Wrote At The Very Beginning

	Gieno   Startup : Wrote At The Very Beginning
	It's a little weird that I'm gonna writing blog here. I can't login to blogspot, that is the case. Something is gone, but the good point is, there is still a little room to standing. Some kind of magic happens in startups, especially at the very beginning, but the only people there to see it are the founders. The best way to understand what happens is to be one of them, so that’s what I’m trying. I’ve talked with some founders. Here, I want to share a number of the patterns I noticed in this post. When you’re talking with a series of famous startup founders, you can’t help trying to see if there is some special quality they all have in common that made them succeed. What surprised me most was how unsure the founders seemed to be that they were actually onto something big. Some of these companies got started almost by accident. The world thinks of startup founders as having some kind of superhuman confidence, but a lot of them were uncertain at first about starting a company. What they weren’t uncertain about was making something good—or trying to fix something broken. They all were determined to build things that worked. In fact, I’d say determination is the single most important quality in a startup founder. If the founders I spoke with were superhuman in any way, it was in their perseverance. Perseverance is important because, in a startup, nothing goes according to plan. Founders live day to day with a sense of uncertainty, isolation, and sometimes lack of progress. Plus, startups, by their nature, are doing new things—and when you do new things, people often reject you. That was the second most surprising thing I learned: how often the founders were rejected early on. People like the idea of innovation in the abstract, but when you present them with any specific innovation, they tend to reject it because it doesn’t fit with what they already know. Innovations seem inevitable in retrospect, but at the time it’s an uphill battle. It’s curious to think that the technology we take for granted now, like “Hot Mail”, the web-based email was once dismissed as unpromising. Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats. In addition to perseverance, founders need to be adaptable. Not only because it takes a certain level of mental flexibility to understand what users want, but because the plan will probably change. People think startups grow out of some brilliant initial idea like a plant from a seed. But almost all the founders I knew changed their ideas as they developed them. PayPal started out writing encryption software, Excite started as a database search company, and Flickr grew out of an online game. Starting a startup is a process of trial and error. What guided the founders through this process was their empathy for the users. They never lost sight of making things that people would want. Successful startup founders typically get rich from the process, but I think it was not for the money. There is a lot of pride in craftsmanship. And we know that we want to change the world. That’s why most have gone on to new projects that are just as ambitious. Startups are different from established companies—almost astonishingly so when they are first getting started. It would be good if people paid more attention to this important but often misunderstood niche of the business world, because it’s here that you see the essence of productivity. In its plain form, productivity looks so weird that it seems to a lot of people to be “un-businesslike”. Suits, for example. Suits do not help people to think better. But when outsiders came to visit you need to try hard to seem “professional” with good suits. You’d clean up your offices, wear better clothes, try to arrange that a lot of people were there during conventional office hours. In fact, programming didn’t get done by well-dressed people at clean desks during office hours. It got done by badly dressed people (I was notorious for programming wearing just a towel) in offices strewn with junk at 2 in the morning. But no visitor would understand that. Not even investors, who are supposed to be able to recognize real productivity when they see it. The truth is, if early-stage startups are un-businesslike, then the corporate world might be more productive if it were less businesslike. The fame that comes with success makes startup founders seem like they’re a breed apart. Perhaps if people can see how these companies actually started, it will be less daunting for them to envision starting something of their own. I hope that after reading this post you will think, “Hey, these guys were once just like me. Maybe I could do it too.”