When to doubt

Written by Aviram on .

 

 

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If Steve Jobs would have asked industry experts before launching the iPod, they would all tell him that entering the mp3 player market is a waste of time and effort; market was already saturated with cheap players, some as cheap as $10. The differentiation was low (what can possibly be different about a device that plays music?) and the focus was in making devices really small, or increasing the capacity. Mp3 players already could hold more songs than a standard CD player and thus it seemed there was nothing left to innovate. Coming out with a premium music player was a bad idea.

 

 

Killing products

Written by Aviram on .

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One of the iron rules for startups is focus, and focus means focusing on a single product. But the problem with rules, especially when it comes to startups, is that “rules are meant to be broken”. Startups, at least the very successful ones, break some accepted rules when they disrupt the market. So it’s very tempting for startup founders to decide that their case is special: they don’t need to focus, and they have excellent reasons for focusing on more than one product.

Time and the theory of relativity

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Time is a funny concept. For Startups, the concept of time is crucial, but just like in Einstein's theory of relativity, time is not always a constant.

When you need to get initial revenues, you must hurry. If you are unable to get revenues you should show user growth. In that case, what you should realize is that growth is much more important than user count. Whether it’s total revenue or user count - whatever you have achieved will be divided by the time factor; rate is more important than the absolute number. Yahoo is making Billions of dollars a year, but investors are disappointed because it's not growing fast enough.

2014 checklist

Written by Aviram on .

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The end of 2014 marks for me three years in Korea, trying to help Korean startups achieve global success.

The goal which I have set to myself: taking a Korean startup to an M&A, a large foreign VC investment or a significant worldwide presence, has not been reached yet. But I have next year to continue and try to reach this goal.

In 2015, I plan to meet more Korean startups, to interact more with Israeli mentors and connect them with the local Korean startups, and work with Korean startups both in Korea and in Silicon Valley to help them launch their products successfully. It’s been hard work for me - more than I expected; just like any entrepreneur, I jumped into this project optimistically thinking I will quickly make a difference in the Korean startup ecosystem. I expected a large impact in a short time, and just like almost any entrepreneur I realized the work is a lot harder than I initially expected. But also just like any startup entrepreneur, learning the difficulties only makes me more determined to work harder and succeed. Israel has a saying: “if you push hard and it doesn’t open, push harder”. Next year I will push harder.

Most of what I did were mistakes

Written by Aviram on .

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The quote in the title belongs to Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, perhaps the most successful startup in history. The only thing that is surprising about this statement is that he said it out loud, in front of an audience; I’m willing to bet that if you could read the thoughts of the most successful business managers to see how they sum up the year that just ended, they would all be thinking a lot about all the mistakes they’ve made.

Making mistakes is not just an unavoidable step in the process to success, it is a crucial one. When you are a low-level employee or a mid-level manager you can try your best to avoid mistakes, maybe in fear of your boss being angry at you, or maybe because you can just follow instructions as closely as possible in which case no one will blame you for anything bad that happens.

Competitive barrier

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“What is your competitive barrier?” that’s a question that was very frequently asked by investors a decade and two decades ago. Nowadays it is hardly asked.

 

It’s still a good question for a startup to ask itself: what prevents from a competitor to copy the idea and out-perform you? Uber is one of the hottest Silicon Valley startups, but their fear is that a local competitor - Lyft - will become more popular. When the startup Digg was worth $200 Million (on paper) their biggest fear was that reddit will be more popular. In both these cases, it seems to be a zero-sum game; as one company becomes more successful and popular, the other company will be weaker and see it market segment shrink.