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Entrepreneurship-related people and organizations

Owned by Nathan Wailes
Last updated: Jun 27, 2023

Information sources


Misc stories:

Aaron Patzer of Mint.com

2009? - Aaron Patzer describing his path
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGhedOHLTOI

2009.07.23 - Fortune Brainstorm TECH - Panel
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S_h5ZX9GPIk

2010.02.18 - VentureBeat - 4min interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hENM1T-SaX8

2010.05(?) - The Duke Start-Up Challenge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FNT5nmqmk3A&t=7m20s

2010.07.29 - The American Entrepreneur
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cQRlHWIa8l8

2010.12 - Net@Night - Interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wixHKoXGJsQ&t=26m23s

2010.12.08 - Founder Institute in Silicon Valley - Naming & Branding for Startups
http://vimeo.com/17670720
- Choose an English name. He gives an example of his competitor "wasabe", which he couldn't find online even after searching for it for an hour.
- Choose a meaningful name (mint relates to finance but it also has a connotation of freshness)
- Choose an original name (he gives the example of copy-cat companies that ended in "-ster" after friendster became successful)
- Choose a name that is spelled unambiguously. (examples of bad names: "milo", "flickr", "kwiqapps", "simplyhired" [the ending 'd' can be hard to hear])
06:41 - He bought "mymint.com" for $3,000.
08:00 - He offered the hedge fund guy $75,000 cash and was turned down.
8:25 - The key is that the domain has to be lightly-used.
~9:00 - He said three things got the guy convinced: 1) the opportunity for an asymmetric return (ie he got equity), 2) limited chance for loss (ie preferred stock), 3) a promise to not allow any other NY financiers to invest, so the manager could brag to his Wall St friends that he was getting to invest alongside the best VCs in Silicon Valley and none of them could get in.
10:00 - He got the domain for the equivalent of $182,000 in equity in the round of financing he was in the middle of negotiating. The guy liked the business so much that in the next round he ended up putting in $300,000. So they got the domain and $300,000. The guy ended up making $2.5 million from that investment (so from $500k to $3mill?)
10:25 - Lesson: Don't settle for a subpar name. Pick the right name and go after it with everything you've got.
10:45 - 90%+ of all brand marketing people are fluff. The people who do SEO are charlatans. Some people who do some types of direct marketing (SEM) are OK. "Brand marketing is where you can get away with the most fluff."
11:27 - Brand marketers use a lot of jargon that's impossible to understand.
11:30 - "There is a logical way to figure out what the value proposition of your business should be and how you should be positioned against your competitors." He suggests you create a matrix (eg a 2x2 matrix) where you plot the most important features of a product (eg "# of things it can do" and "cost") and then plot where the competition is on that matrix. Then just look for gaps.
16:40 - Very interesting: he describes how they went to the Mountain View metro station and tested their slogan on them to see what their perceptions were. Go anywhere there's a queue.
~18:00 - He went back to IN and tested his explanation of his product on his parents' 60yo friends.
19:00 - In surveys people generally say they'll use it more than they actually do.

2011 - Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco - 5 min interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vWctrFsydNo

2011? - the Founder Conference
http://vimeo.com/15644909

  • 2011 - Princeton - The $170 Million Idea: From Idea to Exit in 3 Years
    • spending 10-20% of your time
      • validate the idea
      • create a prototype
      • build the right team
    • he told everybody about the idea
      • he told ~80 people about the idea
    • within the idea, a gem resonated, the personal finance issue, where
    • virtually everybody mentioned that they had this problem
    • this reminds me of how facebook was a validated idea before mark started working on it.


2012.02.16 - TechCrunch - Informal 7min interview with Scott Cook (founder of Intuit) and Aaron Patzer
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fjQxwvmgDw

2012 - e27.sg - 5 min informal interview
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buD6L6ybcyM


Alibaba / Jack Ma

Andrew Carnegie

Books

The Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie

Chronology of Success



1. Born to a poor family in Scotland. They had to leave their village when machine-looms made the father's hand-looms obsolete; they ended up settling down in Pittsburgh. Carnegie received almost no formal education.

