Understand and dive deep into your financials. Cash rules: Keep a sharp eye on financials and be sure that you are working with up-to-the-minute information.

Know and understand where and how the next round of funding is going to come from. If you have decided to go the venture route and have a choice of raising less or more, raise a bit more than you need and get some peace of mind. Raise more money (than you need): The number one cause of startup failure is running out of money.The more stakeholders there are, the more people there are rooting for your success. You want to develop a firm base of customers that love you, employees with generous equity who have a strong commitment to the company’s success and advisors who want to help you realize your vision. Spread the stakes: Enlist as many stakeholders and well-wishers to the mission as possible.Always be paranoid your company’s future and be ruthless in pursuing and solving issues before they kill your company. Look out for issues that can ultimately kill your startup including new technology, failure to execute, not being able to raise another round, or departure of key customers/employees. They can unravel quickly and sometimes unexpectedly. Startups are fickle and are powered by the will of the founders. But these rules are based on my own personal experience in bringing a high- tech startup into existence in selling to, hiring and raising money from some of the smartest individuals I have ever known. I am at best a semi-successful, middling entrepreneur with no exits under my belt. They are not binding and for every rule a counter-rule exists. The ones listed below are mine.įull disclosure before I begin, these rules are in no way complete. However, every entrepreneur once they have been in business a few years sees enough problems and patterns to create certain rules to live by. A high-tech startup is hard to build, harder to grow and almost impossible to succeed. High-tech startups are complex and unpredictable. This article is dedicated to Ben Horowitz whose book, “Hard things about hard things” has helped me and countless other founders, and whose love for rap music makes him a real O.G. There's rules to this shit, I wrote me a manual” Notorious B.I.G, 10 Crack Commandments “I've been in this game for years, it made me a animal.

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