Sharing Start-up Lessons To Guide New and Future Entrepreneurs
General Catalyst is a strong supporter of Harvard in Tech — a network of talented people focused on exploration, collaboration, and venture creation.
Last week we hosted more than 250 current and former Harvard students engaged in NYC’s tech sector at the Harvard Club of NYC. Our special guest, HBS professor, Tom Eisenmann, kicked the event off by challenging the group with data proving how hard entrepreneurial success can be. With “90% of the HBS curriculum focused on entrepreneurial success stories,” according to Eisenmann, “we need more forums to discuss failure.” A lively panel discussion on the topic followed. Adam Valkin (Managing Director at GC, HC ‘96) moderated with participation from alumni speakers Scott Belsky (Founder & CEO of Behance, HBS’08), Olga Vidisheva (Founder & CEO of GC-backed Shoptiques, HBS ‘11), Halle Tecco (Founder & MD of Rock Health, HBS ‘11) and Scott Crouch (Founder of GC-backed Mark43, HC ‘13).
Here’s a snapshot of the real world experiences and perspectives the panelists shared:
Both failure and success can start with a state of mind. According to Scott Crouch, “at Harvard you’re told you are special. You assume you have all of the answers.” Coming out of school and trying to disrupt a legacy industry like law enforcement (the focus of Scott’s company, Mark43), you have to consider the decades of experience, habits, and dependencies of the market’s constituents. There is a resistance to change. “When I started Mark43, I too quickly assumed my ‘outsider perspective’ was a strength. Once I had the guts to get into field and work alongside the team in action, I earned their respect.” Scott told entrepreneurs exploring a new space that they should immerse themselves in the customer experience, and make sure to leave their ego at the door.
Focus is key. When Scott Belsky bootstrapped Behance in the early days, he was on a mission to change the way creative people used the Internet to get work done. In Behance, they built a rich online community for artists and designers to showcase their portfolios, build their online identity, and get jobs from interested parties. Along the way, they had a number of other ideas. Scott recalled building a second product, a project management tool for creatives, but it took a lot of time and energy to maintain. “When working on a start-up, you should bet the farm on your best idea. Anything less than that hampers your chance of succeeding in what matters most.”
Even when you are succeeding, the early days can be tough. Especially when you have nothing in the bank. Scott Belsky coached the audience on how to come up with a near-term feedback loop, to help teams understand where they are on the entrepreneurial journey. When Scott was first getting his own company going, he and his team used Google search results for inspiration. They would type ‘Behance’ into the search engine, and look to see where their homepage sat in the organic results and how frequently Google’s autocorrect tried to fix the spelling of their company’s name to ‘enhance’. Every so often, Behance would climb in the organic search results and soon enough, Google stopped suggesting a misspelling. Scott pointed out that the team did have one setback when the pop star, Beyonce, rose to fame and started to dominate the results — but by that point, they’d outgrown the motivational hack…
Olga from Shoptiques encouraged those interested in entrepreneurship to arrive on campus with a mission, and to think of school as a stepping stone to where you want to go. The resources on campus are large and deep, and can offer a powerful platform for a student looking to launch their business while also balancing classes. ‘It can be done, you can do both!” Olga was able to leverage her curriculum & schedule to her advantage, directly translating those skills into creating a new ecommerce website. The ability to take those learnings and apply them in launching a startup is an opportunity she seized on to, and today fuels her greatest joy: “There’s nothing better than walking into the office and being with my team— being around people that are just excited for what we’re building as I am, it’s energizing.”
Halle from Rock Health asked the audience to think of school as a place to tackle the biggest and most interesting problems possible. “It’s easy to get caught up in what everyone else is excited about,” Halle said. When starting Rock Health (initially conceived of as ‘HCombinator,’), she used HBS as a place to explore the healthcare industry — due to its enormity, complexity, and centrality. Going after ambitious areas such as healthcare can seem daunting, but the opportunity and potential for impact are very real. She also helped challenge preconceived notions of where technology does & does not have a greater role to play: “most people think that creatives are the ones that can’t leverage technology, but really it’s doctors & the medical industry that need to better use software!”
One message that Olga & the entire panel echoed: know why you are starting your business. “Don’t just start it for the ‘sake of being an entrepreneur’, instead be mission-driven or seek out markets with huge potential”. There are a lot of people looking to get into startups just because it is a sexy thing to do these days: to really make it through the good times and the bad as a founder, you have to be in it for the right reasons to persevere.
If you’re passionate, hungry and ambitious to pursue an idea, there’s a great network of alums to help a company get off the ground. School can be an ideal time and place for entrepreneurial exploration. It’s a forum to not only share ideas and build networks, but also to fuel and fund new businesses through Rough Draft Ventures (a student-focused fund backed by GC) and Dorm Room Fund (a similar effort sponsored by First Round Capital). These groups give students the tools needed to turn ideas into products and products into companies, above and beyond the $500 business plan competition.
The Harvard in Tech community nurtures new and future entrepreneurs as they think about building a new company. Many of us at General Catalyst are former entrepreneurs with operational experience and we recognize the value of having a network of people to share experiences and support each other. We are excited to be part of the Harvard in Tech community, helping to empower early-stage founders to build great technology companies.
Here’s to the next wave of entrepreneurs...
