Month: January 2012

Children of Steve Jobs, a Japanese documentary program aired by NHK last week, had an unexpected content to me.

The program mainly focused on the students who attended the commencement at Stanford University and listened to Steve Jobs’ speech in 2005. While I thought the program woud be about how these students are proceeding with their dream after 6 years and how they are becoming successful today, I realized right after the introduction the focus of program was completely opposite.

It was a reality show of Stanford graduates who lost his job at Goldman Sachs because of financial crisis, who walks down the street with a “hire me” sign on him everyday, who went back to India in exchange for helping own country and family by giving up a promised position at Google, who started own business as a journalist after being fired.

I understand it’s arguable to call it that way, but the program was just about “No more American dream” and the content was devastating to me. We are seeing global crisis right now. America is facing nearly 9% unemployment rate, which roughly results in 1 out of 10 people having no job.

Silicon Vally is still the place for all tech entrepreneurs to offer lots of opportunities that no other places on the earth can’t compete. Stanford University is still the driving force behind Silicon Vally and people graduated from the university were thought to be all successful. However, this show reminds me of being successful from someone else’s perspective is not always equal to being successul in his/her own life value.

If working at Goldman Sachs and Google gives you a ‘dot’ which leads to your valuable connection in the future as Steve Jobs said during commencement, just go for it. If you are doing it just because everyone will think you are successful, please don’t. Life is too short to play that kind of worthless game.

Our startup project Coworkify is now looking for new logo design. We’ve held a contest at 99designs and we had more than a hundred logos submitted in 4 days.

Cost we paid was $295 including various transaction fees and cut for platform holder. It’s just $3 for each design. Although quality of every logo varies a lot, it’s still huge time saving to us. If we were to produce a hundred logos by ourselves, it would have costed us more.

During product building phase of startup an entrepreneur must focus on one thing, which is to build a product in the most efficient way in a short period of time. At this phase he should not spend time on building a great team for future growth. All of his energy has to go into a product and people who can produce it.

For those who are willing to outsource some creative work I recommend that you take a look at 99designs, Hatchwise, Bootb, Prizes.

Fred Wilson wrote this great post few days ago about the management team at the first stage of startup, what he calls Product Building stage.

Although number of team members and co-founders may vary depending on scale of your product, I personally had to go through the similar process recently and reduced our team size from 9 to 4 people as a result.

A couple of weeks ago I heard from someone who attended the previous Startup Weekend saying that our team was just too large so that we won’t make it to the presentation on the last day of the event. I initially had same feeling but somehow we managed it while letting everyone join our team without questioning anything about his/her skills and without caring about overlapping between people.

Now that our project is at Product Building stage where everyone in the team must have certain skills and responsibilities not overlapping with each other. For this particular reason I had to make a tough decision to say “sorry, we will come back to you when we are at a certain phase in the future.”

This is not easy thing to say, especially to the people who were around us for a while as team members. However, at the same time it is true that overlapped skills and responsibilities in such a small team will create unnecessary communication effort and lots of frictions between team members which only you can resolve most of the time.

As a startup leader you don’t want to spend your time talking to team members just to make sure they don’t overlap each other. You want to focus on building a great product. If you find yourself spending too much time on communicating team members, maybe you’d better start thinking of solving the root cause of your problem.

Here is our current team structure and role of each person. 1) Frontend and backend developer (which is me) 2) UI/UX specialist 3) PR/Marketing 4) Business development and overall strategy. I’m hoping we won’t have to reduce number of people at least until product launch at DEMO.