Lost and Founder: A Painfully Honest Field Guide to the Startup World

Market Validation: One of my major worries is that the Venn diagram of what I want to build and what people actually need will have too little overlap to be an exciting startup. To combat that, I plan to: build a list of about one hundred people I strongly suspect will want the product I’m creating; interview each of them about the problem and how

Funding: Today, there are vastly more funding options to those building a new tech-enabled business. Venture capital comes in more variety than in the past, particularly with the rise of “micro-VCs,” who raise smaller funds, invest smaller amounts, and also require less massive exits to meet their LPs’ expectations. A fund that raises $40 million i

Silicon Valley startup culture embeds founders with the false belief that because growth is what matters most, we should pursue any and all strategies that could lead us there. Far wiser, and much more difficult because of the discipline and patience required, is ignoring those potential off-course avenues in favor of applying the experimentation,

When you’re an early-stage startup founder, your job is clear—find “product:market fit” (Silicon Valley–speak for “a product that a significant portion of customers in your market love, use, and will pay for”), then scale.

Growing at 30 percent year-over-year at our stage is considered the minimum level for an “interesting” business in the venture world (one that could reasonably raise additional capital or where equity overall would be a desirable commodity).

For many companies, “do one thing” is unrealistically reductive advice. But it pays to know that adding more priorities scales exponentially, not linearly. At Moz, I found it vastly less complexifying to add one additional product (e.g., Moz Local) to the company’s charter than to add a third or a fourth. Each new product and priority cost vastly m

Doing just one thing means you can: try more experiments in pursuit of success, meaning you learn and iterate faster; keep communications overhead lean by hiring fewer people and keeping the task list short; get your most senior leaders personally involved in projects, reducing power distance and minimizing the time required to make crucial decisio

YEAR CASH SAVED/BURNED DEBT RAISED/PAID BACK VC RAISED END OF YEAR CASH IN BANK TOTAL REVENUE 2007 $0 $0 $1,100,000 $1,100,000 $800,000 2008 −$800,000 $0 $0 $300,000 $1,400,000 2009 +$200,000 $0 $0 $500,000 $3,100,000 2010 +$500,000 $0 $0 $1,000,000 $5,700,000 2011 +$1,000,000 $0 $0 $2,000,000 $11,400,000 2012 −$5,000,000 $0 $18,000,000 $15,100,000

Sarah elected to offer, at minimum, six weeks of severance to everyone, even if they’d been at the company only a month or two, and then give an extra week of severance for each year of tenure with no cap. We paid this out in a lump sum, despite the large cash hit to Moz’s balance sheet, because it meant that laid-off folks could also apply for une