Last year, we covered an ambitious collaborative R&D project called “Startup Genome,” created by three young entrepreneurs, Bjoern Herrmann, Max Marmer, and Ertan Dogrultan. The goal of the ongoing project was (and is) to take a comprehensive, data-driven dive into what makes tech startups successful — and not so successful.

Startup Genome is also offering a new ranking for the world’s top 25 startup ecosystems, ordered by their average throughput:

• Silicon Valley (San Francisco, Palo Alto, San Jose, Oakland)
• New York City (NYC, Brooklyn)
• London
• Toronto
• Tel Aviv
• Los Angeles
• Singapore
• Sao Paulo
• Bangalore
• Moscow
• Paris
• Santiago
• Seattle
• Madrid
• Chicago
• Vancouver
• Berlin
• Boston
• Austin
• Mumbai
• Sydney
• Melbourne
• Warsaw
• Washington D.C.
• Montreal

Below, you’ll find some 20-odd insights into those comparisons, intended to get entrepreneurs thinking about what’s working, and what isn’t. Readers can find more on how the report defines its terms in our coverage here or on the project’s blog here. There’s also more on how it defines “Types” here.

• Startup Throughput: Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Silicon Valley startup ecosystem continues to lead the way, but the gap is growing smaller every year. Silicon Valley’s ecosystem is currently 3-times bigger than New York City, 4.5-times bigger than London, 12.5-times bigger than Berlin, and 38-times larger than Boulder.
• Startup Success Rate: Proportionally, the Silicon Valley ecosystem has 22% more companies in the “scale stage” than in NYC and 54% more than in London.
• Availability of Capital: On average, Silicon Valley startups raise two to three-times more money in the first three stages of development: Discovery, Validation, and Efficiency. But in the scale stage, compared to Silicon Valley, New York City startups raise 27% more money and London startups raise 30% more money.
• Job Creation: In the Efficiency and Scale stages, Silicon Valley startups create 11 percent more jobs than NYC startups and 38 percent more jobs than London startups.
• Risk Profile: The number of high risk companies deough the startup lifecycle, except in New York City where the number of high risk companies spikes from 45% to 67%, and has 4x more high risk companies in the scale stage than Silicon Valley.
• Product Types: Compared to New York entrepreneurs, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are 2-times more likely to build games, 50 percent less likely to build marketplaces, 23 percent more likely to be build social networks, 3.5-times more likely to be build infrastructure and 2.5-times less likely to be build financial tools. Compared to entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley, London entrepreneurs are 50 percent more likely to be build eCommerce products, 35 percent less likely to be build social products, 3.5-times less likely to be build products based on user-generated content and 2-times more likely to be build project management software.
• Market Type: Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are 13 percent more likely to tackle new markets than London entrepreneurs whereas London entrepreneurs are 21 percent more likely than entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley to tackle existing markets with better products. New York entrepreneurs have the highest proportion of companies trying to re-segment existing markets with niche products. They are 30 percent more likely to build something niche than entrepreneurs in London.
• Market Size: Entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley are much more “ambitious” than entrepreneurs in New York City and London. Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are 22% more likely to estimate their market size as greater than 10 billion compared to New York City entrepreneurs and 120% more likely than entrepreneurs in London. They are also almost 2x less likely to estimate their market size to be less than 100 million.
• Revenue Streams: Subscion is the most popular revenue stream everywhere. Compared to London, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are 4.4-times more likely for their primary revenue stream to be Lead Generation, 3.6-times more likely for it to be virtual goods and 2.6-times less likely for it to be the rapidly fading model of license fees.
• Perceived Competitive Advantage: Compared to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, New York City entrepreneurs are 4.3-times more likely to consider content their primary competitive advantage, 40 percent more likely for it to be niche focus, and 90 percent less likely for it to be centered around the team. Compared to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, London entrepreneurs are 58 percent more likely to consider technology their primary competitive advantage and 5.3 less likely to consider user experience to be.
• Product Development: London and NYC companies outsource 34 percent more of their product development than Silicon Valley companies.
• Adaptability: Pivoting happens much more frequently in Silicon Valley. Pivots happen 45 percent more on average in Silicon Valley than New York City and 33 percent more than London.
• Mentorship: The Silicon Valley and New York City ecosystems have more helpful mentors than the London ecosystem. Silicon Valley companies have 46 percent more helpful mentors than companies in London.
• Thought Leaders: In Silicon Valley, Steve Blank and Paul Graham are the most popular startup experts. In London, Paul Graham is by far most popular expert and NYC shows their local pride, voting Fred Wilson as their favorite startup expert.
• Work Ethic: Companies in Silicon Valley work 35% more than companies in New York City. In Silicon Valley teams work 9.5 hours a day on average vs. 8 hours in London and 7 in New York City.
• Founding Team Composition: Silicon Valley founding teams are 34% more likely to be technical heavy than founding teams from NYC. Whereas NYC founding teams are almost 2x as likely to be business heavy than Silicon Valley founding teams.
• Founder Education Background: In London most founders have a masters degree, whereas in Silicon Valley and NYC most founders have just an undergraduate degree. But NYC has 2.2x more founders with Ph.Ds than Silicon Valley.
• Founder Gender: New York City has almost double the female founders of Silicon Valley and London (80-20 vs 90/10 ratios, respectively).
• Founder Age: The average age of founders in all three ecosystems is about the same, with an aggregate average of 33.5.
• Founder Experience: Silicon Valley founders have on average started almost twice as many startups as founders from NYC and London.
• Founder Motivation: Silicon Valley has 30 percent more founders that want to change the world than London or New York. New York has 50 percent more founders that want to make a good living than Silicon Valley or London. London has twice as many founders that want to make a quick flip than Silicon Valley or New York.
• Founder Challenges: New York City startups are 3.7-times less likely for team building to be their biggest challenge, at the same time they are almost twice as likely to consider “having too much do and being over capacity” their biggest challenge.

