Startup is a Career Move: It may sound lofty, but a startup is your life’s work. You have to think about your company as a ten year project. Your first three years you will get the startup off the ground, establish your core team culture, and fully validate your main product/market through rapid iteration. Your next three years, you will establish your company as a force in that market, grow your A-team, and scale your business. The next few years may take you in all sorts of directions. You may become a fast-growing business, full of potential and ambition. You may end up a stagnating but still profitable business, looking for exit options. You may end up a company in the difficult position of having to scale back or become defensive, due to market evolution, management blunders, or any combination. But it will still be your company. Will you still care about the company’s mission ten years from now, no matter what position the company ends up in? If so, you probably have what it takes. But, if you are treating your startup as a “career move” — a way to move up in the “startup ecosystem” and end up a C-level executive at some other, VC-funded rocketship,cchub then, in all probability, your current startup will fail. It’ll fail because after year two, you’ll start to get antsy and want to move on with your career, and you’ll realize you never cared about the startup mission in the first place. It was just a means to an end.

No Bootstrapping Plan: Many startups that come out of an accelerator program (such as YCombinator, Dreamit,CCHUB or TechStars) simply do not get funding. If you have the mentality that “without funding, I can’t work on my startup”, then your startup will likely die. This seems like a straightforward statement, yet many founders I have met don’t seem to make the connection. Let’s say that you just quit your job to work on your startup. I have heard many founders — even in the first few months of product development — expect to raise seed rounds, pay themselves salaries, etc. This simply is not the right attitude. Expect to spend a year or two without external funding. If you are not prepared for that possibility — no matter how grim, financially — then you are not prepared to survive.

Hope this help a soul !!!!

#team wittyLabs #wittyOs