Casey Schorr

“I have had the privilege of observing a number of founders grow their companies from just a few people to over a hundred employees. Leaving all the other growth challenges aside, I have come to conclude that personal scaling is the most important issue. By personal scaling I mean figuring out how…”

I’m going through this now and it’s really hard. For years I’ve read about how hard it is for founders to ‘give up control’ but man, it’s difficult! It’s such a weird feeling to have people working for you, not really knowing exactly what they are doing, only knowing the high level goals they’re trying to achieve, not knowing how they’ll implement something, realizing it will always be different than how I’d implement it, etc. Basically realizing you’ll never know everything, and no matter what you have to trust them that they’re doing the right thing, learning on their own, asking the right questions, etc. I could go on and on, maybe I’ll write some posts about this.

What makes the problem a bit easier, and reminds me I absolutely have to figure it out, is the advice is universal. Everyone says you have to give up control to grow and take it to the next level. There’s not a lot of startup advice that’s universal, so when it is, you better listen up!

Have you gone through this process already? Would love to hear your thoughts, leave a comment please!

Boulder’s Entrepreneurial Weakness – Space

Brad Feld, a local Colorado VC, just wrote an interesting article about Boulder’s startup space problem. I couldn’t resist and left the following as a comment on his post…

I know this won’t happen, but I secretly wish the Boulder entreprenural community was transplanted to LoDo Denver. Specifically, the part of downtown North West of Market Street. LoDo is remarkably similar to downtown Boulder with many advantages. It has the same feel, 1800’s brick buildings mostly three stories and under, yet it doesn’t have any of the problems Boulder is plagued with. As a startup CEO who’s lived in both Denver and Boulder, and moved my company from Denver to Boulder back to Denver, let me explain why this pipe-dream would be great…

1. You have a valid point the “space crunch” keeps entrepreneurs together. Just like SoMa SF, and the startup-dense parts of NYC, LoDo denver is small. Yet not a “bubble” and has lots of options if you outgrow it.

2. Tons of great restaurants, coffee shops, etc. WAY more variety than Downtown Boulder

3. The bigger startups that outgrow LoDo office space can move 2 blocks to the SE and choose from literally a million square feet of office space in the “high rise” part of downtown, and still interact with the smaller startups in LoDo.

4. Better public transportation - FasTracks will connect all points of Denver and DIA to LoDo via the amazing redesigned Union Station. Already there’s wonderful light rail and bus service to the LoDo area from all over. Public transit in Boulder is terrible, especially for people living outside of Boulder proper. It’s a massive traffic jam getting into Boulder each day with no train, no HOV lanes, no nothing. And because of Boulder political views, I doubt they will increase the highway capacity. Boulder is a bubble, one road in one road out, not good for commuters.

5. The hip, young, startup crowd has tons of neighborhoods to choose from, from trendy to family oriented, all within 15 minutes of downtown. Boulder has a massive “age gap” between college-age and 30+ with families. Lots of young people I know involved with the startup scene don’t like living in Boulder and choose to commute from Denver, or not locate in Boulder at all, because all the twenty-somethings live in Denver and it’s a lot more fun. Boulder is really boring for post-college twenty-somethings without a family. This is the primary reason I moved away from Boulder back to Denver.

6. The cost of office space in LoDo is similar, or cheaper than downtown Boulder. And taxes are lower. And there’s true class A space, almost impossible to find in downtown Boulder.

7. The cost of living in Denver is about 20% less than in Boulder, primarily because housing is a lot cheaper. This is a major factor and could position Colorado as a “low cost startup hub”.

8. Denver government is very pro-business compared to Boulder. These are just some reasons I’ve observed first-hand having office space in LoDo and then moving to Boulder, and back. I know it’s a pipe dream but a larger city like Denver, if we could start over, would be a lot better in my opinion.

Curious to hear your opinion, leave a comment on Brad’s blog or here!

We’ve all seen this one (via andrewdumont).

But here’s my take. It isn’t just a “hype” lifecycle, I’d argue most entrepreneurs go through a focus and discipline lifecycle as well.

In my personal experience, we never had a ton of hype surrounding our product. But as we got traction, we started to loose focus. The more revenue and customers increased, the more opportunity poured in from every orifice. All of this opportunity was lethal.

We started building more features, got smart and cut them, built a different feature, forgot to figure out marketing because we had lots of customers, started thinking about marketing and decided to target a different audience, etc. This was our “humps of iteration” which I hope we’re mostly done with.

I’d say we’re currently in the “finally have a product and now need customers” phase, even though we’re profitable with respectable revenues - it doesn’t feel like it. It feels like we just found our footing and are about to go out there and change the world.

I’ve been at this long enough, seen enough “up and to the right” graphs that I know there’s going to be a sloth ascent before we hit the exponential curve. But the excitement of how far we’ve come, and what’s down the road, keeps me going every day.

I wouldn’t change the startup lifecycle for anything… what a ride!

Facebook’s Zuckerberg: I would not have moved to Silicon Valley

Zuck says he’d do things differently if he was starting Facebook now, namely not moving his company to Silicon Valley.

I found this interesting, knowing so many entrepreneurs who’ve moved to the valley ‘just because’ it’s what everyone else is doing. Or they think there are more qualified people to work at their startup (there are, but there’s also 100x more competition to hire them, plus cost of living in SF is rediculous).

One prop for the valley - I have heard from lots of qualified people it’s easier to get funded there, but I firmly beleive if you have a good idea and a solid team you can get funded anywhere. Plus having some barriers to funding helps you really hone your idea and make your business kick-ass before getting massive dollars. We almost got funding back in 2006-2007, at the time it sounded like a great idea. I’m so glad we didn’t. We didn’t know what the hell we were doing, and if we’d taken funding back then we’d be just another CafePress rip-off. Not having money made us focus on the business because we had no choice. Not having funding is the reason we pivoted into a niche way more interesting with less competition. But this is a whole post in of itself.

If there’s one thing I’ve learned in life, it’s that you should zig when others zag. Whatever everyone else is doing, don’t do it. This is the golden rule for marketing especially.

My last parting thought: is Zuckerberg just saying ‘don’t move here’ to keep other startups out of the valley to reduce recruiting competition? What do you think?

Here’s my favorite part of the article:

If I were starting now I would do things very differently. I didn’t know anything. In Silicon Valley, you get this feeling that you have to be out here. But it’s not the only place to be. If I were starting now, I would have stayed in Boston. [Silicon Valley] is a little short-term focused and that bothers me. He explained that he had a conversation once with Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos about this, and the average time someone stays in job at Seattle is twice as long than it is in Silicon Valley. “There’s a culture out here where people don’t commit to doing things, I feel like a lot of companies built outside of Silicon Valley seem to be focused on a longer-term,” he explains. “You don’t have to move out here to do this.”