The trip to Silicon Valley companies are so inspiring. The speeches from great entrepreneurs lead me to think about business plan more realistic. Probably, US is a free country. People are open to share their opinions. I find some of their views are contradictory to each other.
Innovative business ideal, good market and great team are the essential factors for a start up company to succeed. Mike from Maples invests in market. Market is the highest priority for him to decide whether to invest or not. He believes good market always wins. While, Warren Packard and Raj Atluru, from DFJ, are investing in great teams and entrepreneurs.There is no right or wrong. Both Maples and DFJ are very successful VC companies. These secrets work for them.
Mike says ‘be different, not better’. My interpretations are: if you come up with a new product which is totally different, you are creating a new market(blue ocean). If the product is upgraded version of the old product, you are trying to grasp market shares from other well established players(red ocean). ‘be different’ has big chance to succeed.
From my personal view, I think a team is more important. Every daily operations of a company are executed by people. Human resource is the most valuable asset of a company.

How to find good team mates? Lesson learnt from professor Tom, Saeed Amidi, Mike and Jeff Gold.
1. Rule of thumb. Never hire friends or family members(Jeff).It is very difficult to manage the relationship (Saeed)
2. Find the people you trust.(Tom)
3. Skills are complementary to you.(Mike)

Piratical ways to start up a company - Winston in PNP
1. identify the the problem you are solving. make sure it is real and urgent. otherwise, it may be too early to enter the market.
2. test all the assumptions you are using. make sure it is pratical.
3. too much money may make you fail faster.
4. develop the beta version for testing. when the product is ready, it is time raise funding to launch the product. The product no need to be perfect. But core features are functional. The extra features can be added on later. Don’t wait for the product to be perfect, you may be waiting forever.
5. make sure you know how to spend the money before you raise it. and don’t take too much money.

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This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 12:36 am and is filed under DFJ, Maples Investment, Plug and Play, Stanford. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.