A Quote by Joe Lonsdale
I have seen a lot of now-great companies at their earliest stages, and these early-stage startups are not built by the senior people who know how to run and scale big-company machines.
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Startups are companies that are still in the process of searching for a business model. Ventures that are further along and executing their business models are no longer startups; they are early-stage companies.
Seed stage is an investment area that is really important for early stage startups. It feels like there is a need for trusted, experienced people to work with and to guide startups at this level.
A recipe I've seen work in early-stage startups is a small tight-knit group of passionate people who are obsessed with their vision of how to fix a particular industry. Conversely, teams composed of people with a lot of specialized experience at running a large business are not as likely to do very well in the first year or two of a startup.
Companies that acquire startups for their intellectual property, teams, or product lines are acquiring startups that are searching for a business model. If they acquire later stage companies who already have users/customers and/or a predictable revenue stream, they are acquiring companies that are executing.
Startups allow technologists and scientists to take risks and change plans in a way that would be frowned upon in a big company. Having said that, big companies will play a key role in certain areas and in partnerships with little companies. Each has its strengths.
If you think about companies that were built in Silicon Valley, a lot of them early on were chip companies. And now the companies that are there, like Apple, are much more successful than any of the chip companies were.
If there's a big problem and you've got the right people with you, usually the answer emerges and you do what's the obvious thing to do. I don't think of myself as some great manager or great leader. I've been very lucky to be in the positions that I've been in. I meet a lot of people and I've grown a lot of companies, and I meet a lot of CEOs at big enterprises. I'm always so surprised at how much they seem to know. It doesn't always seem to be correlated to how well they actually do.
In an ironic twist, I now see Good to Great not as a sequel to Built to Last, but more of a prequel. Good to Great is about how to turn a good organization into one that produces sustained great results. Built to Last is about how you take a company with great results and turn it into an enduring great company of iconic stature.
That business we started with 10 people has now grown into a great American success story. Some of the companies we helped start are names you know. An office supply company called Staples – where I’m pleased to see the Obama campaign has been shopping; The Sports Authority, which became a favorite of my sons. We started an early childhood learning center called Bright Horizons that First Lady Michelle Obama rightly praised. At a time when nobody thought we’d ever see a new steel mill built in America, we took a chance and built one in a corn field in Indiana.
I built stages and I did stage management - I think I built the sets twice, I happened to be good with a drill, which is a talent I didn't know I had.
A lot of the younger kids now can rap, but they're scared of the crowd. Mastery of that stage is an MC. I don't know if you've seen any great MCs on stage but when you do it's like wow, this is more than the words to rhymes.
Great businesses can be built on scale. I think Amazon has built a phenomenal commerce business largely on scale. Their network effect isn't obvious to me, but boy, have they used scale effectively.
I think that sometimes people talk about disruption, and I've seen tons of startups come in as disruptors and then disappear. And I think what we need to do as an industry is think about a world that is dominated by mobile and software and not extrapolate from what was. And I think a lot of big companies tend to want to do that.
Baidu and Google are great companies, but there are a lot of things you can do outside them. Just as electricity and the Internet transformed the world, I think the rise of modern A.I. technology will create a lot of opportunities both for new startups and for incumbent companies to transform.
If we didn't have Net neutrality, carriers could do things like penalize companies that use a lot of bandwidth or create high-speed lanes and charge Internet companies extra fees to send their stuff over them. That would give an advantage to big companies and make life harder for startups.
For a lot of people, one of the reasons they don't like to work for founders of startups is that they can be sensitive and protective around what they've built. You have an emotional attachment to the early marketing and technology materials, and you don't want to hear that anything's wrong with them.
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