Inside startup land

Hey there!

Can’t believe I actually won the listserve!

I’m a 22 yo marketer who moved to San Francisco last year. Startup culture is pretty amazing, but I think sometimes we get so wrapped up in ourselves that we miss the bigger picture.

Here are some of my ideas on running a great startup:

1. Make a 10x improvement. The world doesn’t need another messaging app. Sure, messaging apps like FB Messenger, Line, and WhatsApp are the craze of the moment, but I’d much rather start something like Theranos (their lab technology could save the US healthcare system ~$200 billion over 10 years).

2. Always put people first. Both for customers and employees, putting people first might be more expensive in the short-term, but it always pays off in the long run. It’s easy to focus on the numbers, but invest the time to build a humble, transparent company culture.

3. Don’t be mediocre. Lots of companies can build pretty decent products, but the really epic experiences are fairly rare. I recently had a problem with my GoRuck backpack, and they immediately sent me a brand new backpack under their lifetime guarantee (more than two years after I first purchased!).

4. Find a way to make money. Too many startups take a loss for years and run off venture capitalist investments. Sometimes that’s necessary (like if you need a large infrastructure), but cash flow is quite freeing.

Also, I’m a bit of a book geek, so I’d love to hear your favorite books! (My favorite lately was Red Notice by Bill Browder)


Nate Desmond
nate[AT]natedesmond.com
San Francisco, CA (SOMA neighborhood)

Comments

Post a Comment

Favorites

This is a puzzle.

Beyond this message a challenge awaits; In the listserve, no links are allowed, what a cruel fate! The first clue must be deciphered by ROT 8. . Let me know and just email if your brain needs a spark Your first clue is just after this punctuation mark / dsoqwj vwxwfvafy lge jgtafkgf af lg cadd s egucafytajv Listserve Puzzle listservepuzzle[AT]gmail.com
Read more

21,612 is a lot

Hi, everyone. I'm a teenaged girl. I'm not arrogant enough to think that I know much about the world. I'm 18, a freshman in college, and I struggle every day trying to see into the future: into what might be, where I might go. Recently I've decided that my destiny in life is to be a high-school biology teacher, but ask me again later and perhaps that will have changed. One thing I feel passionate about is body modification. Somehow my standards of beauty have developed in a way that put piercings, tattoos, implants and scarification at the forefront. However, my parents have threatened to cut off their funding for my education if I modify myself in any way. I already have piercings, and though my family will never see them due to their private locations, I would love to be able to share this important part of my life with them and express myself through modification in a more public way. Essentially, they have rejected my lifestyle, and through this, they have ...
Read more

Tiny wings

Hi all, I want to write about a subject that is very close to my heart - bees! I started bee keeping last year, and have two colonies right now. These two already managed to supply my family and my friends with more than enough honey, and keeping the bees is a tremendously satisfying activity. They smell so good, and are very tidy animals, and are just very, very interesting overall. The insects' way of dealing with the world is just so very different from how we as mammals approach it - it seems almost alien. Anyways, what is probably most impressive is the workload these little animals deal with. For one kilo of honey, they visit 4 million flowers, and fly a distance equivalent of more than 4 times around the earth. Think about that for a second. And then, if you start to think about how they "furniture" their housing themselves by the wax they sweat out, how they can control temperature inside the hive to the tenth of a degree, how they collectively make decisions i...
Read more