Found+READ: Comments by David Shen

David Shen — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 20:26:06 GMT

Another thing to do is to hold back titles. Never give out VP, E, or C level titles until you are absolutely sure that the person you hired can definitely fill that role. Give them “Head of…” or “Director of…” or even “Manager” for now and set their expectations that they are leading their team, but you are evaluating them to see whether they can really fill the larger role or not.

You can always promote, but removing someone from a title is generally a painful thing no matter what the circumstance.

David Shen — Tue, 22 May 2007 18:38:34 GMT

Mistake #2 is a pretty big one to avoid.

If you aren’t a target user, you’ll need to hire people who are. This increases cost, decreases your ability to advise, strategize, and manage the business and development effort, and also means you can’t effectively employ an organic, fluidly moving product development method.

By this, I mean that many products are created by teams of 1-2 people who are developing constantly on the fly and on instinct. They modify, tweak, add and delete from the product as they are developing. No product plans. No schedule. Just instinct. It’s the fastest way to getting to first release of a cool product. You add people, you slow down, increase discussion and arguing time, and increase the risk of a competitor trouncing you with faster development.

David Shen — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 06:27:21 GMT

I’d love to hear about marketing on the cheap, and all the things startups have done to market their sites without spending any money at all. These range from creating link exchange modules between friends with startups to word of mouth to emailing Techcrunch or GigaOM. What are the ramifications of each? Any case studies someone would like to share?

David Shen — Mon, 16 Apr 2007 14:15:34 GMT

This is a great topic. Naming can be done on the cheap without spending millions to hire a professional firm to do so. But it would be good to discuss branding, future implications, expandability/flexibility of the name to future directions, how to spot potential negative implications in a name. How about how to create a Web 2.0 name without leaving out vowels?

David Shen — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 02:52:37 GMT

After all is said and done, being able to let go is probably the best thing you can do in situations like this. The more partners-in-crime you have, the more you can have help in taking things to the next level which I think is much better than trying to do things by yourself. But I think if you’re a serial entrepreneur, you’ll eventually experience such a situation, and to be able to let it go will allow you to move on and not let it drive you crazy in frustration for the rest of your life…

David Shen — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 03:54:23 GMT

When Found+Read launched, I was ecstatic that entrepreneurs could now get advice from the trenches. But as time went on, somehow I lost interest in how Found+Read was going about covering this area. I wasn’t sure exactly why but I thought about it and here are some suggestions:

1. The articles seem very random. To that end, I think that if you gave advance word that you were going to cover some area, that could be nice, ie. Monday we’re covering Financing advice all week. That way I know when I should tune in.

2. Deeper categorization would also help. Having a “Financing” category with an RSS feed off that would be really awesome as I am not as curious about some areas as I am on others.

3. Case studies and entrepreneur’s stories are OK as content if I want to read real-life experiences. But if I am to learn from them, I find it hard to pick out all the, for example, financing tips that are in them. They are scattered across all the story posts.

4. This idea is beyond Public Square potentially, but a Yahoo Answers style area could be really cool. Sometimes entrepreneurs have really focused questions and it would be really cool to provide a forum where they could get advice on their specific problem. I know you have a Q of the Day, but I am sure there are tons of questions out there beyond just doing one per day.

5. It would be great to categorize by industry and sector as well. There are certainly issues that span across industries/sectors, but there are definitely issues that are very specific. For example, E-Commerce should be a sector, and potentially Consumer versus B2B. That way, if I am working on a social networking site, I can subscribe/watch the Social Networking category for postings specific to my area.

Thanks for listening – If I have more thoughts I’ll add them later…