Whether you’re an aspiring author, musician, or first time business owner, this article is for you.

If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to recognize the changes that are happening around you and position yourself to capitalize on those trends.

Of course, often times, that’s easier said than done.

Here’s a step by step template on how to be a successful entrepreneur. Take it and customize it to your own unique situation.

Step #1: Recognize change

As I mentioned, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur the first step is to actually recognize what’s changing so that you can try to plan your next move.

So, what is changing?

In the larger picture, the thing that is changing is how our culture consumes and interacts with businesses. The Internet and social media has, essentially, disrupted this power dynamic and has shifted a small amount of power to the consumer.

As a result, this has disrupted many of the traditional business models and has presented opportunity for new players to join the game.

A while back I wrote an article for my friends over at SpinSucks that touched on how businesses, from a marketing perspective, are trying to capitalize on this opportunity and are racing to create a business model that successfully monetizes word of mouth.

The reason they’re taking on such a drastic change is because they know that their business model will soon be outdated if they don’t.

Step #2: Recognize great opportunity

Of course, if you want to be a successful entrepreneur you can’t simply recognize that change is happening. People recognize this sort of thing all the time.

The next step is to actually recognize a great opportunity that you have the ability to capitalize on.

I’ve touched on what makes a good business idea before. What I would consider a “great opportunity” is very similar.

• Opportunity to provide a lot of value to a lot of people – If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, you need to have something that a lot of people want but not too many people can deliver. There needs to be an opportunity to provide a lot of value to a lot of people.
• Opportunity to scale - Likewise, a great opportunity presents the opportunity to scale the solution you are considering. In other words, how much demand is there for your solution? To figure this out, try walking through this simple market research process I outlined for my friends over at Under30CEO.
• Opportunity to make a profit – In most scenarios, if you have something that a lot of people want but not too many people can deliver, you will make money. However, that’s not always the case. If you have the cure for cancer but it cost people a trillion dollars, they’re not going to buy it. A great opportunity presents an opportunity to make a lot of money.
• Minimizes risks – Entrepreneurs tend to optimistically play off risk as if it won’t happen to them. Guess what? That decision comes back to bite them. In the 20th century, a record number of businesses will launch and a reesses will fail. Successful entrepreneurs will lay out a plan to minimize risks associated with their ventures and will only take on risks within their comfort zone.
• Is within reach – I have a lot of great ideas. The problem is, I don’t have the means to make a lot of those ideas happen. A great opportunity is one that is actually within your reach. Successful entrepreneurs don’t chase opportunities that they can’t make happen. Instead, they build their power from the ground up; building momentum with smaller ideas.

Step #3: Launch lean

A while back, I was really considering a project that would have required a lot of upfront development cost.

Luckily for me, a friend of mine (who has a lot of experience managing technology development) was able to convince me to find a way to test my idea before I poured a lot of money into it.

It’s a good thing because the project would have likely flopped.

When it comes to the topic of “launching lean“, I like to refer people to Eric Ries’ lean methodologies.

Whether you’re an author, musician, or business owner, the main idea here is simple; get at least a basic version of your product out there so you can start to collect feedback from your customers.

Successful entrepreneurs know that post-launch is much more useful than pre-launch assumptions.

Step #4: Build a relationship with your audience

I can’t think of many instances where a successful entrepreneur doesn’t have a relationship with their audience.

Once you’ve launched a basic version of your product, you need to make sure that you are growing your audience base and building meaningful relationships with those impacted by your product.

The reason for this is simple;&rom them and use that knowledge to help them even more.

In my experience, before you can build a relationship with someone you need to be able to accomplish these three basic things:

• Make the connection - Find some way to get in front of the person you are trying to reach.
• Develop context – Find a way to break the ice with the person you are trying to reach.
• Learn from them – Find ways to gain meaningful insight from interaction with them.

Of course, if you’re starting a business with no money, it can be incredibly difficult to even accomplish these simple tasks.

Step #5:  Evolve your business idea

As the example above illustrates, there are plenty of ways to systematically gain insight and feedback in a humanized way.

Great entrepreneurs are those who can not only gather useful insight but can also apply that insight to create a better product or service.

They take their new found insight and lay out a realistic plan to make progresstowards their next goals. From there, the process repeats.

Successful entrepreneurs make good things happen

What to know how to be a successful entrepreneur?

Develop your ability to make good things happen.

In other words, being a successful entrepreneur isn’t about getting lucky; it’s about creating a smart strategy and then executing it perfectly.

If need be, talented entrepreneurs could completely start over and become successful again. That’s because they have developed a talent.

…a talent that takes them all the way to the bank.

As an increasingly capital environment, the global economy depends on entrepreneurship to foster innovation, create new jobs and produce wealth, economist and entrepreneur Carl Schramm said in a lecture at the Rockefeller Center on Thursday.

In the lecture — titled “Entrepreneurship and the Future of the Global Economy” — Schramm said that entrepreneurship is especially important during times of recession, yet it remains undervalued, and academic institutions do not teach entrepreneurship properly or take it seriously, he said. Furthermore, government policies intended to facilitate entrepreneurship, such as those of the United States and China, inherently restrict its positive effects, Schramm said.

“Many governments think that they can solve all problems,” Schramm said. “The problem is that the government is intrinsically outside the market and so cannot pick winners or losers with any efficiency at all.”

