Lessons Learned From Startup CEOs: Jonathan Abrams
Previously, Jonathan was the founder & CEO of bookmarking community HotLinks, and worked as a software engineer at companies such as Netscape and Nortel. Jonathan holds an Honors B.Sc. in Computer Science from McMaster University, which he received after flunking out of engineering school.
I asked Jonathan to share some of his key learnings as a startup CEO.
In Jonathan's own words:
- Focus is difficult but crucial. Until your product is complete,
your technology solid, your customers or users happy, and your sales or
traffic growing and near critical mass, most other things do not
matter. A startup CEO can waste a lot of time on premature marketing,
business development, partnerships, PR, consultants, board maintenance,
etc. before the company is really ready for those things.
- Hire based on passion, not resumes. If you attract candidates based on
your prestigious investors, be wary. If you lose candidates because you
don't have prestigious investors, they weren't the people who you
needed anyways.
- A startup can get more done in the same
amount of time than a large company, and needs to, but a startup is
still more like a marathon than a sprint. Things will still take longer
than you expect to get done, and you will make mistakes. Making
mistakes is ok, as long as you get more things right than wrong each
week, and correct the things you get wrong. Avoid irreversible mistakes.
- Losing control of a startup to investors puts founders and common
shareholders in a vulnerable position and may not improve the company's
execution or increase the company's chances of success. Surrendering
the corporate governance of a company to the wrong people is typically
an irreversible mistake.
- For a software or Internet company,
overall execution depends on engineering execution in the first few
years -- make sure your stuff works! A technical founder should stay
involved in the technology until it does.
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