A Guide to Career Hacking

It seems like every other week I am getting a call from an old friend or new introduction asking for career advice.  The narrative is usually pretty similar:  Smart people reach a certain point in their college education where they start thinking about career aspirations.  They look back at a couple years of miscellaneous coursework, and realize that they quite simply have no idea what they want to be “when they grow up”.

Our university system does an impressively terrible job of helping students iterate through career options.  Switching majors is somewhat stigmatized (which didn’t stop me from doing it three times in three semesters of school), and a huge percentage of majors do absolutely nothing to help students hone in on a career.  Students end up graduating feeling no closer to a career choice than when they started school.

I’ve had enough of these conversations over the past several months that I’ve finally decided to collect my general advice into a guide of sorts.  What follows is a mode of thinking about career decisions that has served me well so far.  As Brad Feld is fond of saying, “It’s just data”, and should be treated as such.

My advice is this:  Hack your career decision by rapidly iterating through several possible options.  Find industries that interest you, and hone in on testable ways to explore them as career options.  Check your assumptions about finances, time, and location to maximize your freedom to explore.  Finally, don’t be afraid to aggressively test these hypotheses, and be prepared to fail in doing so.

To do this, start by defining your interests:

1. Identify markets/industries that interest you.  I advise starting at the industry, rather than the job function level for several reasons.  First, job functions change dramatically over the course of a career.  You start as an engineer, get promoted to manager, and end up as an executive.  You start in marketing, move over to sales, and end up in business development.  So driving towards a potential function is often counterproductive in the short term.  Second, industries in which you have a genuine, long term interest are likely to keep you engaged regardless of the actual function you are fulfilling.  In my time at Onswipe and Taykey I’ve done everything from sales to hiring to project management, and thoroughly enjoyed each one.  This is because I had already discovered a passion for the overall industry in which I was working.

2. Hone in on testable experiences.  Prior to dropping out of college, I had three opportunities under consideration.  The first was the three month Associate position that I ended up being lucky enough to receive at Techstars.  Second was being an apprentice to an individual who led leveraged buyouts of distressed corporations.  Third was working for a military contractor in Afghanistan, doing QA on vehicles returning from combat situations.  These options were quite literally all over the map, but that was the point.  Each represented a bold, aggressive move into an industry that interested me, and each was an opportunity that would have been impossible to pursue in the traditional college framework.

3. The three month hypothesis.  Focusing on the Techstars opportunity, I knew that I needed to test whether tech could truly be a long term passion for me.  This meant taking a tremendous leap of faith:  three months in NY, no salary, and no guarantee of a job offer upon completing the program.  I planned a budget which allowed me about fourteen weeks of runway, and arrived in New York with my laptop, five changes of clothes, one set of sheets and one towel.  I planned and executed a lifestyle designed to minimize distractions, and worked 18 hour days, 7 days a week to maximize my exposure to mentors, founders, and learning opportunities.  The entire strategy was unsustainable on a long term basis, but that was precisely the point.

After defining my interests, I had to check my assumptions.  Overcoming your core career and lifestyle assumptions is the first step to actively hacking your career options.  These assumptions often fall along three lines:

1.  Finances:  What is your financial position?  Do you have savings?  Debts that can be deferred in any way? What are your living expenses?  Where can you eliminate inefficiency?  I was lucky to have several advantages in this regard:  I was intensely debt intolerant, and had chosen a State school specifically to avoid quickly being saddled with large student loans.  I was an inherent workaholic:  The summer after my Freshman year of college, I worked two jobs nearly full time:  From 9am to 4pm I handled the marketing for a SaaS software company, and from 5pm to 1am I worked as a waiter at a local restaurant.  Consequently, I had saved up enough cash to make an aggressive decision like moving to NY.