Thus the government, at the taxpayers’ expense, commits money to different ventures that do not succeed, Schramm said, citing the Solyndra Corporation bankruptcy as a case in which the government wrongly stepped in to fund a private sector company. In 2009, Solyndra Corp. received over $500 million in guaranteed loans from the government only to file bankruptcy in 2011.

The risk involved in entrepreneurship frightens people, according to Schramm. Risk and creativity, however, are imperative for growth, he said. This growth is not limited to the business sector and finance, according to Schramm.

The failures as well as the successes are what make the U.S. entrepreneurship model remarkable, he said. One of the unique traits of U.S. entrepreneurship is its acceptance of failure, according to Schramm. Other nations, particularly China and India, are changing their economies to copy American flexibility, Schramm said.

What we've lost, above all, are stopping points, finish lines and boundaries. Technology has blurred them beyond recognition. Wherever we go, our work follows us, on our digital devices, ever insistent and intrusive. It's like an itch we can't resist scratching, even though scratching invariably makes it worse.

If you're a manager, here are three policies worth promoting:

1. Maintain meeting discipline. Schedule meetings for 45 minutes, rather than an hour or longer, so participants can stay focused, take time afterward to reflect on what's been discussed, and recover before the next obligation. Start all meetings at a precise time, end at a precise time, and insist that all digital devices be turned off throughout the meeting.

2. Stop demanding or expecting instant responsiveness at every moment of the day. It forces your people into reactive mode, fractures their attention, and makes it difficult for them to sustain attention on their priorities. Let them turn off their email at certain times. If it's urgent, you can call them — but that won't happen very often.

3. Encourage renewal. Create at least one time during the day when you encourage your people to stop working and take a break. Offer a midafternoon class in yoga, or meditation, organize a group walk or workout, or consider creating a renewal room where people can relax, or take a nap.



It's also up to individuals to set their own boundaries. Consider these three behaviors for yourself:

1. Do the most important thing first in the morning, preferably without interruption, for 60 to 90 minutes, with a clear start and stop time. If possible, work in a private space during this period, or with sound-reducing earphones. Finally, resist every impulse to distraction, knowing that you have a designated stopping point. The more absorbed you can get, the more productive you'll be. When you're done, take at least a few minutes to renew.

2. Establish regular, scheduled times to think more long term, creatively, or strategically. If you don't, you'll constantly succumb to the tyranny of the urgent. Also, find aifferent environment in which to do this activity — preferably one that's relaxed and conducive to open-ended thinking.

3. Take real and regular vacations. Real means that when you're off, you're truly disconnecting from work. Regular means several times a year if possible, even if some are only two or three days added to a weekend. The research strongly suggests that you'll be far healthier if you take all of your vacation time, and more productive overall.

A single principle lies at the heart of all these suggestions. When you're engaged at work, fully engage, for defined periods of time. When you're renewing, truly renew. Make waves. Stop living your life in the gray zone.

There are any number of failure points for startups – lacking focus, scaling your product too quickly, draining capital, pursuing a derivative idea, hiring the wrong people, execution.. the list goes on.

No matter how many things you can think of that would bring down a startup, few mention the real Achilles Heal – founder breakups.

It’s one of the most common issues startups face, but also one of the most under-discussed. Just look at the top reasons startups fail and you’ll be hard pressed to find someone that cites the dissolution of the founding team. Founders who’ve fallen victim to breakups often shove it under the rug like it’s something to be ashamed of rather than publicly acknowledging it as one of the many learning points in your startup experience.

The biggest and most tragic consequence of this trend? That other entrepreneurs never get the chance to benefit from the learnings of their peers who’ve been through it and persevered.

At SXSW, a group of entrepreneurs (Seth Blank of YourTrove; Orian Marx of Siftee; Kathryn Minshew of The Daily Muse) made a bold statement by airing their dirty laundry all out in the open! That’s right – they talked about their experiences on how to lose a co-founder in a panel to about 100 eager entrepreneurs and investors.

Just as I’d hope more entrepreneurs would do, I’m passing off my learnings to you. Take this as a pseudo “pay it forward” and when you or other founders you know have a co-founder breakup, encourage them to walk proud and be open to talking about it. You’ll benefit the entire startup ecosystem and perhaps even increase the likelihood that other startups succeed.

A common metaphor that is often used to describe starting your own company is that of building an airplane and learning to fly it while it's falling from the sky. The downside risk of starting a company from nothing stacks all odds against you, requiring nimble intelligence, fearless determination and the vision to see something where others don't. It's a gamble with passion and without almost blind determination, you're not acing the AP.

The words you hear most often associated with this process are: innovate, ideate, pivot, brainstorm, develop, productize and pivot again. All fantastic and all the active verbs required for taking something you thought up and crafting it into a product, a business, or a company.

So what's the problem?

There's only a small window for starting something special. For those rare moments when your big idea could hit, many windows might open, but they are all tiny. The money you have either from yourself or outside investors is always running out. There's a countdown clock that monitors your startup's survival and it's measured not by the hour and minute hands but by the diminishing digits in your bank account. Investors are going to tighten their belts during a down cycle, and the ability to gain traction particularly from paying customers or even dedicated users is difficult when "everyone's down on tech." That's not the case today. In fact we have irrational exuberance in our industry, which is fantastic as long as that doesn't translate to a perception of time never running out. The period that you can keep a team -- meaning anyone more than yourself -- dedicated to an idea is often transient. People butt heads, get dissatisfied, distracted, or their lives' move in new directions. You can't stop this but only hope to maintain the talented individuals who take the leap alongside you as long as you can.

Peter Thiel, the billionaire venture capitalist and PayPal Inc. co-founder who has encouraged would-be entrepreneurs to drop out of college, will teach a lecture course at Stanford University on startups.

