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Month: February 2020

Coronavirus (COVID-19) PSA for Startups

by Elad Gil
This post is by Elad Gil from Elad Blog

Last updated: Feb 28, 2020. If I add updates, they will be here. (I originally sent this out to founders I know but was encouraged to publish this more broadly.)


The Coronavirus outbreak (note the disease is officially named COVID-19 and the virus SARS-CoV-2) is catching many technology startups unprepared. The second community transmitted case of the virus in California, with no known ties to others, was just reported in Santa Clara county. New cases were also reported Friday night 2/28 in Washington State and Oregon.

Below is a brief summary of some of the data behind the outbreak as well as what I have seen larger companies quietly adopt. I have also been on a number of small group calls with some of the epidemiologists working on this, so passing some of this on. These calls were under Chatham House rules. Hopefully this is useful for startups not in the loop.

1. What is happening?
In December 2019, cases of a new respiratory virus emerged in Wuhan, a major city of over 10 million residents in the Hubei region of China. Although information on this disease was initially suppressed by the Chinese government, the WHO was contacted on December 31, 2019 and a new virus was identified on January 7th. The first non-China cases were identified on January 13 in Thailand and January 16 in Japan. On January 23rd Wuhan was placed on lockdown by the Chinese Government. The virus is a coronavirus, which (Read more...)

Coronavirus (COVID-19) PSA for Startups

by Elad Gil
This post is by Elad Gil from Elad Blog

Last updated: Feb 28, 2020. If I add updates, they will be here. (I originally sent this out to founders I know but was encouraged to publish this more broadly.)


The Coronavirus outbreak (note the disease is officially named COVID-19 and the virus SARS-CoV-2) is catching many technology startups unprepared. The second community transmitted case of the virus in California, with no known ties to others, was just reported in Santa Clara county. New cases were also reported Friday night 2/28 in Washington State and Oregon.

Below is a brief summary of some of the data behind the outbreak as well as what I have seen larger companies quietly adopt. I have also been on a number of small group calls with some of the epidemiologists working on this, so passing some of this on. These calls were under Chatham House rules. Hopefully this is useful for startups not in the loop.

1. What is happening?
In December 2019, cases of a new respiratory virus emerged in Wuhan, a major city of over 10 million residents in the Hubei region of China. Although information on this disease was initially suppressed by the Chinese government, the WHO was contacted on December 31, 2019 and a new virus was identified on January 7th. The first non-China cases were identified on January 13 in Thailand and January 16 in Japan. On January 23rd Wuhan was placed on lockdown by the Chinese Government. The virus is a coronavirus, which (Read more...)

Hard Startups

by Sam Altman
This post is by Sam Altman from Sam Altman

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one.  A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!).

I remember when Instagram started to get really popular—it felt like you couldn’t go a day without hearing about another photo sharing startup.  That year, probably over 1,000 photo sharing startups were funded, while there were fewer than ten nuclear fusion startups in existence.

Easy startups are easy to start but hard to make successful.  The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people, and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful.

A startup eventually has to get a lot of people to join its quest.  It’s usually reasonably easy to get the first five or ten people to join—you can offer large equity grants and areas of responsibility.  But eventually, what you have to recruit with are the mission of the company, the likelihood of massive success, and the quality of the people there. [1]

Few recruiting messages are as powerful (when true) as “the world needs this, it won’t happen any time soon if we don’t do it, and we are much less likely to succeed if you don’t join.”

There is a derivative of the Peter Principle at play (Read more...)

Hard Startups

by Sam Altman
This post is by Sam Altman from Sam Altman

The most counterintuitive secret about startups is that it’s often easier to succeed with a hard startup than an easy one.  A hard startup requires a lot more money, time, coordination, or technological development than most startups. A good hard startup is one that will be valuable if it works (not all hard problems are worth solving!).

I remember when Instagram started to get really popular—it felt like you couldn’t go a day without hearing about another photo sharing startup.  That year, probably over 1,000 photo sharing startups were funded, while there were fewer than ten nuclear fusion startups in existence.

Easy startups are easy to start but hard to make successful.  The most precious commodity in the startup ecosystem right now is talented people, and for the most part talented people want to work on something they find meaningful.

A startup eventually has to get a lot of people to join its quest.  It’s usually reasonably easy to get the first five or ten people to join—you can offer large equity grants and areas of responsibility.  But eventually, what you have to recruit with are the mission of the company, the likelihood of massive success, and the quality of the people there. [1]

Few recruiting messages are as powerful (when true) as “the world needs this, it won’t happen any time soon if we don’t do it, and we are much less likely to succeed if you don’t join.”

There is a derivative of the Peter Principle at play (Read more...)

