Zitat des Tages über Anlaufen / Start-Up:
American nuclear reactors are well into middle age. The median age of an operating reactor in the U.S. is 34 years, placing start-up in midst of the Carter administration.
It's much harder these days as a start-up to do physical devices.
In a start-up company, you basically throw out all assumptions every three weeks.
For a start-up company, it is all about the religion of the product's excellence - the success of the product - while for a large corporation, it is the brand. We chose to maintain our start-up image.
In my first start-up, I had an initial advertising budget of $5 per day total. That would buy us 100 clicks per day. At $5 per day, marketing people scoffed and said that is too small to matter. But if you think about it, to an engineer, 100 real humans everyday giving your product a try means you can really start improving.
As one of the first employees at a small cellular phone start-up called Nextel, I gained firsthand experience in how a business grows from an idea to a company that, at its peak, employed many thousands.
With lower start-up costs and a vastly expanded market for online services, the result is a global economy that for the first time will be fully digitally wired-the dream of every cyber-visionary of the early 1990s, finally delivered, a full generation later.
The biggest start-up successes - from Henry Ford to Bill Gates to Mark Zuckerberg - were pioneered by people from solidly middle-class backgrounds. These founders were not wealthy when they began. They were hungry for success, but knew they had a solid support system to fall back on if they failed.
The ventures that keep things light and fun, easy to understand, that have a compelling story, a sexy retail product, will have an easier time getting people to rally around them and contribute. A start-up doing something that's difficult to communicate or doesn't offer any kind of retail product will have a tougher go at it.
The wind industry has made major strides over the past two decades, and they have proven their industry to be efficient and self-sustainable. There is no need for the taxpayer to continue to subsidize a wind start-up tax credit.
Launching a start-up, you need to get a lot done quickly. Every day is different. Everyone pitches in with everything. It's easy for the founding team to say, 'We're flexible. We all help out with everything!' But when it comes to making decisions - that flexibility can spell inefficiency and disaster.
To be a designer today is to be an entrepreneur. Whether you're a two-man operation in Shoreditch or a 3,000-person, vertically integrated brand, you need to have the wherewithal to run your business through investment, considering everything from start-up funds to your exit plan or what it takes to go public.
I consistently run into young adults who have quickly turned away from traditional jobs at great companies to try their hand at a start-up. I believe that some of this stems from the desire to strike it big like Mark Zuckerberg, but I also believe it is because starting a company has become far cooler than working in one.
The basic parts, the start-up molecules, can be supplied in abundance and don't have to be made by some elaborate process. That immediately makes things simpler.
Incredibly, oil and gas companies don't have to pay certain environmental costs that amount to small change to them, while an offshore wind project start-up is faced with fees that could mean the difference between building a wind farm and packing up and going home.
It's really rare for people to have a successful start-up in this industry without a breakthrough product. I'll take it a step further. It has to be a radical product. It has to be something where, when people look at it, at first they say, 'I don't get it, I don't understand it. I think it's too weird, I think it's too unusual.'
I think Amazon is the greatest start-up and the greatest company in the world. The way they are using new technologies is not just disrupting retail, it's getting ready to disrupt everything.
Any dispassionate observer would recognize that on Day One, a start-up has no customers, and unless the founder is a true domain expert, he or she can only guess about the customer, problem, and business model.
The best start-ups might be considered slightly less extreme kinds of cults. The biggest difference is that cults tend to be fanatically wrong about something important. People at a successful start-up are fanatically right about something those outside it have missed.
I try to drive my office more as a start-up of ideas.
If you look at America, one of the great strengths of America is its university towns and the way a lot of their businesses and a lot of their innovation and enormous economic growth have come from reducing that gap, getting those universities directly involved in start-up businesses, green field businesses, new development businesses.
For me, the winning strategy in any start-up business is, 'Think big but start small.'
The Technion didn't teach students how to open a start-up.
Auctomatic was a compressed start-up experience, going from start to launch to acquisition in under a year. We spent a long time building the product before getting our first customer, whereas with Stripe we made sure we had paying customers from the very start.
As an entrepreneur and investor, I prioritize construction and collaboration. Whether it's a five-person start-up or a global giant, the companies that are most productive are the ones whose employees operate with a shared sense of purpose and a clear set of policies for responding to changing conditions and new opportunities.
Most troublesome is the legalization of 'crowd funding,' the ability of start-up companies to raise capital from small investors on the Internet.
At TechStars, I have the privilege of working with hundreds of the best and brightest start-up mentors on the planet. We coach our mentors to take a Socratic approach and to provide data rather than decisions.
Wikistrat is my ninth start-up, so I've been through this process a few times. You have to go with what works. The power of example is compelling, so model the ideas that you want someone to understand.
Start-up success is not a consequence of good genes or being in the right place at the right time. Success can be engineered by following the right process, which means it can be learned, which means it can be taught.
Politics is not my cup of tea. I would like to focus on research and education, and will also work to help start-up ecosystem.
In 1991, I co-founded my first start-up, Ink Development, which made software for an early tablet computer.
I hope that I have had some effect on the fact that Israel is a start-up nation.
The start-up life kept me busy and surfaced the problem of not being able to stay on top of my personal finances, which led me to invent Mint.com. I was working 80-hour weeks, and had done enough preliminary work and research to know I had a big idea: To make money management effortless and automated.
Every year, it seems to be there are more people right out of college who are willing to jump into a start-up.
