Medium Digest @19.05.13

Tips for Entrepreneurs No VC Will Tell You: Stop Nodding, You’re Killing Your Company.

상대가 말하는 순간부터 습관적으로 고개 끄덕이지 말기

어느순간 정신차려 보면 상대의 말이 끝날 때까지 고개를 끄덕이게 될 것

의사결정권자로서 당신이 내리는 결정의 가치를 깎아먹지 말 것

처음 듣는 의견에 대해서는 우선 회의적으로 바라보는 대신, 감정을 섞지 않는 화법을 연마

 

 

Things I wish someone would have told me before I founded my first startup

There are 2 easy and well-known mechanisms that you need to take from this blog post. Mechanisms that if I used before founding my company, it would be in a completely different place today. Here they are:

 

1. Do not form a company board consisting only of 2 members — You and a friend have the greatest idea and you want to build it together as two co-founders? You’re in for a mess. The board of a company is its most powerful organ. There is no way you could fire a non-performing co-founder when it’s only the two of you amending the board seats. Its even a good rule of thumb to always have an odd number of board members, so you won’t end up with “deadlocks”, i.e. ties in votes, but creating a board of 2 people can have devastating consequences.

 

2. Reverse Vesting — If you do not know what it means, read about it! This is a MUST. If you found a company and divide all its shares between the co-founders on day one, with no buy-back or other fallback mechanism, you just made one of the biggest mistakes in your life. If you want to get rid of a co-founder that got all his shares upfront, your company is basically dead. No investor with a bit sense in his mind will fund a company in its early years that has so much equity held by a person that doesn’t work there anymore.