Thiel will instruct students in “Computer Science 183: Startup,” Mehran Sahami, an associate professor in the computer-science department, said in a telephone interview. His course is scheduled to begin next month and enrollment will be limited to 250, Sahami said.

Thiel, 44, who received undergraduate and law degrees from Stanford, became a billionaire with investments in PayPal, the Internet payment company now owned by EBay Inc. (EBAY); gamemaker Zynga Inc.; and LinkedIn Corp. He now uses some of his wealth in his 20 Under 20 Thiel Fellowship program, which pays students as much as $100,000 each, over two years, to drop out of college and pursue startups. That doesn’t keep him from helping students pursuing a traditional education.

Maintain your cool and sense of humor, especially during a crisis. When our biggest customer - and I mean big - thought I leaked a front-page story to the press, I offered to resign to save the relationship. My boss, a great CEO, gave me a serious look, like he was thinking about it, and said, "You're not getting off that easy." Then he broke into a big smile.

Tell subordinates when they're shooting themselves in the foot. Sometimes I can be pretty intimidating and I've had CEOs who shied away from giving it to me straight when my emotions got the better of me. Not this one guy. We'd be in a heated meeting and he'd quietly take me aside and read me the riot act. He was so genuine about it that it always opened my eyes and helped me to achieve perspective.

Be the boss, but behave like a peer. I've worked with loads of CEOs who let their egos get the better of them. They act like they're better than everyone else, are distant and emotionally detached, or flaunt their knowledge and power. That kind of behavior diminishes leaders, makes them seem small, and keeps them from really connecting with people. They're not always the most successful, but the most admired CEOs I know are genuinely humble.

Let your guard down and really be yourself outside of work. You know, teambuilding is so overrated. All you really need to do outside of work to build a cohesive team is break some bread, have some drinks, relax, let your guard down, and be a regular human being. When you get to be really confident, you can be that way all the time. That's the mark of a great leader.

Stand behind and make big bets on people you believe in. One CEO would constantly challenge you and your thinking to the point of being abusive. But once he trusted and believed in you, he put his full weight behind you 100 percent to help you succeed. He'd stand up for you even when he wasn't sure what the heck you were up to. And he'd give you new functional responsibilities - something up-and-coming execs need to grow. Okay, he wasn't perfect, but who is?

Complement your subordinate's weaknesses. I often say it's every employee's job to complement her boss's weaknesses. The only reason that's even doable is because we've all only got one boss. But I actually had a CEO who did that with each and every one of his staff. For example, I'm more of a big picture strategy guy and he would really hold my feet to the fire by tracking my commitments. It felt like micromanaging at first, but I eventually realized it helped me to be a more effective and strengthened the entire management team.

Compliment your employee's strengths. It takes a strong, confident leader to go out on a limb and tell an employee what they're great at. Why? I don't know, but I suspect it's hard for alpha males that primarily inhabit executive offices. Anyway, it's important because we can't always see ourselves objectively. Twenty years ago a CEO identified how effectively I cut through a boatload of BS to reach unique solutions to tough problems. Today, that's what I do for a living.

Teach the toughest, most painful lessons you've ever learned. As a young manager at Texas Instruments, I once asked my boss's boss for advice about a promotion I didn't get. He told me a candid story about the hardest lesson he'd ever learned, the reason he was stuck in his job. He made himself indispensible and didn't groom his replacement. It was painful for him to share, but it opened my eyes and made a huge difference in my career.

Do the right thing. Just about everyone says it, but I've only known one CEO who both preached and practiced it to the point where it became a big part of the company culture. You'd walk the halls and hear people say it all the time. He meant two things by it. When he said it to you, it meant he trusted you to do just that. He also meant it regardless of status quo or consequences. He had extraordinary faith in that phrase. Now I do too.

Do what has to be done, no matter what. It's a rare executive who jumps on a plane at a moment's notice to close a deal or gives an impromptu presentation when a potential investor shows up unexpectedly. It's even more rare when he does it without asking questions or hemming and hawing about it. He just does what has to be done. That kind of drive and focus on the business is relatively common with entrepreneurs in high-tech startups. And it's the mark of a great manager who will find success, that's for sure.

Choosing a co-founder is the most important decision you will make when starting your company.  Your co-founder(s) will be like your spouse - you will spend most of your time every day with them, and you will need to agree with them on all the big decisions (what product to build, how to launch it, whether to sell the company...).
Additionally, your co-founder will also be fundamental to establishing the company's culture and work ethic.  The initial team that grows out of the two (or few) of you will determine everything the startup does, and equally importantly, how it does it.
1. Ability To Communicate With Each Other (On The Tough Stuff):

• Can you have an honest and frank conversation with your co-founder? Can you tell them when you think they made a bad decision or are doing things for the wrong reason?  Can you give honest and critical feedback - and can you take their honest and critical feedback?  Can you be honest with them in your reasons for doing things that may be in your own personal interest?
• Startups are stressful, and you need to be able to have honest conversations with your co-founders despite the stress.  If you can't call each other out and learn from mistakes, then your startup won't be able to advance.
• The basis for the above is mutual respect and trust, and an understanding that your are in the fight together.  Like any relationships, co-founder relationships can have a lot of ups and downs.  They key is the ability to talk through the bumps along the way.

2. Alignment On Key Questions:

I would suggest discussing the above with your prospective co-founder even if you have known them for many years.  There is a big difference between "being friends" with someone and starting a company with them.

