What Batman can teach startups

A little while ago Brad Feld turned me on to the book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Basically, it’s a book, about comic books, that is about entrepreneurship.

I have no idea if this passage is going to translate for those that have not read the book, but it is as good a piece of startup advice at the early idea stage as you’ll hear. The context is that the two main characters, Joe & Sammy, are discussing what kind of superhero to create in the heady days just following the launch of Superman. To translate, think about that energy around creating a social network a few years ago, or a social game right now.

“And no matter what we come up with, and how we dress him, some other character with the same shtick, with the same style of boots and the same little doodad on his chest, is already out there, or is coming out tomorrow, or is going to be knocked off from our guy inside a week and a half.”
“So…” Sammy said. “So…”
“How? is not the question. What? is not the question,” Sammy said.
“The question is why?” Joe asked.
“The question is why.” Sammy said, ”Why is he dressing up like a monkey, or an ice cube, or a can of fucking corn.”
“To fight crime, isn’t it?”
“Well, yes, to fight crime. To fight evil. But that’s all any of these guys are doing. That’s as far as they ever go. It’s the right thing to do, how interesting is that?”
“I see”
“Only Batman, you know… see, yeah, that’s good. That’s what makes Batman good, not dull at all, even though he’s just a guy who dresses up like a bat and beats people up.”
“What is the reason for Batman? The why?”
“His parents were killed, see? In cold blood. Right in front of his eyes, when he was a kid. By a robber.”
“It’s revenge.”
“That’s interesting.” Sammy said, “see?”
“So we need to figure out the why.”
” ‘What is the why.’ ” Sammy agreed.

It’s not the how. What is the why.

The quickest path to $50m in revenue? Build fun.

The Wall Street Journal has a good piece, based on Christian Chabot’s blog post, about how long it takes to build a technology empire.

Turns out it takes an average of eight years to hit $50m in revenue, which is about the point when you can start thinking about things like going public. And this is for the top 100 largest software companies, so we’re talking about the biggest winners here. One of the most valuable companies ever founded, in any industry, in any country, took 8 years to hit $50m in sales, Microsoft. Oracle took 10. Locally I often point to the timelines of successes like iRobot and Harmonix and the time it took them.

But hey, let’s say you’re still trying to hit the obviously unrealistic five year projections  of a typical venture capitalist (unrealistic only from a purely factual, statistical basis you understand), what’s the fastest way to the top?

Thankfully Tableau’s study breaks down the companies by market segment… so I did a little extra simple math. Here were the averages for how long it took to hit $50m in revenue by market segment:

Network (Rackspace, Echelon): 10.6 years
Security (Symantec, Sourcefire): 8.2 years
Database (Netezza, Oracle): 8 years
Content Management (Adobe, Digital River): 7.5 years
Entertainment (Activision, EA): 6 years

Feeling impatient? Don’t start a networking company, start a gaming company. Of course, this is a limited study and breaks with our deep-seeded need to be working on “serious stuff.” But it’s actually not just historical, it seems to be repeating itself right now. At least three Social Gaming companies founded post 2007 will be, or already have, hit $50m in revenue in their first three years of business.

The interesting dichotomy that the data suggests is this: it will take longer than you expect to hit success, and building fun might actually accelerate that path.

A Startup is like a Pirate Ship →

As Cap’n of this particular ship, I’d like to add that it’s great sailing the windy seas with Mr. Sivak. Also, this is an apt companion to using Dave’s Startup Metrics for Pirates to navigate your ship.

You’d never find your soulmate, make a friend, or hire someone based on a Powerpoint—so why find someone to invest in your company that way?

— 

(from This is going to be BIG!)

Charlie’s recent post to Stop Pitching made me feel like perhaps this whole “one hour - 30 slides - go pitch!” process should just come to an end. Every good fundraising process I’ve had didn’t start with a powerpoint deck. It started over coffee/lunch/dinner and a conversation about life, our industry, and, yes, the business I am building. I’ve always seem to manage to explain the business even if it wasn’t in exact order with charts and graphs.

I do everything I can to keep the first meeting a conversation, almost never bringing out a powerpoint deck. Every time a VC has tried to force a formal first meeting I’ve pushed back.  And the few times I have acquiesced seem to always end badly. Looking back at those meetings they always felt forced, they put me on the defensive, and it didn’t let me learn nearly enough about my prospective investor.

Were I a VC (and thank god I’m not) I would do everything I could to make that first meeting an authentic conversation. As soon as the lights go off and the eyes turn to the screen, the conversation stops. Without conversation, there simply is no way to build mutual understanding and trust, and that makes finding the right investor/startup all the more difficult.