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My wife and I were going through old videos the other day, and we stumbled upon this video of Avery’s fourth birthday party. I invited Nancy and her son Ethan to the party. Nancy used to work for me a couple years before that.
The video consists of me talking excitedly to Nancy about starting my company. At the time I was an EIR (Entrepreneur in Residence) for a VC fund in San Francisco, and the video is painful for me to watch.
I’m telling Nancy, in this very authoritative way, about how things would play out over the next year. Everything I said to Nancy was pretty much wrong. LOL!
I was on a pretty steep learning curve in those days about starting a company. You probably are too if this is your first startup.
So, here are my painful learnings of things you should never do starting a company from that time and beyond:
A. You should never hire co-founders that aren’t passionate about your business.
You are going to run into so many problems you can’t imagine. From running out of money, to customers not paying on time, to products not working right, to investors pulling their support that anyone that isn’t a true believer in you and your company will leave.
