big louis winthorpe III energy

1/ The first 18 months of starting a company is often life or death. I must've made 5 different companies that each failed within 9 mo. 😭 Each time the company failed I figured out what I could do better. Eventually startup #6 got to $40K/mo by month 18. Here’s what I learned...

2/ Stay focused! Ignore things that are a waste of time: meetups & conferences, meetings with no clear agenda, fundraising if you're not fundraising, reading lots of tech media articles, etc. Every week should feel like significant progress in the first year.

3/ Your first 5 hires will be the difference between life or death. Choose carefully. Be picky. Many of the things we do at the company still are a result of those early hires' legacy. Have fun as a tight knit team. It will change & evolve as you get bigger so enjoy this moment.

4/ Growth may be flat for the first 9 months. It's gonna be okay. Almost every company has experienced this: Airbnb had to sell cereal in-between, Slack failed as a gaming company first, Tesla sold only 147 cars after 6 years! You probably won't be an overnight success either.

5/ In the beginning, do customer support yourself. You will learn a lot about why your product sucks. I did 5,000+ support tickets when it was the two of us. Delight customers & fix things fast while you learn. It will help you build an amazing intuition about your customers.

#Thread
An interesting story of Kamala Devi hazarika for all Sanatanis...🙏

A Xtian missionary was sent to Assam for the promotion of religion. His name was Cruz. He came across to one the boys from an influential family in Assam to teach him English.
@noconversion

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The p@stor slowly began to study the house and he learned that the boy's grandmother was the most influential person in the house. So he thought 'Corrupting the grandmother's mind can make the whole family Xtian as well as the whole village.

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The p@stor began to tell Grandma the stories of how J€$u$ cured leprosy of lepers, how He gave sight to the blind, etc..But after listening to him, the strong Sanatani grandmother said. A stone turned into a living woman (Ahalya) for our Rama when he touched the stone.

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She spoke of Rama setu where stones floated in sea just by writing his name on the stones and that they are still floating today.
The p@stor continued his efforts but all his tricks went in vain.

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One day he had brought a cake from the church and he thought of offering it to grandmother but he was doubtful that she would eat it. But contrary to his expectation, she took the cake and ate it.

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1/ new essay: What's next for marketplace startups? Reinventing the $10 trillion service economy, that's what. Co-authored with @ljin18 https://t.co/fgKbrHTnH5. A short thread 👇

2/ Marketplace startups have done incredibly well over the first few decades of the internet, reinventing the way we shop for goods, but have been less successful services. It's bc services are complex, subjective, fragmented, and often in real life. Makes it hard

3/ There's been 4 major eras at making the service economy work online. The Listings Era, the unbundled Craiglist era, the Uber for X era, and the Managed Marketplace era

4/ Each era has added more value than the last, and utilized technology innovations, from internet to social / "read/write web" to mobile. The "Unbundling Craigslist" era was particularly epic at generating startup ideas

5/ The problem is, all the low-hanging fruit has been picked off. The techniques that got us to here won't get us to the next phase. So we have to do some pretty different things. That's why "Managed Marketplaces" have been a big deal - hire folks as W-2s, certify quality, etc.