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 / michael.dehaan@gmail.com