Obviously, yes. Unlike Silicon Valley or Boston, there are nearly 20 million people who live in the New York metro area; it is far too big a place to be known for just one thing. After all, Madison Avenue and Wall Street represent more than just city streets. Not many other cities in the country or the world can claim one street name that stands in for an industry—yet alone two. But under the giant shadow of the advertising, media, legal, finance, tourism, and restaurant industries—not to mention all the big corporate headquarters for which NYC is so well known—there also exists an important and growing community of innovators. Working from neighborhoods like the Flatiron, West Chelsea (once dingy and dangerous, now hip), and the forever up-and-coming and—thanks to the New York Times building—now nearly arrived Garment District, these startups and, now, well-established technology and online innovators don’t have expensive views of Central Park but they have become a meaningful presence in their own right. NYC does not yet have its Ebay, YouTube or Google, but we’ve had some big successes and now have our own hometown “serial entrepreneurs” like Chris Dixon and multi-hit early stage investors like Fred Wilson, who is arguably in the same league as the best early stage investors anywhere. (Wilson is so good, in fact, that full-fledged Silicon Valley companies like Zynga and Twitter actually received their first round of funding in part from him.)
This is the world I’ve lived and learned in for the past ten years. My business partner Ariel and I have launched three startups in NYC since 1998, and we’ve worked in nearly every “startup neighborhood” (except Brooklyn). We’ve had some successes and some failures. We like to think we’ve learned a lot along the way and we’ve definitely had a lot of fun doing it. Startups, innovation, and creativity have seeped into our blood to the point where we could not imagine doing anything else or live a day without, in some way or another, thinking about our work.
Ariel and I founded our last startup, Epana, in 2000 and rode it from the end of the last bubble to a near bankruptcy in the fall of 2002 and through to a large profitable company with more than 400 employees by the end of 2005. We can’t say we’ve seen it all; who has, and who would want to (if in ten years I realize that I know no more than I know today, I’ll be deeply disappointed) but at Epana we saw and experienced a lot and we’re looking forward to telling some of the stories. We had to deal with challenges and opportunities in a multitude of disciplines including technology (making bleeding-edge technology not only work but scale), consumer branding, third-party distribution, a large company-owned sales force, general management, human resources, analytics, financing, and the dynamics of a venture-backed, board-of-directors-controlled company. I was the CEO, and left in mid-2006 to “pursue other opportunities” (more on that later), and Ariel was the COO. He left about a year and a half after me. In 2008, we put the band back together again—along with our third partner and my youngest brother, Eytan—and after working under wraps for nearly a year and a half, we recently launched Oyster Hotel Reviews.
We like to say that we’ve been to the gym for business and startups over the past 10+ years and this blog, among other things, will be about the lessons we’ve learned and things we’ve observed along that stressful, enjoyable, risky road.
Future posts will include the following topics and I’m, of course, open to suggestions. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts. In no particular order:
- Execution is 99%, strategy is 1%
- Choose your market carefully
- An arrogant VC has been rude and obnoxious to your – admittedly terrible – business idea in a meeting. What should you do?
- What happens to your company if your VC investor goes out of business?
- VCs – generalist vs specialist?
- My advice – choose carefully whose advice you heed
- Why “hot markets” never are
- Overnight success in five years
- It’s not how much you raise – it’s how much you make
- Fire the bottom 10% – do it as respectfully as possible but do it
- Why big companies waste time with business planning and projections exercise
- Why valuation metrics other than profits are the lies you tell yourself
- The cost of the OS you use does not matter
- Leica M9 – The most beautiful camera ever
- Get an SSD and upgrade to Win7 – right now
- Athlete vs experience
- Hiring hit rate
- Democracy – the enemy in a startup
- Revenue solves all problems
- What resumes don’t tell you
- When hiring, look for attributes and capabilities more than experiences
- Hiring for a startup out of BigCo; extremely hard to do
- Do entrepreneurs make good VCs?
- Most VCs are clueless about making a startup successful yet VCs control a lot of companies. Should they?
- How to interview a VC before you let them become a shareholder
- When to raise money
- Are you building an asset or a Company or both?
- How much employee churn should you have in a startup?
- Why you should remove the average calculation from Excel
- Mercenary vs missionary
- Religious wars – Nikon vs Canon and Windows vs Mac
- Why (the right) layoffs are good for morale
- How open should you be?
- Why don’t you ever see James Simons (founder of uber successful Renaissance hedge fund) on CNBC?
- What do you do with really smart and productive employees who are not passionate about winning?
- Don’t chase the mythical “what a future investor will want to see” strategy
- How is the valuation of a company set in a negotiation with VCs?
- Companies are not charities. Companies that don’t make money are not worth anything. Simple, right?
- Why has Google invested billions into internet charity, YouTube? Would they do it over if they could?
- CEOs run companies. Boards run CEOs. Who runs the board?
- What kind of computer equipment should I buy myself and my team?
- The path is the point – are you having any fun?