2.  Time:  Perhaps the biggest lie of American culture is the concept of the linear lifestyle.  You graduate high school and go to college.  Graduate college, get a job.  If you’re a high achiever, return to school for a graduate degree.  Back to work.  Get married.  Have kids.  On and on and over and over again.  The faster you can separate yourself from that mode of thinking, the better off you will be.  Taking three months at age 20 to pursue a potentially life changing career opportunity absolutely cannot damage your long term prospects.  When presented with a choice that has enormous upside, and a tremendously limited long term downside, you take it.

3. Location:  The geographic “hub” effect is as strong as ever, regardless of how social technology has changed the way we communicate.  I wanted to work in tech startups, and lived in Raleigh, NC.  I knew I needed to  relocate in order to accelerate my career, especially if I was going to pursue a three month hack.  I hear from too many students located in places like Atlanta or Madison who want to work in tech startups.  My first advice is always to move to a hub as quickly as possible.  You simply cannot replicate the serendipity and opportunities that come with living in New York or Silicon Valley.  Regardless of the industry you want to hack, find the hub and move there as soon as possible.

Once you’ve defined your interests and checked assumptions, you should have developed at least one testable hypothesis worth pursuing.  Having settled on the Techstars Associate position as my top choice, I simply had to go out and execute.  As always, this is the hardest part.  I left my friends, girlfriend, and network behind in Raleigh, NC.  I moved to a city I had never even visited, knowing that I was about to burn through every penny of savings I had worked so hard to accrue.  I threw myself into an industry I knew almost nothing about, in an environment where I was the youngest person by at least half a decade.

I was lucky enough that my first test ended with a “success” in the traditional sense.  I found the industry I loved, and received my dream job offer from Onswipe within less than a week of my budgeted runway coming to an end.  However, like any good experiment, an alternative resolution could have equally been seen as a success.  I could have found that I had no passion for the tech industry, and received no dream job offer with impeccable timing.  This would not have been a failure, but simply a refutation of my initial hypothesis.  With a relatively minimal time investment, I would have narrowed my list of potential career options, and learned an enormous amount in a short period of time.

Although these “hacks” are built around short term tests, they are not at all designed to optimize for short term success in the traditional sense.  This is no get-rich-quick scheme, or a way to circumvent paying the dues required to advance in your chosen field.   The primary goal is to learn, not to quickly make money or get a dream job offer.

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We Rejected Dan Shipper (And What I Learned About Hiring)

Edit:  To clarify some confusion over on Hacker News: Dan reviewed this post in its’ entirety before it was published. I gave him final say on whether or not it was published or submitted here.  He thinks the entire thing is pretty funny and will probably jokingly hold this over my head for months.

Last Thursday I jumped over to Twitter and saw this via my friend John Exley:

“Consider this a job offer to work at @42Floors“: 42floors.com/blog/posts/con… – by @jasonfreedman. Written TO my brother @DanShipper. Beyond legit.

— John Exley (@JohnExley) April 26, 2012

I was  blown away by the post and thought it was great to see this sort of thing written about an awesome guy like Dan.  I agree entirely with Jason Freedman’s thoughts on hiring, and loved seeing him put everything into his strategy of courting top talent.  It was cool to see Dan earning some (well deserved) attention for the following he has built over the past 2 years through his blogging and various projects/products.

The story also was cause for a little humor and embarrassment on my part.  See, a little over one year ago Dan Shipper applied for an internship at my last company.  And we rejected him.

Dan applied via our jobs page.  His application listed some interesting experience (Blackberry app development when he was still in high school, two small webapps), but nothing immediately relevant to our needs.  He also listed a few things that seem funny to look back on now:  His first semester college GPA, and his role as high school senior class president.  Altogether, it was an interesting application- but quite frankly, not very different from many similar applications we received from college students looking to work at a startup.  I sent him a quick response thanking him for his submission and looking to schedule a brief interview.