• What are their objectives?  Why a startup?
• There are many reasons people start a company.  Some people want to make a few million dollars.  Some are doing it for the impact to the world.  Some want to be an internet celeb.  Make sure you and your co-founder have alignment on this - otherwise you might end up with one founder trying to force an exit for $5 million when Google comes calling, while the other wants to build something huge.
• What do they care about in a company culture?
• What are the 3-5 key things they want the company culture to have?  Do you agree with them?  
• Hiring?
• Do they want to hire full stack generalists or specialists?  What are the 3-5 traits they consider most important in a new hire?
• How do they view investors?  What is an investors role in the company?
• One friend of mine got fired as CEO of his company after his co-founder sided with the VCs during an important strategic decision.  The reason his co-founder did it?  Because he felt that once the VCs invested in the company, the strategic decisions were theirs to make.  This is a naive view, but some people have it.  You should check how your co-founder views the world.
• How ethical are they?
• You are trusting this person to safegaurd the next 4-10 years of your life.
• What is your role versus theirs?
• Discussed below in detail.
• What do they want to be doing day to day?
• What do they want exposure to along the way?

3a. Agreement On Roles.

Many of the biggest companies had a clear breakout of which founder was in charge/CEO early on (e.g. Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Larry Page in 1999, Mark Zuckerberg) and the one who was the technical lead or supporting actor (Steve Wozniak, Paul Allen, Sergey Brin, the other N Facebook founders).



If both of you want to be the CEO (one is usually given the title of "President" as a compromise), and you agree all major decisions are made "as equals", you are likely signing up for eventual conflict.  In the early days it might feel like decisions come easily and you and your co-founder are well aligned so you think this structure works.  Be forewarned- without a clear sense of who can call the shots on what, and who can make the final-final call if needed, you are signing up for a messy future:

• Even if you agree on 95% of things, the 5% of times you disagree may freeze the company up for many months.  You will each claim the right to veto.  This means nothings gets agreed to and the company can't move forward.  This could be the death of a startup, whose entire core premise and competitive advantage is the ability to move fast.
• You need to have an explicit decision maker set up up front. Don't punt on this painful conversation in the early days.  My own 2 cents is 99% of the time the CEO should be able to make the final call not only on business issues, but also on product, if needed.
• You need a pre-agreed upon way to resolve conflicts (e.g. "our external advisor Melissa will be the tie-breaker")
• Competition between founders may emerge.  The CEO is usually the person who gets invited to panels, who pitches VCs (this is not glamorous, but people think it is), and who is often the external face of the company.  If both people want to be CEO, the one who did not become CEO may feel like they got a raw deal by not getting as much exposure.
• This is something that emerges over time.  You may have the most humble, well-intentioned co-founder but 6 months later they may start to feel they are missing out.  If this happens, try to find a way to create opportunities for them to get some exposure without compromising the role of CEO.

3b. Non-Overlapping Skills (unless you are all coders) 

Usually a startup can only deal with one product visionary (a separate post coming on this later).  Two people setting the vision for the product means that often you either get design by committee (mediocre) or split directions.  This does not mean look for people with bad product sense.  Rather, it means you need one person who is really strong at product that you have explicitly agreed will set the direction of the product.



Similarly, 3 business people starting a technology company is usually a recipe for disaster.  There is usually not enough "business" stuff for 3 business co-founders to do (unless it is a brand-building/operations heavy exercise versus a tech company - e.g.Warby Parker, Birch Box or the like - in which case it is easier to carve out roles).  This will exacerbate 2a above.



The only time it is beneficial to have overlapping skill sets is if all the founders are developers.  Even then, make sure to define who is responsible for what (e.g. who is the CEO etc.)
4. Important Nice To Haves:

There are some additional characteristics of a co-founder that is optimal (although not strictly necessary) to have:

• Have known them for a few years.
• This helps dramatically with the ability to have very open conversations with them - you already know, respect, and trust one another.  So you know feedback that is giving or a hard conversation you are having is coming with the right intent.
• Have worked with them directly.
• People may act dramatically different in a social situation versus a business one.  Optimally, you have worked with them in a business or other project based context.  Once hard work, and money, enters the picture, people may change the way they act in all sorts of dramatic ways.
• If you worked with them before, you have a pre-set working style and cadence, so you hit the ground running faster.  You also probably have well defined roles for working together, and trust each other in those roles.

Word of mouth, according to Holman, is content. It’s not a Facebook share button or a Twitter button asking your users to tweet. Word of mouth is what happens to make people genuinely excited to tell their friends. But far too often in technology, people are afraid to talk about what they’re doing. Holman chalks this up to modesty:

“There are a lot of modest people in technology, and this is great. That’s why here aren’t as many douchebags in our industry. But overall you have to not be nervous about talking about something that you’re really excited about.”

So how do you excite people? Holman has two schools of thought that he sums up as being quiet or being loud. In the camp of quiet, which is the model that GitHub follows, changes, fixes and upgrades are never pre-announced. You simply show up one day with a greeting of “good morning. We fixed everything that you had a problem with for the last year.” It’s a matter of surprising and delighting, which Holman notes as happening far too little these days.

“It’s a sad fact about our society that when you care about people and go the extra mile, it’s noteworthy.”

THERE was another element necessary to Mervin Kelly’s innovation strategy, an element as crucial, or more crucial even, than all the others. Mr. Kelly talked fast and walked fast; he ran up and down staircases. But he gave his researchers not only freedom but also time. Lots of time — years to pursue what they felt was essential. One might see this as impossible in today’s faster, more competitive world. Or one might contend it is irrelevant because Bell Labs (unlike today’s technology companies) had the luxury of serving a parent organization that had a large and dependable income ensured by its monopoly status. Nobody had to meet benchmarks to help with quarterly earnings; nobody had to rush a product to market before the competition did.