Basically, he was in the railroad industry for ~15 years (the same amount of time that Walton was in retail before starting Wal-Mart) from the age of 17, worked harder than anyone around him, got promoted again and again until he was in a fairly prominent position, and only THEN started the project that really seemed to start to make him rich: a bridge-building partnership with some contacts he had made.

He was able to use his many years of experience in the railroad industry to make intelligent decisions about the direction of the business (e.g. concluding that the business was a profitable venture, choosing the best men in the industry for his partners, using non-obvious information to convince customers that his bridges were superior to that of the competition).

He was also able to see steel coming like a wave of the future (like a surfer), and he did a great job of launching himself onto it as it arrived. As part of the bridge-building business he'd bought a small iron-forging plant, and knew a lot about iron and steel because of their importance in building bridges and acting as train tracks (apparently iron train tracks used to break ALL THE TIME back then and would cause all kinds of train accidents; pretty crazy to think about).



The last 100 pages or so of this book seem pretty boring; just him talking about his philanthropy, all the friends he's honored by naming a building after them, etc. (everything starting with the chapter "The Gospel of Wealth")


Lessons


1. Keep your eye out for people with Carnegie's traits: disciplined, hard-working, thoughtful, etc. [I didn't get a strong sense of whether his ambition would have been visible earlier in his career.]

2. You can invest your time in PEOPLE just as you can invest your time in founding a company; Carnegie rose through the ranks because the guy he was working for kept getting promoted and always brought Carnegie along with him. This is the exact same kind of relationship that Generals Sherman and Grant had in the Civil War; Sherman had the opportunity to compete with Grant for control of the entire army but chose instead to forcefully decline any such ambition, instead loudly declaring his intention to work faithfully under Grant. Then as Grant got promoted he brought Sherman along with him, which ended up putting Sherman in the position to conduct affairs as he pleased (which led him to absolutely destroy the South).
- Working together and developing a friendship can propel both of you to higher ground than if you're competing against each other for the "higher" rank (and generating animosity between yourselves as a result). This actually kind of ties into my thought that "leaders" aren't necessarily any more worthy of praise and attention than the people "under" them.
- You might be better off looking for someone who is in a position to rise up but hasn't yet. I'll have to think about this more.


Q: What exact expertise did Carnegie acquire in his first 15 years that made him successful at future projects? Would there have been any way to acquire that expertise more quickly?


Notable Quotes

  •  "The battle of life is already half won by the young man who is brought in contact with high officials; and the great aim of every boy should be to do something beyond the sphere of his duties- something which attracts the attention of those over him."

Balaji Srinivasan

  • 2013.11.22 - Wired - Software is Reorganizing the World
  • 2016.06.24 - YouTube - The Machine Payable Web

    • 18:00 - He recs the book "The Sovereign Individual", he says it's one of Thiel's favorite books, one of Andreessen's favorite books, and one of his favorite books.

    • 18:15 - He mentions "Seeing like a State"

    • 37:00 - He got into bitcoin because his last business was driven out of business by us regulators, and he wanted to create some way to get around those kinds of restrictive regulations.
    • 37:50 - "if bitcoin takes off, we globally un-ban transactions" - Really? bitcoin transactions wouldn't be regulated just like fiat currency transactions?

