- Today we're gonna look
at what I wish I knew when I started as a founder 25 years ago. We're gonna look at what I've
learned over those 25 years that I can pass on and it's
very important to a new founder. You might as well learn it here instead making all the painful
mistakes that I've made. This is Raw Startup. I built companies my entire life, I've been an entrepreneur
for the past 25 years and I learned a lot from that. The latest being Vivino,
the world's largest wine app and community with more than 35 million users all over the world. 20,000 people install
Vivino every single day and over time we raised $57 million. There are obviously
hundreds of different things I can pass on but I've boiled this down to six different things. The six different things
that I find most important, the six things that I wish I knew and the six things that are relevant for almost all founders. When I started out as a founder,
I really wasn't very good. There was no YouTube to learn
from, when I think about it, there really wasn't much
of an internet either. The only alternative was reading books but books were usually
old and even the new books were written last year, once they came out and got printed, they were already kind of old. With very little experience and not that many people around me to ask what's right and wrong, I did a lot of trial and error. Trial and error is a way to learn but it can be an expensive way to learn so thank you very much to
all the early investors that backed me and my teams, they certainly paid for
my founder education, thank you very much for that. At least, I'm gonna do whatever I can to help the next generation
of founders and entrepreneurs. I'm gonna pass on whatever I've learned to you guys and hopefully
you can learn from that. I can promise you there
are things in this video that will surprise you, things that are not in any textbook but they're from my real life experience. All that said, you can learn from others but you can't learn everything, you will be making decisions
out of uncertainty. In those cases, just do it, that's the best advice, just do it. With that said, let's go to the list. Number one, be short term
impatient and long term patient. I'm sure you heard this before, doing a startup is a
marathon, not a sprint. That sometimes confuses
people to thinking, hey, we have to run
slowly to preserve energy just like a marathon but that's
not the case with a startup. With a startup, you're sprinting your way all the way through the marathon, there's no preserving energy. The fact that it's a marathon does not mean you have a lot of time, you're still in a hurry and that's why we like the expression, be short term impatient
but long term patient. So you are sprinting like a crazy one but you also know this is a long marathon. Yes, this is gonna take some time but it still means everything
has to be done right now, short term impatient, long term patient. Great founders know they have to run this marathon like a sprint. With that, let's go to number two. Number two, build a great founding team. In the early days of a startup, the only thing that's there is an idea and the founding team, nothing else. Some people do great alone but startups with more than one founder
generally do better. Doing a startup is hard
and having someone there to support you and challenge you just increases your chance of success. Founders usually have different skills because you need different skills for the different tasks
that need to be solved. For a tech startup, it's good
to have some tech skills, very often you'll need sales
skills and in most cases, you need domain knowledge too. Make sure you have all the skills needed to get the startup off the ground. In Vivino's case, domain knowledge would have been knowledge about wine and we had none of that. We knew nothing about
wine or the wine industry, we just needed help
picking the right wine. But that all turned out to be an advantage because we understood
our users really well because they also had very
little wine knowledge. So in our case, little,
very little domain knowledge turned out to be an advantage. Generally, I recommend you have
a diversified founding team that can do around 90% of
whatever needs to be done. And this is where
multiple founders come in. I don't know a lot of amazing engineers that also are great sales people. You need multiple founders to get both. I've done a video only
about finding a co-founder, so please check out that
video for more information. This cannot be underestimated, you have to have an amazing founding team. On that note, let's go to number three. Number three, focus like crazy. This is really not that complicated but can be really hard to do in practice. When you are building a startup,
you're always in a race, you race against the competition, a race against time, a race
against running out of money. Either way, what's
important is finding out what needs to be done to win this race and then focus like crazy. This all sounds pretty
easy until you get tempted, and then it's not easy, that's when you have to focus like crazy. Let me give me you two examples,
you'll be tempted by money. Somebody is gonna offer you
25K for this consulting gig, all you have to do is change
a product a little bit, make a special version,
not quite what you focus on but we really need that money. Every time you do that, you
lose to the competition. If you do it very often,
you'll lose the race, at some point your product
just cannot compete anymore. For Vivino, the temptations
came from a different direction. We have a new business opportunity coming to us every single day. Some company somewhere in the world that says this is an amazing opportunity, you need to do this right now. That happens every single day. That's what happens if you
have a high profile company with millions of users. Most of these opportunities
are easy to say no to, but some of them are not. What do you do when the really big guys come knocking on your door? You're still a small startup,
suddenly Amazon, Samsung, or Google want to do business with you. Now it's suddenly a lot harder to say no. For instance, when Amazon in 2014 wanted to build their own smartphone, the Amazon Fire, they knocked on our door. They needed help with
recognizing wine bottles and data on wine. We ended up investing heavily in this partnership with Amazon but when the phone was
launched, it went nowhere, was taken off the market
only months after. The resource we put into that partnership could have been used to put
into building a better product and winning against the
competition, and that's a problem. We should have stayed focused but it's hard to say no to Amazon. When Amazon launched the product, they had founder Jeff Bezos
present the Amazon Fire phone including some of the
Vivino powered features. So at least we got that out of it, we got Jeff Bezos
pitching Vivino, not bad. My advice to you is to only
take the best opportunities, the opportunities that
align with your focus but at the same time are a