But what should our pursuit of innovation actually accomplish? By one definition, innovation is an important new product or process, deployed on a large scale and having a significant impact on society and the economy, that can do a job (as Mr. Kelly once put it) “better, or cheaper, or both.” Regrettably, we now use the term to describe almost anything. It can describe a smartphone app or a social media tool; or it can describe the transistor or the blueprint for a cellphone system. The differences are immense. One type of innovation creates a handful of jobs and modest revenues; another, the type Mr. Kelly and his colleagues at Bell Labs repeatedly sought, creates millions of jobs and a long-lasting platform for society’s wealth and well-being.

The conflation of these different kinds of innovations seems to be leading us toward a belief that small groups of profit-seeking entrepreneurs turning out innovative consumer products are as effective as our innovative forebears. History does not support this belief. The teams at Bell Labs that invented the laser, transistor and solar cell were not seeking profits. They were seeking understanding. Yet in the process they created not only new products but entd lucrative — industries.

There’s no single best way to innovate. Silicon Valley’s methods have benefited our country well over the course of several decades. And it would be absurd to return to an era of big monopolies. Today’s telecom industries are thriving, and customers likewise have access to a dazzling range of affordable devices and services, which most likely would not have been true had the old phone company remained intact. Though it had custody of the world’s most innovative labs, AT&T introduced new products and services slowly, and rarely cheaply. As Time magazine once put it, “Few companies are more conservative; none are more creative.”

But to consider the legacy of Bell Labs is to see that we should not mistake small technological steps for huge technological leaps. It also shows us that to always “move fast and break things,” as Facebook is apparently doing, or to constantly pursue “a gospel of speed” (as Google has described its philosophy) is not the only way to get where we are going. Perhaps it is not even the best way. Revolutions happen fast but dawn slowly. To a large extent, we’re still benefiting from risks that were taken, and research that was financed, more than a half century ago.

Entrepreneurship isn't simply about launching new ventures or making money.  Instead, it's about solving problems and creating social progress; building great new things that make a better world.  It's about celebrating each step toward the ultimate human longing for an enhanced and enriched enterprise of life.

 But it gets even more interesting.  A true entrepreneur might toil in obscurity for life.  He or she might never actually leave the day job or create a venture that becomes a household name.  There might never be great success or wealth in his future.  But breakthrough entrepreneurship is equal parts attitude and attempt. Even if the entrepreneur falls and fails a thousand times, there is a real sense of winning in the effort—especially if he can pass along the benefits of his experience to those who come behind him.

 Most of the highly successful entrepreneurs we interviewed while researching our new book, Breakthrough Entrepreneurship, did not cite money as their prime motivator. That’s good, because money doesn’t buy happiness anyway. In fact, studies show that once you reach $75,000-a-year in income, more money doesn't do much to increase your contentment. 

 Instead, it's the creative process itself, with a focus on meaningful problem solving, that leads people to deeper levels of consciousness and truer truths.  We found scores of entrepreneurs who talked about how they find it an especially fulfilling journey when it's fueled with their personal strengths.

Identify important customer needs, create solutions, develop a compelling value proposition, gather necessary resources, build credibility, and lead your venture to greatness.  But on those dark days when you lack motivation—or when you're just wondering whether it's worth trying to escape from Cubicle Purgatory by starting something of your own—remember that you’re trying to create something new, something better, something closer to the ultimate.

Many budding entrepreneurs struggle mightily with that first step – out of their comfort zone and into the unknown. They keep asking people like me whether the time is right, and the truth is that there’s never an ideal time to start your own business. It’s like starting a personal relationship, if you wait for exactly the right time, you’ll never do it.

I’ve talked to many experts, and everyone has his own view of the right personal attributes, and the right business conditions to jump in. In my own view, the recovering economy is ripe for new startups, but successful startups are more about the right person, than the right idea or the right climate. So the real challenge is looking inward to check your alignment with these clues:

1. Running a business is a passion you crave. This is a necessary, but not sufficient reason to start a business now. It’s not the same as “I want to change the world (volunteer for a good cause)” or “I’m tired of the corporate grind (take a vacation).” It does mean you have a compelling new business idea, and a willingness to face risk.

2. You know what needs to be done, and not afraid to make the decisions. This is the right context for being your own boss. You get great satisfaction from overcoming all obstacles, and you have no problem with living or dying by your own decisions. You have never had a problem putting together a plan and making it happen.

3. The opportunity to make real money excites you. You have read all the stories of Google and Apple hitting on a great idea, beating the odds, and being worth millions in just a couple of years. You like the idea that most of the money you make will be yours, not just merged into corporate profits.

4 You believe the economy has tilted the odds in your favor. The recent recession has definitely opened up opportunities for new products, and skilled people at lower costs are abundant. Many of the great entrepreneurs of the past started their companies near business recessions and depressions.

5. You get to set the deadlines, and manage your own priorities. You have always felt that you can do more than expected by current bosses, if allowed to do it on your own schedule with your own ur self-motivation is more effective for you than any arbitrary rewards and even salary increases.

6. You get to do the interesting things, for a change. First of all, the business you intend to set up is your dream, not someone else’s. Within that context, you can delegate or find partners for things that bore you, like marketing, rather than feel that you have been assigned to do the least interesting work.

7. A variety of challenges stretches your abilities to the maximum. If you love to learn new things, and are stimulated by change, you will love the new business environment. Every day is different, from dealing with creative elements, to financial challenges, marketing and sales, and customers of every type.

8. Your office is where you want it. Many entrepreneurs enjoy working from their home, where they are more comfortable, and can interact better with their family. Some like an old eclectic loft downtown, or a local coffee shop to minimize the commute. In these days of global links, you can actually run the business from halfway around the world.