Barbara Corcoran

AyMRB0ZCEAA_h90.jpg

As I stepped into my apartment I felt the Giffuni Brothers’ check burning a hole in my pocket. Should I buy a new coat or shouldn’t /? I looked down at my lavender Georgy Girl outfit; I knew it had walked down the street too many times to still look fancy-free. Should I or shouldn’t I? Well, I decided, if Mom could cover her old rocks with a coat of white paint, I could certainly cover my old outfit with a new coat! I hightailed it down to First National City Bank to cash my check and made a beeline for Fifth Avenue. I was going to buy myself the best coat in the best store on the best block in all New York! I asked the red-suited doorman at Bergdorf Goodman where I could find ladies’ coats and took the gold-paneled elevator to the second floor. The elevator opened, and I tripped into a full city block of new coats. A well-clad saleswoman offered her help, but I was too intimidated to accept her offer and thought of a really original response: “No, thanks, I’m just looking.” I puffed up my chest and dove straight into the sea of a thousand coats. Suddenly, I spotted her from across the room. She was the flashiest one in the whole place. There was nothing plain about her. She had curly brown and white fur around a high mandarin collar and a pair of matching cuffs. Her wool was thick, laid in an oversize brown and white herringbone pattern. Down her front she had at least a dozen diamond-shaped buttons chiseled out of what looked like real bone. Each button hooked through its own loop. Her huge shoulder pads rode high and her hem swung low, almost touching the polished wood floor. Everything about her screamed, “HERE I AM!” And for $319 plus tax, she was mine. My new coat became my signature piece and I never took it off. In it, I not only looked successful, I felt successful. My curious customers asked what kind of fur it was, and since I’d never spoken to the saleslady, I had no idea. “It looks a lot like my old dog, Prince,” I’d joke. For the next two years, I marched in and out of buildings up and down Manhattan wearing my expensive coat and flaunting my new image for all it was worth.

Corcoran, Barbara; Littlefield, Bruce (2011-02-09). Shark Tales: How I Turned $1,000 into a Billion Dollar Business (pp. 21-22). Portfolio Trade. Kindle Edition.

  • I've noticed I get a lot of comments about my blue sunglasses.


Benjamin Franklin

Books

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin

a great book. it's concise, conversational, funny, filled with valuable lessons and great stories. i actually got the feeling that we could be good friends (i.e. it seemed to me that our values are close enough and that we'd see eye-to-eye on a lot of things). the whole thing was written as a letter (or letters) to his son, which is why it's a lot less dry than other autobiographies you'll see (where the author is clearly being careful to avoid making himself look bad).

highlights:

- franklin's attempt at correcting all of his faults
- his weekly meetings to discuss intellectual subjects
- his work ethic (working from dawn till dusk, seven days a week while establishing his printing shop)
- his chronology of success: made his way from Boston to Philly without much money, ended up working as an assistant to a printer, eventually opened his own printing shop and worked his tail off to do a good job of it, gradually gained more customers and Philadelphia became a bigger city (when franklin got there there wasn't much competition), he also became well-known for his published thoughts on things (iirc). don't quite remember how he got pulled into the revolution; i think it's just because he was already well-known by then.