Here’s where Dan began to differentiate himself.  He followed up persistently (we were in the middle of Techstars at the time and had trouble coordinating an interview time), and kept me up to date on the explosion of Wheremyfriends.be, a simple webapp he had built with his friends Wesley and Ajay.  We finally found time to schedule a lunch, and he and I ended up spending half of an afternoon talking about product, startups, and education (I had recently dropped out, while Dan was committed to staying at Penn).

After our long conversation, it was clear that Dan had the mentality and intellect of an A Player.  He was young, driven, and extremely intelligent.  But in a review between myself and the company cofounders, one sticking point kept coming up:  Not enough relevant development experience.  We were trying to build a core front end team that had an existing passion for mobile/tablet, and Dan was a square peg in that round hole.  So we rejected him.

Rejecting someone you genuinely liked interviewing is tough, and I thought the least I could do would be to introduce him to other internship opportunities that might be a good fit.  I connected him with the awesome founders of Artsicle, where he ended up interning for the summer. Dan was extremely gracious about the entire thing, and I was happy to see him end up in a good situation.

Of course, looking back on it, the fact that we rejected the guy who is now being publicly courted by a well regarded startup like 42Floors is pretty funny.  However, in reflecting on this story, there are a few important lessons to learn as an early stage startup:

1. Look for talent at all levels: At the time that Dan applied, we had no plan in place for hiring technical interns.  We were focused on building out our “core” tech team, and really weren’t prepared for talented but raw engineers to step in and contribute.  We ended up rectifying this situation and finding two incredibly talented engineering interns, but we missed on Dan and several other potential candidates.  In a startup environment that is a constant battle for talent, early stage companies simply cannot afford to pass on talent at any level.  When we were absolutely buried with product needs in the weeks leading up to launch, we wouldn’t have given a damn if Dan did or didn’t fit our neat round hole of a job description.

2. Always hire A Players: This is repeated often enough that it’s a truism in the startup community, yet we still got this one wrong when it came to Dan.  As a startup, if you have the opportunity to bring on an A player in a low risk role (like an internship), you do it.  No questions asked.  Because finding A players is tough.  When one drops into your lap, you don’t hesitate or shuffle through your available job listings.  You pull the trigger.  In a company of less than 10 people, A players will naturally fall into the role that best suits them.  They will contribute at a high level, and attract other high level contributors to join the team.

3. Treat People Right: I could have easily made the mistake of sending Dan a polite rejection email and nothing else.  Instead, I followed up and worked hard to help him find another opportunity that made sense.  We got coffee the next time he came to the city, and met up when our schedules allowed over the summer.  I took something that could have easily been a negative interaction and turned it into a positive opportunity to build a friendship.  Whether we end up working together, competing, or just staying in touch throughout our careers, it’s great having a smart friend just an email or phone call away.

In our email banter about the blog post and subsequent Techcrunch and Hacker News coverage, Dan joked that maybe I finally owed him an apology for our rejection.  Even though that statement was made entirely as a joke, I don’t mind eating crow:  Like 42Floors made their offer as an open letter of recruitment, consider this my open letter of apology.

Making decisions in a startup is hard, and you absolutely cannot get every one right.  I’m lucky that this mistake turned into a positive (and humorous) learning experience.  Congratulations to Dan on one hell of a year, and best of luck to Jason Freedman and the team at 42Floors in courting A Players like Dan.

If you enjoyed this post, you can follow me on Twitter.  Thanks for reading!

Instagram and Value Judgements

As we move to the end of the Instagram acquisition hype cycle, I am especially discouraged by the overall tone of the conversation.  In the press, on Twitter, and in communities like Hacker News, I’m struck by the broad value judgements thrown out, debated, and repeated ad nasuem.

Perhaps this frustration comes from the fact that I’m currently re-reading one of my all time favorite books, “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”.  Context switching between a book that begins as beautifully and simply as:

And what is good, Phaedrus,
And what is not good—
Need we ask anyone to tell us these things?

And blog posts with breathless titles like “The Billion Dollar Mind Trick”  or “From 0 To $1 Billion In Two Years: Instagram’s Rose-Tinted Ride To Glory” is bound to be frustrating (and perhaps a good argument for ignoring the hype cycle altogether).