206. The Ultimate Testing Framework (Alex Osterwalder)

by Nick Moran

Alex Osterwalder of Strategyzer joins Nick to discuss The Ultimate Testing Framework. In this episode, we cover:

  • Take me back and talk through the origin of the business model canvas?
  • Just to refresh listeners can you provide a high-level overview of the business model canvas and how it's used?
  • Let's chat about your new book, Testing Business Ideas, co-authored with David J. Bland... Why'd you right the book?
  • Who is the target audience?
  • If I'm the reader, what outcome can I achieve after reading this book and applying it's principles?
  • What are the four phases outlined in the book?
  • Walk us through the objective and key elements of the testing phase.
  • A significant focus is the elimination of risks?  How does one systematically reduce or remove risks from their business?
  • We recently had Leo Polovets on the program and discussed the challenge of balancing testing with executing.  I think it can be difficult to know when something is working well enough that you should stop testing and move forward quickly in that direction.  What's your guidance here?
  • How does one avoid getting too caught up in rigid frameworks and checking boxes vs. finding that key insight that warrants 90+% of their attention?

To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.

Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.

206. The Ultimate Testing Framework (Alex Osterwalder)

by Nick Moran

Alex Osterwalder of Strategyzer joins Nick to discuss The Ultimate Testing Framework. In this episode, we cover:

  • Take me back and talk through the origin of the business model canvas?
  • Just to refresh listeners can you provide a high-level overview of the business model canvas and how it's used?
  • Let's chat about your new book, Testing Business Ideas, co-authored with David J. Bland... Why'd you right the book?
  • Who is the target audience?
  • If I'm the reader, what outcome can I achieve after reading this book and applying it's principles?
  • What are the four phases outlined in the book?
  • Walk us through the objective and key elements of the testing phase.
  • A significant focus is the elimination of risks?  How does one systematically reduce or remove risks from their business?
  • We recently had Leo Polovets on the program and discussed the challenge of balancing testing with executing.  I think it can be difficult to know when something is working well enough that you should stop testing and move forward quickly in that direction.  What's your guidance here?
  • How does one avoid getting too caught up in rigid frameworks and checking boxes vs. finding that key insight that warrants 90+% of their attention?

To listen more, please visit http://fullratchet.net/podcast-episodes/ for all of our other episodes.

Also, follow us on twitter @TheFullRatchet for updates and more information.

What’s Your Success Formula? Ruminations on Quality of Life and Measuring What Matters

by hypermark

Careers-Opportunity-Card

At my company, Datex Property Solutions, we were talking about “quality of life” issues in building & deploying our Real Estate Portfolio Management software platform, Datex BI Portal, without compromising on our religion around surrounding Clients with engagement & support.

By quality of life, I mean that there are certain activities that recur on an ongoing basis across the lifecycle of building, deploying, configuring, reconfiguring, adding users, pushing system updates, and maintaining uptime across all system layers of a SaaS software stack.

In this domain, the most basic of activities that place a "tax" on quality of life are those that require human interaction to get done.

One specific (and NOT infrequent) example of the tax in our world is the requirement to “Backdoor” Data and System Configuration updates in Client Environments, a set of tasks where human interaction is typically required.

The first step to improving quality of life in the above scenario is to “take inventory” of and formally document the activities, steps and scenarios that play out, and where practical, isolate the elements that would benefit from instrumentation.

Then, based on the learnings across multiple Clients, build interfaces to reduce and simplify those steps to drop-downs and clicks.

Over time, these sequences can then be scripted, turning what today is a high touch process into an automated one.

The mantra I embrace for achieving such goals is "ship the idea," "fix" and "iterate." This reconciles the notion that perfect is the enemy of good (enough), while avoiding the (Read more...)

What’s Your Success Formula? Ruminations on Quality of Life and Measuring What Matters

by hypermark

Careers-Opportunity-Card

At my company, Datex Property Solutions, we were talking about “quality of life” issues in building & deploying our Real Estate Portfolio Management software platform, Datex BI Portal, without compromising on our religion around surrounding Clients with engagement & support.

By quality of life, I mean that there are certain activities that recur on an ongoing basis across the lifecycle of building, deploying, configuring, reconfiguring, adding users, pushing system updates, and maintaining uptime across all system layers of a SaaS software stack.

In this domain, the most basic of activities that place a "tax" on quality of life are those that require human interaction to get done.

One specific (and NOT infrequent) example of the tax in our world is the requirement to “Backdoor” Data and System Configuration updates in Client Environments, a set of tasks where human interaction is typically required.

The first step to improving quality of life in the above scenario is to “take inventory” of and formally document the activities, steps and scenarios that play out, and where practical, isolate the elements that would benefit from instrumentation.

Then, based on the learnings across multiple Clients, build interfaces to reduce and simplify those steps to drop-downs and clicks.

Over time, these sequences can then be scripted, turning what today is a high touch process into an automated one.

The mantra I embrace for achieving such goals is "ship the idea," "fix" and "iterate." This reconciles the notion that perfect is the enemy of good (enough), while avoiding the (Read more...)