measure,
and you do want to measure everything and anything in
order to understand deeply what is making your user
happy, and then iterate over it and try to make it even
more magical.
Predicting the future or the far future, of course, you
could see all over that people fail tremendously in trying to
predict the near future, and actually the far [INAUDIBLE]
greater [INAUDIBLE].
The progress and measuring progress, there's lots of
thoughts about [INAUDIBLE]
trying to move us and shifting us into [INAUDIBLE]
that you can predict better, set [INAUDIBLE]
in order to accomplish them.
And then helping us be the speedboat that we spoke about
on the last slide and respond quickly and act quickly.
Focusing, I think, is one of the most important aspects.
Because you have limited resources, limited time,
limited money, you want to make sure that you're focusing
on all the people in your organization.
And it could be the three co-founders are just focusing
on the same needle that we want to move.
Passion, of course, if people are not passionate, especially
in the core team, if you don't see the light in their eyes,
and they don't put those 140% or 200% of effort and time and
devotion into the startup, probably it won't be a
successful one.
And execution, execution I think is one of the most
important aspects to consider.
Great ideas are all over, but what's really differentiates
is the execution and how well you execute according to your
objective [? and pure ?] results.
Plan, of course it's a must.
And you do want to plan, and you do want to set goals
quarterly, yearly, and probably something above, so
everyone will be clear about what is the North Star of your
venture, your company, and where you want to see yourself
on the long run.
But keep attention that everything is changing,
everything is volatile, and you do want to be as agile as
possible, because this is one of the strength capabilities
that you have at the beginning.
Find good advisors.
Easy to say, really hard to do.
But when you do find them, pay attention that you listen and
you are able to gain and leverage their feedback.
What to do fast?
So we spoke about those main components.
And I highly recommend you, if you are in the front end
development arena, and you're producing interesting
products, services to the web, the diagram here are coming to
emphasize that we need and are actually changing today the
ways that we work in the past.
So basically, this diagram is just showing us that it's a
never ending story.
We keep iterating after we're working and launching the
first version of something.
And this is the way to make sure that we are executing as
fast as we can.
What to avoid.
So yeah, if you're not an expert on bikes, probably you
do want to avoid this situation.
And in our case, when you're coming to pitch to angel
investors, each and every sentence here is well--
how should I put it--
is very known and
well-preserved from their side.
They know to identify it as pure BS, and you probably want
to avoid them.
So our product will go viral, because we're doing x or y.
You want to pay attention and to make sure that you have a
good plan because in most of the cases, it won't.
No one else is doing, probably it's a bad
sign and a red flag.
Because if no one doing it, probably
there is a good reason.
Try to think about successful companies that you know and
amazing ventures that you see.
In most of the cases, they did have some competitors at the
early days.
And there's lots of examples on that.
Projections are conservative.
Well, you could smile when you're saying it.
And all the others are also very, very good points.
And as I mentioned, large companies might be too small
or too big or too whatever, but you need to come with real
arguments why it's viable niche or why you could execute
much better than the current competitors.
And on the other side of the equation, for investor, when
you're seeing one of these, probably a flag should
rise in your eyes.
And each and every sentence here is quite well-known and
quite common, unfortunately.
As you all know, VC or a typical angel will see
hundreds of startups and entrepreneurs, and then they
will invest in, I don't know, a dozen or less.
So the probabilities that you will be able to raise money
are quite low.
And some of the things here are quite common.
And actually try to just go and put your efforts and move
on with other investors or VCs.
Some resources that I highly recommend you to check out.
If you want to see what the Google Cloud Platform is
offering entrepreneurs these days, this is the link on
cloud.google.com.
Any other materials that we have today for startups and
entrepreneurs and developers are on
developers.google.com/startups.
For the entrepreneurs that want to launch and start new
businesses, there's an amazing [INAUDIBLE] series from
Stanford, and it's in Entrepreneurship Corner.
And it's great, great ability to listen to thought leaders
and amazing entrepreneurs that did it and to learn and gain
from their experience.
And some blogs that I personally really like, AVC,
of course Fred Wilson from Twitter fame and lots of other
companies like Foursquare of course, and Paul Graham from Y
Combinator and Ben Feld, all of them are great, great angel
investors, VC investors, and of course people that write
extremely well.
If you have any questions, please feel free.
Right now, it's a great opportunity.
And if not, just ping me on G+ or through my blog.
Thank you very much, and until next Wednesday,
be strong and happy.