- hire people with domain and technical expertise; don't stumble through without expertise and having to reinvent things poorly and fail.
The author seems to be advising to wait till you have a fairly concrete business idea and the required technical and domain expertise for starting up – especially with your own money – because both time and money are in short supply.
This is great advice if you want to build a new business with you own savings or with debt etc, but without funding from VCs.
If it is VC funded, in the early rounds, you are basically an experimental bet for the VC – a small risk for a potential huge upside. For you too it should be the same – a small risk bet with a potential huge upside (you shouldn't starve yourself).
By the time you get to bigger funding rounds, you have figured out – product market fit and execution – that you and VCs believe this is scalable and hence the bigger round.
If you fail at the earlier rounds, that's an expected likely outcome. If you and VCs have a relationship of mutual admiration, then you continue to be funded to do something else – the pivot.
When this happens, VCs and you should consider the previous investment as mostly a write-off and think of this as a new start. After a few such pivots, the VCs may lose confidence and hence you run out of funding. You may also be burnt out (from the high-stakes decision fueled execution stress) and choose to return the money and take a break.
All this is perfectly normal and expected in VC land.
- hire people with domain and technical expertise; don't stumble through without expertise and having to reinvent things poorly and fail.
The author seems to be advising to wait till you have a fairly concrete business idea and the required technical and domain expertise for starting up – especially with your own money – because both time and money are in short supply.
This is great advice if you want to build a new business with you own savings or with debt etc, but without funding from VCs.
If it is VC funded, in the early rounds, you are basically an experimental bet for the VC – a small risk for a potential huge upside. For you too it should be the same – a small risk bet with a potential huge upside (you shouldn't starve yourself).
By the time you get to bigger funding rounds, you have figured out – product market fit and execution – that you and VCs believe this is scalable and hence the bigger round.
If you fail at the earlier rounds, that's an expected likely outcome. If you and VCs have a relationship of mutual admiration, then you continue to be funded to do something else – the pivot.
When this happens, VCs and you should consider the previous investment as mostly a write-off and think of this as a new start. After a few such pivots, the VCs may lose confidence and hence you run out of funding. You may also be burnt out (from the high-stakes decision fueled execution stress) and choose to return the money and take a break.
All this is perfectly normal and expected in VC land.