bengi

Cofounders need:

1) Complementary skills. This means a broad enough combined skill set to understand the market, build something and gain initial traction.

2) The focus/discipline to actually get things done. Most teams flunk this test completely, or one founder ends up trying to do everything. Either way, doesn't last.

3) High-level agreement on vision. Fighting about how to get from Point A to Point C can be useful; fighting about what Point C is? Not so much.

This is Lean Startup taken to an impractical extreme. I know, I know, those two hours you spend on LegalZoom filing as a Delaware C are hours you're not spending outside the building talking to customers blah blah blah, but not everything that doesn't involve "learning" is waste.

Just for liability purposes it's worth dealing with incorporation early. If you have co-founders, you're a de facto general partnership until you opt for something better.

People balk at Lean Startup because it tends to come off as patronizing, reductionist, and antithetical to innovation. The stereotypical "lean" startup is so tethered to short-term customer feedback that it will produce, at best, an incrementally improved version of whatever product customers were already using. In other words, aiming for what customers will want a 2 months from now, as opposed to 2 years from now.

To some extent I think this criticism is justified, but it's important to remember that even if big bets and profound insights into what customers want turn out to be correct, "non-lean" startups still need to be agile enough to adjust what they're doing on the margins through fast experiments. Getting 95% of the way towards having a product someone will pay for just is not good enough. To use Color Labs as an example, it can also be argued that Color was REALLY close to being successful, they just messed up distribution, and that had they used a small-scale, more iterative roll-out approach things would have been different.

As with a lot of posts on Steve Blank's blogs, it contains a lot of good observations but hasn't been very well thought out. Recommending that entrepreneurs target niche markets makes sense, but you shouldn't prefix that advice by implying that a venture-backed startup that fails to reach a $100 million valuation "sucks". And as other people have pointed out, since when is $100 million a useful cutoff for success? By that metric, should Viaweb's inflation-adjusted exit be considered a failure? One gets the impression that the number was picked simply to generate a low success rate, and subtly encourage people to buy the author's book.