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Lessons Learned from Ansible Open Source Startups & Other Topics Presentation to NCSU Collegiate Entrepreneurship Organization, 3/2015 Michael DeHaan

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What Company To Start?

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Solve A Problem You Have and care about.

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A 20% Better Mousetrap Is Sufficient

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Build something people will pay for

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Can you bootstrap? Be aware of time to prime markets and sales cycle time

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Community Is Not A Buzzword, It’s Everything

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Community is a Force Multiplier

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Always be helping people.

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Take Users Along For The Journey

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Explain your thought process, decisions, and be human.

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Get Your Product To Mostly Sell Itself

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Product Design / Strategy

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Good products are a balance of central design and crowd input

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Listen to the crowd, not one user at a time.

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Watch your competition, but don’t follow them.

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Know your design (and implementation) aesthetic.

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Avoid MVP. Have expertise and know (and talk to) your audience before you build something.

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Anything Proof of Concept is Provable in 2 Weeks

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YAGNI - build what matters most

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Just the right amount of design and development. make shippable Prototypes (Python!)

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Avoid Heavy Engineering Process (Scrum/too-many-meetings/interruptions/etc)

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15 minute timer for new user acquisition

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Good Documentation & Authenticity is more powerful than Marketing

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Company and Team Dynamics

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You have to be able to talk about everything

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Understand personal motives

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Seek correctness over saving face / Use Blameless Post-Mortems / Etc

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Be Able to Revisit Any Decision

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Culture is not declared, it grows from what you do every day.

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Hiring is really hard.

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Venture Capital and The Market

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Balancing Creating a Business vs The Desires of Venture Capital

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Get Profitable vs Seeking More Rounds

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IPOs are decreasing, have a better plan.

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Business models: SaaS vs Product vs Services ?

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Avoid Overhead

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Understand Timing

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Personal Things

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Running a Startup is more possible - But Infinitely More Work - Than It Looks. Be Sure You Want It

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Quote on starting my company from someone who started their own very successful company: “Congratulations! It’s horrible!”

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Don’t Say “We Are Killing It” All The Time

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We Are All Faking Knowing What We Are Doing.

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Even if it’s not, it always feels like the wheels are coming off - to all of us. Find someone you can talk to and be sure to take some time off occasionally.

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Remember to Enjoy the Ride.

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? info / questions @laserllama / [email protected]