Box / Aaron Levie

2014.10.30 - Stanford / YCombinator - How to Start a Startup - Lecture 12 - Building for the Enterprise
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tFVDjrvQJdw
He comes off very well IMO, he seems to know his stuff.
02:10 - When they started they didn't know they wanted to do enterprise software.
04:15 - They got the idea in 2004, started in 2005.
05:30 - They noticed in college that it was really hard to share files.
05:40 - He had an internship that involved copying lots of paper.
06:45 - The first name was Box.net
06:50 - They noticed the cost of storage was dropping dramatically.
07:15 - They had more powerful browsers & internet connections.
07:25 - People had more locations they wanted to share files from.
07:40 - Look for broad changes that are happening.
08:10 - They put together a quick version of Box. They got funding from Mark Cuban before Shark Tank.
09:25 - They first moved to Berkeley, and then Palo Alto
09:35 - They had hundreds of thousands people signing up every month. (2006) They offered a free GB.
10:00 - They ran into a problem where they were over-serving consumers and under-serving businesses. They had more functionality than consumers wanted and less functionality than businesses wanted.
11:35 - They thought consumer would be really fun and enterprise would be really hard.
11:50 - The big problem in the consumer world is how to make money. You generally have two options: 1) have the user pay for the product, or 2) use advertising. In today's world the annual consumer spend on mobile apps is $35 billion and the total worldwide ad spend is $135 billion, so the consumer world has about $170 billion in money to go after. However, in enterprise, $3.5 trillion is spent on IT services every year.
13:20 - At the time there were rumors that Google would be coming out with a free version.
14:35 - It can take a couple YEARS to sell a product to a company, and then a few more years for them to implement it.
15:10 - When looking at enterprise software you often ask why the GUI is so bad.
15:30 - Another problem with enterprise is that you'll have to hire salespeople.
16:40 - Every investor in 2007 was telling them they wouldn't make it in enterprise.
17:08 - The
18:50 - They got lucky in that they had an investor who was also early in his own career and was willing to take the chance.
19:10 - They architected the product to work in one particular version of the world, and they happened to be right.
19:50 - Main topic: What has changed that has made enterprise easier to enter than before?
20:30 - He talks about "on-premise computing" but I didn't really understand.
21:45 - The big change is that CIOs are now taking advantage of cloud services. From their perspective, there are decades of investment that need to be shifted to the cloud.
23:20 - The reachable enterprise market has gotten way bigger.
24:20 - He distinguishes user-led vs IT-led purchasing decisions. Which makes me think Box is just getting used by individuals.
30:10 - Go to any business and ask what are the fundamental changes in (?) and ask what software will be necessary to power that.
31:50 - He starts to give advice about how to get started. He gives a really good caveat that things are messy.
32:30 - #1. Spot technology disruptions. Gaps between how things HAVE been done and how they CAN be done.
33:50 - Go to articles in the '90s and you'll see that all we're doing nowadays is trying things that have already been tried 10, 20, 30 years ago, but the time wasn't right.
35:00 - He gives an example of how the founders of PlanGrid realized that $4 billion are spent printing blueprints, but with the iPad all that could be done away with.
36:10 - #2. Start intentionally small. "If people call it a 'toy' you're definitely onto something." Start on a sliver of a problem and make the user experience totally amazing.
37:28 - Example: zenpayroll - They found that the payroll process was a pain. The sliver they went after for startups was just payroll. The incumbents look at something like zenpayroll and think, "Oh, that's small, we don't have to worry about it."
39:00 - #3. Look for things that incumbents can't do because it's economically and/or technically infeasible.
41:20 - #4. Look for businesses at the bleeding edge of technology to be your earliest customers.
43:20 - #5. Listen to your customers. Build what they need, which may not be what they ask for.
43:55 - #6. Modularize, not customize.
44:15 - #7. Focus on the user. It's easier to sell into an organization.
44:40 - #8. Your product should sell itself. But you still need salesmen.
45:30 - Read these three books:
- Crossing the Chasm
- The Innovator's Dilemma
- Behind the Cloud


2015.01.28 - Inc. Magazine - A Look Back on How Box's Aaron Levie Became Entrepreneur of the Year, 2013
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGjj45CgRwI
01:37 - He gives some interesting comments about what it's like at the beginning: "On day one everything about your day and your time and every moment you have is about building a product and getting it in the hands of customers. You're not focused on hiring, you're not focused on selling, you're not focused on scaling, you're just focused on, "I need to build a product and I need to get it in the hands of customers." And there's something very genuine and raw about that process, because you have to be able to create that product-market fit, and that's one of the hardest grinds there is, is that early stage."
06:47 - There's a couple of clips of him interacting with random employees at Box and it's clear he doesn't have any particular connection with them. It comes off as the kind of "blow sunshine up their asses" behavior Ben Horowitz describes in his book. I think he was probably just put under pressure by the film crew to do it.
08:41 - He gives a BS spiel about how he didn't start the company as a way of making money.
09:50 - "The best piece of advice I've ever gotten as an entrepreneur was from Mark Cuban, who said "Don't hedge your bets." That was a lesson very early on that we learned from him, which was, you can't ever balance two completely contradictory things as a means of hedging. You have to decide, "What are you going to believe in?" and put all of your energy behind that. And those are the kinds of strategic decisions and trade-offs that you make every day as an entrepreneur, and it's important that you create the level of clarity and conviction to go after an opportunity that isn't hedging lots of different ideas or lots of different approaches, because that's the surest way that you'll never be good at anything."


Bryton S.

  • 2016.11.09 - Q&A Session

    • Coding he did before he started a company:
      - He took CS classes in college.
      -- For example, algorithms classes.
      -- These didn't really prepare him for web development.
      - He was doing a lot of coding for the trading.

