Post Category → Startups

There is no good place to start a startup

There has been a lot of talk recently about the “best” place to start a startup. Elad Gil’s controversial thread on Twitter made a compelling case for why the Bay Area should continue to be the location of choice for founders.

I think some theoretical nuance and practical observations are missing from the conversation, which I hope to add here.

I’ll start by saying that if you are a famous second-time founder with an existing network of talented engineers who will immediately leave their jobs to work with you, or you are a genius technical founder who can attract engineers who want exposure to your technical skills, or you have some other ‘unfair’ advantage in recruiting, there is no better place to start a startup than the Bay Area.

Otherwise, there is no particularly good place to start a startup, and life is going to be hard.

Some background on the Bay Area: the Bay Area benefits from what urban economists call economies of agglomeration – that is, benefits that accrue when firms and skilled workers are located in close proximity. This is what Gil was largely talking about in his thread: “[e]ngineers, sales, PMs, others who have worked at breakout companies all based in [the] Bay Area, [e]arly customers (influencers for consumer, buyers for enterprise) all based in tech clusters, [and s]mart angels & venture capital is here, & smart service providers for legal, real estate.” This creates a positive feedback loop, just like network effects in software that all founders are familiar with, causing the magnitude of the benefits to increase as time goes on.

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Down to Earth: SpaceX and the Return of Limitless Ambition

I have been thinking about the SpaceX launch since I watched it last night – and, of course, the subsequent landing – feeling inspired and excited in a way that I cannot ever recall feeling before.

The last launch I watched was back in June, when the Falcon 9 was due to deliver a much-needed payload with resupplies to the International Space Station. I was shocked when the rocket exploded shortly after launch. It was a heartbreaking sight – seldom do we witness a failure so spectacular, so public.

And as the video feed started, this time live from SpaceX headquarters, the energy was palpable. Much was at stake: the ostensible goal of carrying eleven ORBCOMM satellites into low-Earth orbit – a nontrivial task, to be sure. But the larger objective, for those of us who have been following the SpaceX journey, was something far grander.

SpaceX was attempting to make history by being the first to land a large portion of the rocket back on Earth after delivering a payload to space. Continue reading →

How Uber’s Autonomous Cars Will Destroy 10 Million Jobs and Reshape the Economy by 2025

Autonomous Google Uber Car

I have spent quite a bit of time lately thinking about autonomous cars, and I wanted to summarize my current thoughts and predictions. Most people – experts included – seem to think that the transition to driverless vehicles will come slowly over the coming few decades, and that large hurdles exist for widespread adoption. I believe that this is significant underestimation. Autonomous cars will be commonplace by 2025 and have a near monopoly by 2030, and the sweeping change they bring will eclipse every other innovation our society has experienced. They will cause unprecedented job loss and a fundamental restructuring of our economy, solve large portions of our environmental problems, prevent tens of thousands of deaths per year, save millions of hours with increased productivity, and create entire new industries that we cannot even imagine from our current vantage point. Continue reading →

How to Name Your Startup

“It is a pretty recognizable brand name. Originally it was ‘Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web’ but we settled on ‘Yahoo.’” -Jerry Yang, Yahoo founder

“It is a pretty recognizable brand name. Originally it was ‘Jerry's Guide to the World Wide Web’ but we settled on ‘Yahoo.’” -Jerry Yang, Yahoo founder

It is no secret at this point that I love being an entrepreneur, and it’s a profession that I would recommend to virtually anyone. At the first mention of job-related trouble, the de facto advice I’ll dispense is to quit your job: burn the bridge behind you and don’t look back. I’ve given away more copies of The 4-Hour Workweek than I can count.

I am often asked, “what is the hardest part of starting a business?”

Like most things in life, the process of starting a business seems impossibly complex until you actually begin to undertake it – what appears from afar to be a mysterious black art becomes fairly simple and straightforward upon closer examination.

With my companies, I have negotiated distribution deals with Amazon.com, manufactured life-or-death components for 200 mph race cars in China, and managed 1,650+ different SKUs – without any full-time employees or a background in engineering, and all while living in South America for a six month stretch…without a cell phone.

Having said that, I can tell you – without hesitation – that the hardest part of starting a business is naming it. And, thanks to a booming startup market and the shrinking availability of .com domains, it is getting harder every day.

But fear not, my friends – while the proliferation of tech startups has certainly dwindled the supply of available .coms, it has also given birth to a series of fantastic tools and resources for solving this frustrating problem.

Below, we’ll go over some rules of naming, and subsequently I’ll divulge my heretofore secret arsenal that will turn you into a dark wizard in the mysterious and elusive art of startup naming.

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