Recently, I shared a famous article with the HelloMovies team called “How to Start a Startup”. The author, Paul Graham, ran a successful enterprise software startup in the 90s which he subsequently sold for millions. In 2005 he wrote “How to Start a Startup” to chronicle his success and philosophy on entrepreneurship; since then, this article has become somewhat of a Silicon Valley manifesto to all aspiring entrepreneurs.

Graham makes a lot of great points about finding the right ideas, making the right sacrifices, recruiting the right people, etc.–but there is one discussion that particularly struck me when I read his article a few days ago:

Graham asserts that you don’t need to start with a particularly good idea in order to have a successful start up. The idea doesn’t need to be that original, but it just has to “suck less” (borrowing Graham’s words) than the competitors. An example that he cites to support this argument is Google. When Google entered the search engine business, this industry by many measures was already mature. There were tons of big players at the time (Yahoo, Altavista, Excite, Lycos), but Google entered the arena because Sergey and Larry thought they could do search more efficiently than the rest–and they were right.

Bringing it back to HelloMovies–I think that our team has lots of non-sucky ideas, some of which are truly revolutionary and some of which are improvements on what our competitors can do. To draw parallels between HelloMovies and Google (hubris, I know)–our team is also venturing into a relatively mature space, but we feel strongly that we can shake up this market with our fine ideas and excellent products.

Nevertheless, these days I’m not too concerned about the ideas, people, or sacrifices we need to make for our startup; I’m concerned about execution.

As our advisor John Merrells recently warned, it’s easy to start but it’s really difficult to finish. Graham sort of implies this point throughout his article, but he didn’t explicitly address the problem of execution to my satisfaction.

Just to be clear, HelloMovies is chugging along at a decent pace these days and our team is confident that we can execute–however it’s frustrating at times that we can’t move faster and that we have to spend time filling some skill gaps in our team. These are common gripes for all startups, I’m sure.

To those of you who want to start a company: don’t be scared of the initial phases of the project–coming up with an idea and forming a team–that’s the super easy part. Be afraid of the execution! It takes huge commitment across your team and lots of emotional strength to move from idea to product.

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 8th, 2007 at 8:01 pm and is filed under Team, Vision. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.