Met a couple of people with very big ambitions, perhaps bigger than they can handle — makes me think that trying to build a billion dollar company from day one might not be such a good thing afterall. Wonder why huge companies “got built” when large markets and good solutions existed (rather than founders starting out with a mission to build a huge company.) Somehow the strategy seems to go haywire when you forget the first million and the next 10 million milestones. Other than the fact that the skill sets required at each stage are also different.
Even elephants are born as babies.
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I came across an interesting (ad)venturer/book – rather an account misadventurer. His is an descriptive and humorous recount of mistakes and failure steps in three failed ventures before the successful fourth. Thought it might be relevant for the venture wood audience. And possibly connect with this topic too.
http://alchemya.com/blog/DesiStartup/desi.html
Book: Blue Screen of Death
Adventurer: Jawwad Farid
BTW, Alok, How do I post a new article here. What are the guidelines. I am planning to review the book after I read the full text. And perhaps post the review here.
The best approach IMO is to look out for a beachead 🙂
Rajan
I agree with Ben and Jerry’s model – where every startup should try to build a solid foundation – exploring few domians and then try to levearage there strength , expertise to branch there growth process out in a more organic way.
Why must SIZE be the primary focus?
Of course every startup wants to be “big” one day. But, I am of the opinion that (for a startup) the primary focus should be on the IDEA – size is something that may or may not be a result of successful execution of your idea.
My 2 cents…
🙂
Here is a wonderful post by Joel (on software) on precisely the same issue:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000056.html
That was written in summers of 2000, but it is still very relevant. While i myself do not agree with some of his interpretations, but it makes for a wonderful read as it touches upon a lot of issues and makes you think.
To summarise:
”
Building a company? You’ve got one very important decision to make, because it affects everything else you do. No matter what else you do, you absolutely must figure out which camp you’re in, and gear everything you do accordingly, or you’re going to have a disaster on your hands.
The decision? Whether to grow slowly, organically, and profitably, or whether to have a big bang with very fast growth and lots of capital.
The organic model is to start small, with limited goals, and slowly build a business over a long period of time. I’m going to call this the Ben and Jerry’s model, because Ben and Jerry’s fits this model pretty well.
The other model, popularly called “Get Big Fast” (a.k.a. “Land Grab”), requires you to raise a lot of capital, and work as quickly as possible to get big fast without concern for profitability.
..
Probably the worst thing you can do is to decide that you have to be an Amazon company, and then act like a Ben and Jerry’s company (while in denial all the time).”