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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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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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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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Hindsight is rarely 20/20. It's far too easy to claim causality where none exists. After all, plenty of the "good" traits of successful startups are present in ones that eventually fail.
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Were you actually excited about enterprise software, was it solving a problem you had, or was it just a good business opportunity?
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The traditional 'hacker' approach is to build a prototype, and throw it out to users. Is this the most efficient way to do it? Are there other ways to get your idea in front of users, to see how they react?
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Say I come up with an idea, do my market research, find no one has done it yet, and get to work on implementation. In the meantime, someone unveils a site that does the same thing. Oops--race condition! What should I do? This actually happened to some friends of mine. (They gave up.)
A variant: say I come up with a good idea and find it's *already* been done? Should I try to do it better (a la Facebook), or should I just move on to the next idea?
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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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One one hand we have application delivery services TCP accelerators(netli), multi-connection applications(F5,Juniper), UDP-blasters (signiant, asperasoft), packet classifiers+delayers(packateer) and on the other content delivery networks (limelight,panther,bitgravity,etc).Finally there is streaming service giants like Akamai, Move Networks,etc. Then there is these box vendors like Riverbed who optimize extranets..
Given this fragmented solution set for a single delivery need, Do you see an integration of all these services provided by one provider or is it destined to be further balkanized where a typical web property had to choose multiple vendors and mix in their own solution for each of their needs?
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