I asked many successful Internet entrepreneurs about lessons they learned starting and running Internet companies. I asked for their best decision and their worst mistake, and I received many insightful replies. Here are responses from Marc Canter, Greg Linden, and Mark Moore (also see
Part 1).
Marc Canter
Marc Canter founded MacroMind, which became Macromedia, and was influential in helping to start the nascent ‘multimedia industry’ in the late 80’s and early 90’s. From there, Marc did scalable content, Interactive TV and what we now call ‘Ajax’ work - all during the dot com era. Since 2001 Marc has been blogging, developing the notion of “digital lifestyle aggregation” and helping to create open standards around open social networking and blogging. Marc is the CEO of
Broadband Mechanics, and he blogs at
Marc’s Voice.
Best decision I made:
I have to say that ever day I’m reassured as an entrepreneur that my gut level decisions are the right ones. When it comes to timing, projecting out ahead what’s gonna happen and where the money will be - I’ve been consistently about 10 years ahead of the curve. So the trick has been to slow myself down, and be ready when the rest of the world shows up. That’s what’s going on right now with open source social networking.
My worst mistake:
Was to rely upon the contributory efforts of others - and let that impede mycore milestones. This created a barrier of success - as you cannot rely upon free labor. You must pay people to do work for you. It’s the only way to get code done.
Greg Linden
Greg is the founder of Findory, a service that uses personalization technology to help readers discover information they would otherwise miss. Previously, Greg was at Amazon.com, where he wrote the recommendation engine and led the software team that developed Amazon’s personalization systems. Greg blogs at
Geeking with Greg.
Solve a problem you want to see solved. If you do this, you will be excited about every day no matter what happens. I loved the problem Findory was trying to solve — helping people find the information they need by learning from what each person does — and enjoyed every moment I was working on Findory.
Be cheap, but not too cheap. In retrospect, I think I have been too cheap running Findory. Budgeting is an exercise that has death by burning out at one extreme and death by resource starvation at another. Findory lived a long time with a very low burn rate, but has been starved of resources, slowing growth, restricting hiring, and limiting paths for expansion.
Mark Moore
Mark Moore is CEO and co-founder of
One True Media, where he is responsible for the vision, business and product strategy as well as the teams and systems needed to execute on them. Previously, Mark was a founding member of three start-ups, Listen.com, MilleCom, and Diba, Inc., where he built successful development and web operations teams. At Oracle Corporation, Mark began his career developing that company’s Media Server and database kernel.
(ed. disclosure: I am an investor in One True Media).
Best Decision:
I’m preaching to the choir here but the best decision a startup can make is to get the initial product out quickly, take feedback, and iterate rapidly. I understand that not all companies can work in this mode (some require longer time to create and iterate due to complexities around the product, etc) but the closer you can work to this methodology than the better chance you will have for success. In my experience, I have found that what you envision in your original business plan will not be true after six months. This is because you will understand the market better and have a better feel for what will really be successful after being in business for a while. So, get started as soon as possible by introducing your product to the market and then you can get to writing a “real business” plan that works and has been tested in the marketplace. For the entrepreneur who wants to be stealth for a year, I say good luck and make sure you have an extra year of funding.
Biggest Mistake:
Ahhh, the list is so long. Well, I would have to say some of my biggest mistakes involve the business partnerships that are made while the company is just starting out. Every entrepreneur would love to sign a deal with a large company which gives them access to a large market, or simply creates a solid revenue stream for the company. The problem is that “there is no free lunch”. Large companies will simply not hand a big opportunity to a small company. And if they do, they will make sure they will take the lion’s share of the returns (or will be able to replace the startup quickly with their own). In most cases, these relationships turn sour because they don’t work (they are just an experiment by the large company and little effort is expended causing failure) and at the same time they can cause a very large distraction for a fledging startup. So, my advice is beware of large partners - they know their business very well and are not about to give you a “free lunch”. There are exceptions to this rule but they are far and few between - just make sure you are getting something valuable in return from a partner before you take the leap.
Thanks again to Marc, Greg and Mark. I’ll continue the series next week.