9. What you envision doesn’t seem all that hard to you. In fact, the cost of entry into most businesses has come down greatly in the last twenty years. You can now start an e-commerce site for $100, or develop software applications for smart phones for a few thousand. The right reason to start a business is because you have done your homework, and are convinced that you have the skills and knowledge to do it easily.

10. You are really ready for a second career. This is especially applicable to Boomers and anyone who has had a successful career, but now ready for a new challenge, with a little time on their hands. The good part of having your own business is that you don’t even have to give up your first job to start the second.

If a few of these reasons are calling your name, now is the time to start building your business. There’s no better time, especially e around you are hesitating due to an apparent fit to my other list. It means you’ll be facing a lot less competition. What are you waiting for?

I see more and more entrepreneurs who seem to have everything going for them – vision, motivation, passion, even a good business plan, product, and money, and yet they can’t close customers. Maybe it’s time to look harder at the mantra of a new breed of gurus and successful entrepreneurs, including Steve Blank and Eric Ries, called “nail it then scale it” (NISI).

You can review all the specifics of this approach in a new book by Nathan Furr and Paul Ahlstrom, appropriately titled “Nail It then Scale It: The Entrepreneur’s Guide to Creating and Managing Breakthrough Innovation,” but I will net it out here. I found their five phases of the process to be compelling, based on my own years of experience mentoring startups:

• Nail the pain. Great businesses begin with a customer problem that has a big and monetizable pain point. Avoid the three big mistakes, of guessing but not testing the pain (on real customers), selecting a low customer pain (solution is only nice to have), or selecting a narrow customer pain (small number of customers willing or able to pay).
• Nail the solution. Neither breakthrough technology nor maximum features will assure that “if we build it, they will come.” In fact, NISI recommends starting with the minimum focused set of features and technology that will drive a customer purchase. Success demands testing the solution early and quickly in the market, then iterating to get it right.
• Nail the go-to-market strategy. In parallel with nailing the solution, you need an in-depth understanding of your target customer’s buying process, the job they are t market infrastructure, and a stable of serious pilot customers. Do real tests with real pricing to see if customers will pay you, without being pushed.
• Nail the business model. Leverage your customer conversations to predict and validate your business model. For example, when you think about distribution channels, revenue streams, or the relationship with the customer, ask customers what they expect. Don’t forget a viable financial model of costs, margins, customer acquisition, and break-even.
• Scale it. Don’t attempt to scale it until you have a proven repeatable business model that predictably generates revenue. Only then is it time to focus on the get-big-fast strategy, and the transformation of three key areas from startup to a managed growth company. These areas include market, process, and team transitions.

These pragmatics and points of focus can effectively counter three core myths which trap too many enterprising and capable entrepreneurs today:

• Hero myth: Why believing in your product leads to failure. All too often, founders fall in love with their products or technology, ignore negative feedback from customers, and spend years building a product based on a vision that no one else shares.

• Process myth: Why building a product leads to failure. Conventional wisdom is that after a great idea, the next steps are raise some money, build a product, then go sell the product. This doesn’t work when attacking unknown problems with untested solutions.

• Money myth: Why having too much money leads to failure. The old saying that “it takes money to make money” isn’t so simple. Money allows entrepreneurs to execute a flawed business plan far too long, rather than stay focused on the market and adapt.

At the heart of iuccessful entrepreneur you have to be totally customer centric, and learn to change and adapt as fast as the market. The pace of change in the marketplace is escalating, so entrepreneurs have to improve their ability to deal with change.

At the same time, more entrepreneurs are jumping into the fray, and less money is available from investors. It’s time for a new startup model. In my view, savvy “super angel” investors such as Mike Maples, Jr., and leading incubators such as Y Combinator, are already on this one. How far behind is your startup?

Is this it?  Really?  Facebook wins, cashes in its chips, and we all go home?
Of course, there is more to come and it’s a future filled with sheer awesomeness.  Within the next few years, technology will improve your life in ways you can scarcely imagine.  But if you’re looking for where we’re headed, it’s useful to know where we’ve been and most importantly, we should know the catalyst driving us from one phase to the next.
Though tech types tend to focus myopically on the laws of hardware innovation, including those written byMoore, Metcalfe and Kryder, these principles focus on infrastructure, which is only the first phase of a risingtechnology wave.  After infrastructure, technology waves enter a platform and finally an application phase.  It is during the platform phases in particular that entrepreneurs build world-changing companies without much initial capital, a la Gates and Zuckerburg.  How do companies change user behavior so profoundly and produce massive growth, seemingly overnight?
I believe we can we plot the growth of online media companies against a predictive trend, like Moore’s law does for hardware.  The percentage of users creating content is a function of users’ ability.  That is to say, the easier it is to create content the more people create it.  But why should we care about content creation?  Because content creation has exponential benefit to the community and is by definition how online media platforms succeed.  Platforms must enable users to create something valuable for other users; the business’ viability depends on it and the economics won’t work any other way. 
The trend line of the relationship between the percentage of users creating content and users’ ability, plots the history of the web and helps predict what’s next.  It was thegraphical user interface, developed by researchers at Xerox PARC and brought to market by Apple and Microsoft, which made hard-to-understand DOS terminals usable and hearkened the PC revolution.  The web browser commercialized by Netscape, took advantage of infrastructure used by academics to help create Web 1.0.  Next, Facebook took technologies likeBBS andRSS to the masses by perfecting the Feed.  Smart entrepreneurs, who took a technology mainstream by making it easier to use, spurred each successive phase of the web.  The interface drove innovation by making previously incomprehensible information useful, driving an explosion of new user behavior and creating huge companies along the way.


