This week I learned…

… about product reviews & founding a startup.

Thursday I had my first product review at Yammer. It went… hmm.. well, I learned a lot:

• Don’t wait too long to go to product review.
• It’s ok if final visuals aren’t ready… sometimes you’ll learn that your entire direction could use a little correction.
• Having an analyst in the room is invaluable…. Real-time queries can save the conversation from hitting a gridlock “until you have time to look into that one thing.”
• Yammer designers are amazing. (Looking at you He & Jiajia)
• Pay attention to early dissent… sometimes there’s a kernel of a hypothesis lurking there.
• Research, research, research. We’ve got such amazing analysts and such a lovely data pipeline. I could have done more there before walking into that meeting.
• Incept! Before walking into that room, every decision maker should have some idea of what you’re going to present and should be bought in to some degree.

I also attended the YC Female Founders conference. Really fantastic use of a Monday afternoon. Lots of advice on early team, fundraising, product/market fit and more. Notably (and wonderfully), not a lot about the “femaleness” of female founders.

Some takeaways:

YC stuff:

• What YC looks for in a founding team: People who know each other and their domain REALLY well & are going after a large market.
• Tenacity is the muscle power behind success.

Fundraising:

• Don’t get nasty… it’s a tiny, tiny world of funders and it will come back to bite you.
• Don’t talk much. Investors hear so many words every day. All those words seem vital to you, but are just phonemes t0 them. Just the important words. Respect their time.
• Know all your numbers. Every single thing you can know. Answer everything they can ask you and then point out what numbers they *should* be asking you.
• Not everyone needs to raise. Don’t take money if you don’t need it. And know that if you *do* take money, you’ll be giving up control.

Starting a company:

• Talk to your cofounders about the end goal. Exit? What price? IPO? These are awful conversations to have when they finally come up.
• Plan for internationalization. Right away. How will your UI scale? (Remember that English is short… can your product support German?)

Achieving some success:

• You never win this game, you just level up and it gets harder.
• As the risk of impenitent death goes down, difficulty figuring out where to focus goes up.

Righto, see you next week!