      Regarding the tech:
      - He created the spreadsheet library from scratch.
      -- Reason: He wanted to be able to approve changes as they happened and update data programmatically, and a lot of the software packages out there weren't very easy to use.
      -- He uses Ember.js
      - Web development is less about solving tricky problems and more about putting in the hours to get it done; you can have a rough idea of how long something will take to do.

      Getting the first version done:
      - He started coding in April.
      - Some days wake up at 10am, code for 12 hours on his mattress.
      - He can do ~1000 lines in those 12 hours.
      - He's pretty interested in the problem itself, and he likes the language; if not for that, he couldn't have worked as hard as he has.
      - He's started a LOT of projects that he never finished because he didn't find the problem interesting.
      - Having an actual customer to work with for the initial development was a helpful motivator.
      - "I can't imagine coding from home all day"
      - Finished coding it in four months.

      Getting his first customer:
      - His first customer was a friend of a friend: an eCommerce company had an office and they gave him a desk in exchange for the software.
      - It was almost not a good thing because he built it too close to what they wanted.
      - This company had too many desks and his friend was renting one of them. It was a month or two into development and he had a rough prototype.
      - This was a 5 person company who had gotten a pretty big office with 30 desks. (NW: It being a 5 person company may have made the decision-maker/CEO more accessible.)
      - He sent info about the program to the Princeton listserv, some guys were interested, his company was in San Diego, so B went to his office and showed him a presentation. 1.5 hours later he got an email saying they were interested.
      - He thinks it was crucial to meet people in person to close the deal.

      Regarding pricing:
      - He just asked the first customer before the presentation, "How much would you pay for this?" The guy answerd, "$3-5k/yr". And so in his presentation he said it would cost $5k/yr.
      - He read an article that says you should ask 3 questions: 1) What would you pay? (that's your lower limit) 2) What would be expensive? (that's prob. what you should charge) 3) What would be obscenely expensive? (that's your upper limit)

      Getting later customers:
      - 80-90% of business are referrals; his impression is that "no one does email" because you need to send 18 emails to get a meeting.
      - Self-service is hard because you're reliant on a lot of sign-ups / inbound marketing, which is really hard. It's hard to get people to organically visit your site.
      - [NW: I brought up the fact that Infer can't really do self-service trials for their original product because there's a costly setup process, and asked whether he had the same issue.] There is a configuration process that takes time; right now it's set up as self-service but he doesn't think that's a great model.
      - Self-service gets you basic editing but no one wants basic editing. The product is a lot more useful to customers if they can use the more-advanced features (eg workflows).
      - For example, a customer will have a list of orders and they want to select orders and press a button and the button knows to set the flag, or they have a db and want to expose it to customers so the customers can edit the db, but they don't want to build something complicated.
      - One problem he's seeing is that the tool is so general that he'll describe how one customer is using it and that use-case won't really apply to the prospective customer he's talking to.
      - He's finding that it's hard to describe it in an email.
      - He had five sales calls this week and had trouble finding a use case.
      - The first customer was really excited and introduced B to five other guys with the same problem.
      - He's also been trying to email Princeton 
      - Cold email and inbound marketing weren't very succesful.
      - He set up adwords last night, so it's yet to be seen how that'll work.
      - He posted the article on twitter, facebook, linkedin, custom accounts for that company. he also shared it on his personal social media acounts. He only got seven views.
      - He was so worried about the launch getting too much traffic, but no one showed up.
      - The problem with getting lots of traffic before you're ready is that it can really hurt you if you haven't worked out the kinks yet.
      - He's finding that customers will want some features that he doesn't have, so he needs to spend time coding them.

      How he's spending his time now that he's switched to selling:
      - Now he's mostly doing business stuff, maybe 3 hours of coding if he can find the time.
      - What "business stuff" means: Updating the deck, coming up with strategy, coming up with leads, updating the website, mainly thinking about the business model, thinking about features, thinking about how he wants to approach sales.
      - Today he had four or five meetings: people he's getting advice from, or customers, or investors.
      - I asked a tangent Q regarding the investors: He's not ready to raise a round because he doesn't have customers. If he holds out for another two months he can get a bu