Startupland Buchzusammenfassung - das Wichtigste aus Startupland

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Zusammenfassung von Startupland

Name: Startupland
Rating: 4 (28 reviews)
Author: Mikkel Svane

Mikkel Svane

How Three Guys Risked Everything to Turn an Idea into a Global Business

4 (28 Bewertungen)

15 Min.

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What’s in it for me? Improve your chances of standing your ground in the land of startups.

Say you’ve just struck upon a brilliant idea for a business. Or maybe you already had one, but failed to follow through with it. Either way, you’re hoping to build a successful business around your new idea.

But in the seemingly open universe of creativity, competition is fierce. Here, everyone fights tooth and nail to turn their innovative ideas into a reality. So, how can you avoid getting swallowed up by the hordes of start-up predators?

You can start by taking advice from one of the heavyweights in the field. In these blinks, the author shares his personal story of building his own successful company, Zendesk. From tentative ideas to a thriving US-based business, the author invites you along his journey of ups and downs, offering plenty of tips on how to get your own ideas off the ground.

In these blinks, you’ll discover

which investors are good investors;
why working on your team-building skills is so important; and
why the author had to relocate from Copenhagen to the United States.

It’s okay if your first start-up isn’t your last.

When Columbus returned from his journey to the Americas, some of his peers insisted that any Spaniard could have “discovered” the new continent – all they had to do was sail westward. To prove them wrong, Columbus placed a hard-boiled egg on the table in front of them and challenged them to make it stand on its own. When they failed, he took the egg and gently tapped it against the table, creating a small, flat base that it could stand on.

Columbus’s point was that it’s easy to do something once you know how – when you don’t, you have to take a risk. Start-ups work the same way.

Founding a start-up is all about using your entrepreneurial spirit to try new things. The author worked on a number of projects before developing Zendesk, a software tool that enables companies to provide better customer support to their clients.

His first venture created 3-D illusions based on 2-D patterns, using a piece of software. He ran his business alone: customers sent him orders and he sent the disks out himself.

The author’s next product was a tool for producing websites, and it gave him his first taste of failure when it collapsed during the dot-com crash of 2001.

When founding a start-up you also have to realize that sometimes the best ideas are not always the most interesting.

At first, few people had faith in the idea for Zendesk, as they weren’t inspired by the thought of a company focused on providing better help desks and customer support. Alex Aghassipour, who ended up becoming one of the company’s core members, initially thought Zendesk sounded incredibly boring.

Like Zendesk, a lot of important start-up ideas might seem unexciting at first, but they can become very attractive if they’re executed well. Take the company Dropbox, for instance. File-sharing isn’t the most exciting service to provide, but Dropbox has made this tedious task easy, interesting and even socially engaging.

Choose your investors wisely.

If you’re a kid on the playground looking for money, the school bully probably wouldn’t be the best person to go to. He might give you the money, but if so, he’ll ask for it back with interest. The start-up scene isn’t all that different.

Not all investors are good investors. Unfortunately, start-ups don’t usually have a lot of options when it comes to getting their initial investments; when you first start out, you’ll be exposed to a lot of investors who are only concerned with themselves. The best thing for your start-up is to turn them down and hold out for a bit longer.

Pick a great team – and fight to keep them together.

Did you play team sports in gym class as a kid? Which team member was the most fun: the person who wanted everyone to participate and have a good time, or the star player who scored all the goals but did it alone? Of course, it’s the former.

Start-ups work in a similar way. People with good team-building skills often make the best entrepreneurs; however, it’s not always easy to keep the team on track.

The United States is the best place to be in the start-up world.

Outsiders are often annoyed by American aphorisms like “fake it till you make it” or “winners never quit.” American optimism might seem unrealistic at first glance, but it’s actually helped foster a great start-up environment. You can’t succeed with a start-up if you don’t have the confidence to take risks!

In fact, all major internet-related businesses (and the internet itself!) originated in the United States. Denmark, for instance, only had one internet provider and very expensive dial-up in the early ‘90s, but American cities like San Francisco embraced the internet early on and were enthusiastic about it right away.

Your start-up will have an impact on your family.

Entrepreneurs’ lives often revolve around their work. They might work over 12 hours a day and when they’re not working, they’re thinking about work. Naturally, this can be challenging for their families for a number of reasons.

For one, it’s hard to take financial risks when you have a family. The author struggled with this when he accumulated a lot of credit card debt and used up his retirement money while building Zendesk. He also took out a $50,000 loan that he was personally liable for. At one point, he was two weeks away from going bankrupt if he didn’t get more funding.

Being adaptable and flexible with your recruitment can help you find the right employees.

If you’ve ever had to sort through a pile of 80 CVs, all written in the same cryptic language, you know that picking the right candidate can be difficult. And sometimes interviews just make the situation worse: the interviewees get nervous and speak too little or too much.

Now imagine if you had to go through all this in a foreign country! That’s exactly what the Zendesk founders had to do after they moved to Boston, and they learned some pretty important lessons in the process.

Be prepared to make mistakes.

Launching a start-up is like jumping from a ten-meter diving board: you might land a perfect dive, or do a painful belly flop. And you’ll definitely have to take several dives before you really figure out what you’re doing.

For example, when Zendesk was starting out, the author had a few false starts while looking for funding. At one point, when the company was still based in Denmark, he flew to the United States to meet a partner in a venture capitalist firm. But his timing could hardly have been worse: the 2008 financial crisis was underway, mortgages were no longer available and big banks like Lehman Brothers and Merrill Lynch had collapsed.

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Worum geht es in Startupland?

In Startupland (2015), Mikkel Svane tells the origin story of his own company, Zendesk. He explains how he went from working on a small website in Denmark to becoming the CEO of a million-dollar trading company in the United States, and shares the insights he gained along the way.

Wer Startupland lesen sollte

Entrepreneurs and start-up founders
Anyone who wants to bring their business idea to life
People who aren’t afraid to take risks

Über den Autor

Mikkel Svane is the founder and CEO of Zendesk, a software company for customer support based in San Francisco.

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