| I can give these two piece of advice. 1) Don't delude yourself into thinking you're "changing" the world (for some ridiculous definition of changing). It's most likely that you aren't. Focus on the business fundamentals. There's an awful lot of startups making very ho-hum products -- small incremental improvements to existing things or dead end paths that nobody would ever possibly want. They've convinced themselves and their VCs that if only the entire world starts using their chat app or appointment reminder, that world peace would break out and we'd live in a Bill and Ted future where Rock music unites us all. They then build a business model that actually requires some percentage of humanity to get on board with their app to become profitable. They also forget that to the VCs, they don't care about changing the world, the company is the product and in the end the company will be sold for parts to the highest bidder. The business needs to optimize for this case because this is what the end-game looks like. Not a neon colored future where everybody is playing air guitar and peace and tranquility because they used your app. 2) If you're bringing lots of technology into the startup, it's not necessarily an advantage. Technological debt can absolutely cripple you. And by the time you've realized it, you're completely out of money and left with old technology that nobody wants. I know of a more than a few startups that get kicked off with a million lines of existing software. They think it's the matter of some source clean up and some new paint on the front end and it'll be easy street. Inevitably, they spend most of their VC investment bringing this legacy to market and getting customer #1. Feedback from early customers is positive, but with one caveat, "this software needs to do x, where x requires a fundamental rewrite of the entire product. By the time a decision is made to start a ground-up rewrite to support x the company is a couple years in and has lost all of the momentum a startup needs when coming out of stealth mode. rewrite = reboot of the company. You accomplish the rewrite, pitching it as the next version, but shifting entire technology stacks doesn't feel like a version bump to the customers (it's a huge investment for them as well). All the sales activity you've done over the last year is also junk, unless you feel like supporting the old and new versions simultaneously, and you probably don't have the resources to do that well. By the end, you're out of VC, coasting on what your sales team is pulling in, but not moving revenue in enough of a positive direction to exit or raise another round. You try to sell it on the cheap and recoup the VC, but buyers are wary of the now very old technological debt you've accumulated and the small customer base you're bringing to the deal. Along the way you pick up some very onerous, non-friendly software licenses for some of your components -- %of gross revenue or something even more onerous like GPLv3 which makes your entire technological investment worthless. Buyers doing due diligence decide not to buy. Your company is a zombie at this point. |