Welcome to the Curated Web

If you want to know what’s next for the web, look at where the interface is changing.  Listen for where non-technical people say, “There is too much going on!  Who can make sense of it all?”  That’s exactly the cry the founders of companies like Pinterest, Evernote re answering.  These companies mark the dawn of what I call the Curated Web.
The Curated Web is characterized by a fundamentally different value to users than the social web.  Whereas Web 1.0 was characterized by content published from one-to-many and social media was about easily creating and sharing content, from many-to-many, the curated web is about capturing and collecting only the content that matters, from many-to-one.  Like all successive phases, the curated web is a response to the weaknesses of the previous phase. Users inundated with too much content are looking for solutions to help them make sense of it all.  Curated Web companies solve this problem by turning content curation into content creation and, following the predicted trend line, they see unprecedented percentages of user participation.  Each re-pin, re-blog, re-tweet, creates a curated, easy-to-use stream for future information to flow.
By designing new interfaces, and suddenly making information accessible, innovative companies have just begun creating the Curated Web.  By extrapolating the trend line, we can expect new startups to engage even higher numbers of users in creating content by making creation even easier.  As our ability to create content increases, perhaps one day becoming nearly effortless, we are likely to see new interfaces to help us make sense of all the data, and hearkening the next phase of the web.

Michael Wolfe, CEO, Pipewise, Inc. http://www.pipe...CEO, Pipewise, Inc. http://www.pipewise.com3183 votes by Heidi Strom Moon, Flavio Gambardella, Jeremiah Fellows, (more)Let's take a hike on the coast from San Francisco to Los Angeles to visit our friends in Newport Beach. I'll whip out my map and draw our route down the coast:


The line is about 400 miles long, we can walk 4 miles per hour for 10 hours per day, so we'll be there in 10 days. We call our friends and book dinner for next Sunday night, when we will roll in triumphantly at 6 p.m. They can't wait!

We get up early the next day giddy with the excitement of fresh adventure. We strap on our backpacks, whip out our map, and plan our first day. We look at the map. Uh oh:


Wow, there are a million little twists and turns on this coast. A 40-mile day will barely get us past Half Moon Bay. This trip is at least 500, not 400 miles. We call our friends and push back dinner til Tuesday. It is best to be realistic. They are disappointed, but they are looking forward to seeing us. And 12 days from SF to LA still is not bad. 

With that unpleasantness out of the way, we head off. Two hours later, we are barely past the zoo. What gives? We look down the trail:


Man, this is slow going! Sand, water, stairs, creeks, angry sea lions! We are walking at most 2 miles per hour, half as fast as we wanted. We can either start walking 20 hours per day, or we can push our friends out another week. OK, let's split the difference: we'll walk 12 hours per day and push our friends out til the following weekend. We call them and delay dinner until the following Sunday. They are a little peeved but say OK, we'll see you then.

We pitch camp in Moss Beach after a tough 12 hour day. Shit, it takes forever to get these tent up in the wind. We don't go to bed until midnight. Not a big deal: we'll iron things out and increase velocity tomorrow.

We oversleep and wake up sore and exhausted at 10 a.m. Fuck! No way we are getting our 12 hours in. We'll aim for 10, then we can do 14 tomorrow. We grab our stuff and go.

After a slow slog for a couple of hours, I notice my friend limping. Oh shit, blisters. We need to fix this now...we are the kind of team who nips problems in the bud before they slow our velocity. I jog 45 minutes 3 miles inland to Pescadero, grab some band-aids, and race back to patch up my friend. I'm exhausted, and the sun is going down, so we bail for the day. We go to bed after only covering 6 miles for the day. But we do have fresh supplies. We'll be fine. We'll make up the difference tomorrow.

We get up the next morning, bandage up our feet and get going. We turn a corner. Shit! What's this?


Goddamn map doesn't show this shit!. We have to walk 3 miles inland, around some fenced-off, federally-protected land, get lost twice, then make it back to the coast around noon. Most of the day gone for one mile of progress. OK, we are *not* calling our friends to push back again. We walk until midnight to try to catch up and get back on schedule.

After a fitful night of sleep in the fog, my friend wakes up in the morning with a raging headache and fever. I ask him if he can rally. "What do you think, asshole, I've been walking in freezing fog for 3 days without a break!" OK, today is a loss. Let's hunker down and recover. Tomorrow we'll ramp up to 14 hours per day since we'll be rested and trained...it is only a few more days, so we can do it!

We wake up the next morning groggy. I look at our map:


Holy shit! We are starting day 5 of a 10 day trip and haven't even left the Bay Area! This is ludicrous! Let's do the work to make an accurate estimate, call our friends, probably get yelled at, but get a realistic target once and for all.

My friend says, well, we've gone 40 miles in 4 days, it is at least a 600 mile trip, so that's 60 days, probably 70 to be safe. I say, "no f--ing way...yes, I've never done this walk before, but I *know* it does not take 70 days to walk from San Francisco to Los Angeles. Our friends are going to laugh at us if we call and tell them we won't see them until Easter! 

I continue, "if you can commit to walking 16 hours a day, we can make up the difference! It will be hard, but this is crunch time. Suck it up!" My friend yells back, "I'm not the one who told our friends we'd make it by Sunday in the first place! You're killing me because you made a mistake!"

A tense silence falls between us. The phone call goes unmade. I'll call tomorrow once my comrade regains his senses and is willing to commit to something reasonable.

The next morning, we stay in our tents til a rainstorm blows over. We pack our stuff and shuffle off at 10 a.m. nursing sore muscles and new blisters. The previous night's fight goes unmentioned, although I snap at my idiot friend when he leaves his water bottle behind, and we have to waste 30 minutes going back to get it.

I make a mental note that we are out of toilet paper and need to stock up when we hit the next town. We turn the corner: a raging river is blocking our path. I feel a massive bout of diarrhea coming on...