Brad Feld - Startup Opportunities: Know When to Quit Your Day Job

Second Edition

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Copyright 2017 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

The first edition of Startup Opportunities was published by FG Press in 2015.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:

Names: Feld, Brad, author. | Wise, Sean, 1970- author.

Title: Startup opportunities: know when to quit your day job/Brad Feld and Sean Wise.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, 2017. | Includes index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2017011359 (print) | LCCN 2017009358 (ebook) | ISBN 978-1-119-37818-1 (cloth: alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-119-37817-4 (ePDF) | ISBN 9781-1-19-37819-8 (ePub)

Subjects: LCSH: New business enterprises. | Entrepreneurship.

Classification: LCC HD62.5.F445 2017 (ebook) | LCC HD62.5 (print) | DDC 658.1/1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017011359

To Amy and Marisa,
our wives, who are by far the best opportunities we have ever invested in

Dear Chris. I have an idea that will revolutionize a $34 billion industry...

Do you know what that is? An email I will never open. No matter how elegant the prose that follows, I see a snippet like that in Gmail and immediately hit Archive.

Why? As youve heard me say for years, Ideas are cheap. Execution is everything.

At some point, each of us has had that moment where we say, Wouldnt it be cool if... ? Every single human being is capable of churning those out. In fact, I am certain some of you once thought, Wouldnt it be cool if I could push a button and have a car and driver show up? Wouldnt it be cool if people could rent out their houses for just a couple days at a time? Wouldnt it be cool if there were an API for payments? Wouldnt it be cool if you could make phone calls and text into your app by using just a little bit of HTML?

You came up with those ideas, so why arent you a billionaire founder on the cover of a magazine? You even bought the endearingly vowel-free domain name, so why arent you going public?

Because all the value, all the magic, all the accomplishment, and everything else that matters in entrepreneurship comes in the grueling months and years following the Wouldnt it be cool if... ? question.

Since I started making seed investments in 2007, I have been obsessively focused on founders. I spend tons of time with them and go deep in the areas I know well. I never worked on Wall Street or at P&G, and I suck at Excel. So, if we team up, Im not your supply chain manager or ads optimizer, nor will you catch me estimating Q3 sales five years out.

If we work together, I am there to help you make your product easy and real.

Back in the day, it was expensive to start building a company. Software was proprietary, founders had to buy pricey servers, and they even had to run their own equipment racks in a speedy data center. All of this meant entrepreneurs needed to raise lots of money before they could build anything.

The result? Ideas were splayed across 60-page business plans written by investment banking trainees. Aspiring CEOs were forced to run the investor gauntlet and have every assumption questioned. Hand-wavey bullshit artists with dog-eared copies of Getting to Yes and Starting with No on their genuine faux leather coffee tables drove the painstakingly Socratic process.

Today, with open source, AWS, GitHub, and coffee shops with free Wi-Fi, there are few barriers to taking an impulse and slapping some code on it. Just $99 will get you a solid logo and smooth-looking homepage that makes it look like you know what youre doing. No more professional networking connections needed, no fancy B-school degrees, and no slick-talking pitch doctors. These days, builders gonna build.

Raise a glass to the democratization of it all! And best of luck to all the now unnecessary investment bankers with incredible PowerPoint and personal grooming skills who have since moved back to New York City to apply their talents to some predatory lending scheme or mass layoff.

But the downside? Too many of you who are founding stuff are skipping the part where smart people beat the shit out of your idea over and over again before anything gets built.

When I first got into this investing business full-time, I was holed up at Brickhouse on Brannon in San Francisco hearing back-to-back pitches. Small teams who could show me live code were impressive. I loved being able to play with a site or an app rather than merely considering a hypothetical.

Yet, almost everything they showed me was irretrievably misguided from the get-go. I met hundreds of entrepreneurs who didnt even know their own competitive landscape, let alone have the ability to describe to me in plain English why they would win the space. It was devastatingly clear: They hadnt done the intellectual work that would be the foundation for everything that came next.

In 2008, Id had enough of these frustrating conversations, so my wife and I moved to Truckee, a small mountain town near Lake Tahoe. Our thesis was that instead of running from coffee to coffee, wed identify the most intriguing minds in startups and invite them up to our house for weekends. We would go deep with the founders whose thinking challenged ours. Whether we were skiing, hiking, cooking, playing music, or snowshoeing, we were also spending that time batting around visions and predictions and controversial points of view. We would sit around for hours in our hot tub, which soon became known as the jam tub. For days at a time, we just jammed on ideas, pushing one anothers reasoning, testing assumptions, and forging moments of clarity and inspiration.