Startups: The Very Beginning

Key ideas

Livingston's earliest-stage advice: choose cofounders carefully, cover determination, expertise and selling, solve your own problem, measure revenue, stay cheap and focused, and ignore the founder stereotype.

1. 1

   Choose cofounders before anything else

   Livingston calls cofounders the foundation of a startup and says ideas are easier to change than partners. She suggests people you already work well with and who share your ambitions and moral outlook, warning that otherwise startup stress will probably split you. If you aren't ready to start yet, she advises practising on small projects with friends, whether or not they turn into a company.

2. 2

   Cover three qualities across the team

   Livingston says the team needs at least one person with each of three qualities: determination, which she ranks first and ties to withstanding rejection; domain expertise; and the ability, or at least willingness, to sell. For software she says founders who can at least program are more likely to succeed, and she names learning coding basics as the best year of preparation. She says she has repeatedly seen women with good ideas outsource a first version or recruit a programmer they didn't know, and watched those companies blow up.

3. 3

   Solve your own problem, then obsess over users

   Livingston calls making something you want the safest route to making something people want, though not the only one, and treats it as a heuristic for finding ideas. In execution, she says, the work is understanding users and doing more for early ones than you could sustain at a larger size. She narrows the early stage down to building and talking to users.

4. 4

   Measure revenue, spend little, say no

   Livingston says to pick a number to grow, with revenue the best if you can, because otherwise you can fool yourself about how much users like you. She says low expenses buy time, and that startups with good ideas still die from spending too much and running out of money. She also names lack of focus as a killer, advising founders to choose a few things and to refuse anything that amounts to playing at being a founder instead of doing the real work.

5. 5

   Don't let the stock founder deter you

   Speaking at a conference for women, Livingston advises them not to worry about being a woman: she grants real obstacles and that it may be a little harder, but says it won't decide success or failure. She says the debate is too often driven by people who haven't built anything, and that activists and reporters tend to magnify the problem. She adds that the press's stock character of a young white male founder doesn't match the variety she has seen among thousands of founders.

In Jessica’s words

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