Early in “Zen”, the divide between classical and romantic modes of thought is studied in-depth. The classical tends to focus on underlying form (“how does a motorcycle work”), while the romantic cares more about intangibles; feelings rather than facts. (“how do you feel while riding a motorcycle?”)

Interestingly enough, I’ve seen that much of the Instagram cheerleading and criticism has aligned along these two modes of thought.  The cheerleaders largely focus on the romantic aspects of the company:  a strong, engaged community.  Beautiful and simple product.  The tremendous narrative of so much value being created in so little time.

The critics largely focus on a classical analysis:  no world changing technology was created.  There was no business model or revenue.  The fact that SpaceX was able to build an entirely new space vehicle for less than it cost to buy Instagram.

Quite simply, neither of these modes of thought fully captures the objective quality of Instagram.  Both approaches lead to value judgements rather than actual analysis.  Commenters on Hacker News use phrases like “cheesy filters” and “cat pictures” to deride the acquisition.  Tech pundits hype valuations and talk of an “overnight success”.  Both approaches rely on a particular mode of discourse, which precludes any actual discussion of quality.

So many labels.  So many soundbites.  I’m reminded of a particular line from “Zen”:

If someone’s ungrateful and you tell him he’s ungrateful, okay, you’ve called him a name. You haven’t solved anything.

Is there anything to solve in the Instagram story?

A small team worked hard to build a product they loved.  Great investors like Ben Horowitz supported them.  A network of passionate users evangelized the hell out of the product.  And finally, an individual much smarter than me unilaterally risked 1% of his $100 billion company to acquire them.

That is all.

Would I ever seek to build a company like Instagram?  Probably not.

Does this story affect my own desired career arc or ambitions?  Not at all.

Should it have any effect on yours?  I would certainly hope not.

So why don’t we all stop making useless value judgements, and start building quality and value of our own?

Hiring Great People Sucks.

Hiring great people sucks.  Its a slog.  Its hard work.

When I was still in school, I remember reading countless blog posts on hiring.  Mark Suster’s “Whom Should You Hire At A Startup” comes to mind as one of the best, but the topic has been addressed at length by many of the best in the business.

These posts always include admonishments to “only hire A players”, and “invest in great people”.  At the time, those seemed like truisms- of course you would only hire the best.  Smart people like working with other smart people, and in a startup you want to create a culture of excellence.

The fact is, it’s damn near impossible to hire truly great talent. Recruiting a single great employee is like trying to date that one girl (or guy) you know is impossibly out of your league.  You know they have plenty of options.  You know everyone in town is trying to get their time and attention, sometimes including your more well known or better funded competitors.

Still, you try.  You invest hours in coffees and lunches, trying to get to know them.  What motivates them? What challenges interest them?  What is their own personal career vision?

You email them regularly with updates on your company’s success.  Maybe another recent key hire could motivate them to join, or perhaps a new round of funding leaves your company in a more secure position.

Now, against all odds, and after investing months in building this relationship- the candidate finally accepts your offer and joins your company.  If we were still talking about dating, that would be the end of the story.

In a startup, that isn’t the case.  The grueling, time consuming process that you finally just completed?  Go do that again.  And again.  In fact, why don’t you repeat it, oh- 20, 30 times.  That’s the kind of dedication it takes to build an awesome organization from the ground up.

Like I said before- it sucks.  Which is why I have such respect for the leaders that work so hard to build excellent teams.  I’ve been fortunate to learn from awesome people like Jason at Onswipe, and Amit and John here at Taykey, that personify the hustle and effort that goes into building a great team.

I’ve also worked hard to apply this mentality to building out our team here at Taykey.  Right now we are looking to hire an amazing product designer, and I’ve spent time reworking the typical designer interview process to make it more conducive to finding and engaging with great people.  More than anything, I’ve been grateful to get a better understanding of why so many smart people like Suster obsess over hiring- it really is the key to building a great organization, and its also one of the toughest challenges a startup faces.

