This video from UC Berkeley’s entrepreneurship class is an entertaining take on building successful companies (i.e. organisations) that work. Y Combinator’s Michael Seibel is nice and blunt.
On How to Know if You’re Winning
Do you know what it’s not? It’s not who you raise money from. It’s not how much money you raise. It’s not how cool your office is. It’s not how cool your product looks. It’s not how many employees you have. It’s not 80 other vanity metrics that you see startups bragging about every day.
…
– Is your product live?
– Does it have customers?
– Are they paying?
– Do they come back and pay again?
It’s that simple.
In the short run, you will be annoyed that you won’t a lot of attention to the other people who are ‘scenesters’. In the long run, you might just build a successful company. Are you optimising for the short run or the long run?