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I'm sure that before every great idea conceived by an entrepreneur, he/she had hundreds of ideas before that. How does one decide which ideas are worth putting time, effort, and ultimately, money, into?
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You are in a startup scenario, and find that you have competition from some well established companies trying to do similar (if not same) thing. The initiative by both are not influenced by each other (bluntly, idea not copied). What is your opinion in such a case?
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In 2001, Loudcloud had some real problems. You had a volatile customer base, a spectacular burn rate ($50+ million a quarter!), and a lackluster IPO. How did you deal with people that were (justifiably) frightened that LoudCloud was not viable? Also, when did things turn the corner?
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What is your advice when facing off against bigger rivals?
What would you have done differently if you could battle MS again? -
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A challenge is that a startup person has to be a bold and confident leader while being a humble and nervous student/experimenter. Advice on how to balance the two? How to present oneself to not appear cocky but also not appear clueless?
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Please throw some pointers about how we can monetize social-networking space? What business models are meant to be survived in this space, and what will die? Do you see more niches are coming in this space, or do you see existing big players will only rule this space and niches will die eventually.
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One of the fears that I have is losing users because the startup was not ready to handle large amounts of hits..similar to what happened to Friendster.
Should young startups be worried about this? Should they start out forking out cash to RackSpace or ServerBeach in the beginning? As students, $300+ is a bundle to spend a month on a server. When is a good time to start worrying about scalability?
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You talk about product/market fit and you refer to Steve Blank's book 4 steps to market epiphany. That book primarily refers to enterprise oriented startup. Do you have any suggestions of how to get to product/market fit for consumer oriented startups? Specifically, what are some signs to know if you are headed in the right direction in your product and what signs to indicate you're headed in the wrong direction in your product. I find the heardest thing is knowing whether to persist in a given endevaour or switch to something else.
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Do you think your earlier self would have actually taken that advice? :-)
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It seems like there's a lot of beliefs that startup founders have about what makes for highly productive individuals and teams that don't jive with many of the things that you've written about in terms of productivity.
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I.e., a lot of would be founders don't have a large personal bank account to fall back on and, for good and bad, that affects their approach to risk.
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