win-win for both companies. It's important that it's both companies because otherwise there's a chance the other party pulls the plug after you've invested
into this partnership. So focus like crazy. Sometimes you have to pivot, change direction, that's fine too, just don't try and do many
things at the same time. When you pivot, you
focus everything on that. Great, let's move on to number four. Number four, learn to
operate and be frugal. You're now running a business,
a startup is a business, there's no way around that. It means you have to learn the
basics of running a business. I prefer if one of the founders
knows how to run a business or at least wants to learn it fast, if that's not possible, find
somebody who can help quickly, you gotta make sure the
business is well operated. I'm not saying it's very difficult but you have to prioritize
it and get it right. If the business doesn't
operate, nothing works and the startup is gonna fail. So you have to know your
numbers both financial and others, the basics have to be running and the salaries have to go out on time. The other thing here is being frugal especially in the early
stages of the company. What you have is equity,
shares in the company that you can sell so you get
the company off the ground. But you can only sell that once. When you've sold 1% of your
company, it's never coming back. Now to the tricky part,
that 1% of the company has one value in the early days, hopefully a very, very
different value later on. You have to be very, very careful you don't sell too much at the lower price that you can sell later at
a much, much higher price. Let me give you a very real
and literal example of that. With Vivino, the value changed rapidly from the early days to later. For 1% of Vivino in 2011, I
could buy a Chevrolet Trax. Two years later and the
value of the company increased a lot. If things go well for you, this
is also what happens to you, it's not a unique Vivino thing. Actually, two years
later, the exact same 1% would have gotten us a McLaren 720S. This is obviously not about buying cars, it's about how many resources you have to build your startup. So be frugal in the early days so you won't have to
buy too many Chevrolets when you can have a McLaren. Good, we're done with the cars, let's move on to number five. Number five, learn to sell. I get it, most founders hate to sell, they wanna be founders, not sales people. However, as a founder you will be selling. You will be selling your
startup, that's your job. Stop whining, this is your dream, this is not only about selling
products to your customers, this is about selling
your startup to everyone. You'll be selling it to investors, you'll be selling it to new employees, employees that have plenty
of other opportunities but you will convince them that they need to take a chance with you. This may come as a surprise to you but this is what being a founder is, selling, convincing,
evangelizing your startup when nobody else has faith
in it except for you. So how do you actually do that? I think the most important thing here is to realize that it is an
important part of your job, realizing that being a founder
is very much about selling, being serious about it, learning about it, and always being prepared for selling. Obviously when you meet somebody
who's amazing at selling, learn from them. I met very few founding teams that in at least have one founder that could really sell their message. I think it's hard to succeed without that, but don't worry, you can
learn it, just prioritize it. Number six, think big, start small. You really wanna think big, tell the world you're building
the Starship Enterprise even though it looks like
a small rocket right now. This is really something I
learned by moving to the U.S., everybody thinks big here. When you come from a small place, it's easier to think small and we very often do so, but not here. In the U.S. people think big, everything's bigger here and
you should really think big when you build a startup. However, don't start by
building the Starship Enterprise when it's your first spacecraft. Instead, you should be thinking
big but starting small. The reason why this is so important is because you won't get
it right the first time. Imagine if your start by
building the Starship Enterprise and you don't get it right,
that's not a great idea. So let me repeat that, you won't get it right the
first time, nobody ever does. This also means you should
not build for scale. If you get a million visits
to your website the first day, your service will crash, great. We certainly had that happen
a few times with Vivino and usually what we got out of it was more press and more attention. Also, let me give you
a little secret here, nobody gets a million uses
from the first day, sorry. So why is it important
not to build for scale? It's important not to build for scale because it's a waste of resources. You're building for something
that you might need later, all those resources should
be put into what's important, the product, so don't build for scale. This is all about execution, you need to think about
what the next small thing that you execute on gets you one step closer to the big idea. Always think about the next step, the next small step that
takes you to the big idea, the Starship Enterprise. Starting small also means you have to say goodbye to perfection. Keep it simple, not perfect. This is a big challenge
for a lot of founders, they wanna build and
launch perfect products. In the real world, that's
very, very difficult. I believe in MVP, minimum viable product, build the smallest possible thing and then listen to your customers. I often hear the argument, I love Apple, they build such amazing, perfect products, that's what I wanna do. That is true, Apple build
amazing, perfect products and they have the resources
to do it, guess what? You're not Apple. So start small, keep iterating
'til you get it right, iterate, iterate, iterate, keep iterating 'til you get it right. So always think big, start small. Great, we're not quite done yet. This was a list that
was really hard to do. I had a lot of runners up that
didn't quite make the cut. So this is my list, I'd
love to hear from you what do you think is missing on the list? I've started the party, write
down there in the comments where I put some of my runners up. Things that I think are important but didn't make the top six here. I put them in there and guys, please put some of your stuff in there. What do you think
should've made this list? Number one, be short term
impatient and long term patient. Number two, build a great founding team. Number three, focus like crazy. Number four, learn to
operate and always be frugal. Number five, learn to sell. Number six, think big, start small. There you have it, this is the final list. If you're a new founder, I
hope you can really use this, so try not to make these mistakes, at least make some new mistakes. That's it, if you want more
videos just like this one to help you build your startup, please subscribe to my channel right now. Thank you very much for watching. (upbeat music)
