18 mistakes that kill startups
“Paul Graham is a programmer, writer, and investor. In 1995, he and Robert Morris started Viaweb, the first software as a service company. Viaweb was acquired by Yahoo in 1998, where it became Yahoo Store. In 2001 he started publishing essays on paulgraham.com, which in 2015 got 34 million page views. In 2005 he and Jessica Livingston, Robert Morris, and Trevor Blackwell started Y Combinator, the first of a new type of startup incubator. Since 2005 Y Combinator has funded over 1000 startups, including Dropbox, Airbnb, Stripe, and Reddit.”
Paul Graham wrote 18 mistakes that kill startup:
- Single Founder
- Bad Location
- Marginal Niche
- Derivative Idea
- Obstinacy
- Hiring Bad Programmers
- Choosing the Wrong Platform
- Slowness in Launching
- Launching Too Early
- Having No Specific User in Mind
- Raising Too Little Money
- Spending Too Much
- Raising Too Much Money
- Poor Investor Management
- Sacrificing Users to (Supposed) Profit
- Not Wanting to Get Your Hands Dirty
- Fights Between Founders
- A Half-Hearted Effort
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