Creative Destruction and Equality

While catching up on my reading over the New Year’s weekend, I stumbled upon this gem via Cafe Hayek:

Adding yet more interventions and taxes which discourage the formation of new fortunes will simply provide additional opportunities for the current elite to avoid the ‘creative destruction’ characteristic of unfettered market competition.

One of my main disagreements with the OWS movement is their general assertion that greater regulation and onerous taxation will unseat the current financial and political elite. Pennington is absolutely correct in recognizing that any increase in regulation and taxation brought about by the OWS movement will likely fall victim to the same rent seeking that created the mess we are currently in.

There is no doubt that our current system is corrupt and broken. A culture of privatized gains and socialized losses continues to pervade our entire financial system. Giants like GE use their lobbying pull to avoid paying a single penny in corporate income tax, even as the regulatory burden for startups and small businesses becomes worse every year.

There is nothing the current elite fears more than the ability of creative destruction to wreak havoc on their political and economic power. Only by removing the barriers America’s entrepreneurs face in the “formation of new fortunes” can we hope to bring about true change to the system we are all so dissatisfied with.

On To The Next One

Over the past several weeks, I have been winding down my responsibilities at Onswipe.  Starting tomorrow, I will be joining the team at Taykey, a trend buying platform for advertisers.

Making the decision to leave Onswipe was one of the most difficult choices I’ve ever made.  Above all else, I am tremendously grateful for the opportunity given to me by Jason and Andres to work alongside them on the early stages of the building Onswipe into a great company.  While I was at Onswipe, our organization grow from 4 people to 16 in just 7 months.  We went from a $1 Million seed financing to a $5 Million “Series Awesome”, and established partnerships with a series of amazing brands and publishers:  Hearst, Washington Post Group, Ziff Davis, Thomson Reuters, as well as Sprint and American Express.

I am also incredibly thankful for the amazing team I was able to work with and learn from every day. People often compare the early stages of a startup to “going to war”.  After months of long hours, hard work, and the emotional roller coaster inherent in any early stage business-  I can truly say that every person I had the privilege to work with is now a close friend.

As compared to Onswipe, Taykey represents a very different (and very compelling) challenge.  While my work at Onswipe consisted of laying the foundation for a growing company, Taykey is now confronting the challenges inherent in scaling around a repeatable and robust business model.  Although my nominal “department” (Operations) will be the same, my role at Taykey can simply be described as this:  identifying and solving problems that are preventing the company from growing at peak efficiency.

As the transition becomes “official” tomorrow with my first day at Taykey, I am very grateful to everyone who has helped me through this process.  Many thanks to the entire Onswipe team, who have been very understanding of my decision.  To my friends and mentors who guided me through the decision making process, thank you.  Most importantly, thank you to Amit Avner and the Taykey team for this opportunity-  I look forward to contributing as Taykey continues to grow and thrive.

Distorting The Economics Of Scarcity

The recent announcement that Amazon has released an Ad Supported Kindle was greeted with little fanfare in the tech world.  There isn’t anything sexy about an ad supported version of an existing (and relatively unexciting) piece of hardware.  Yet this release may have marked an important first step in the progression towards a limited form of the mythical “post scarcity” economy.

As Amazon continues to progress towards their (unconfirmed) goal of a free Kindle, we get closer to the first time that a piece of physical hardware can be subsidized entirely via the delivery of paid, digital content.  Unlike phone subsidies tied to the signing of a long term (and overpriced) contract, the Kindle subsidy is tied entirely to the postulated lifetime value of a Kindle customer.

The concept of Post-Scarcity Economics has intrigued me for years.  A (very) theoretical offshoot of mainstream economic thought, its primary focus is exploring the potential consequences of an economic reality no longer tied to scarcity in the procurement of physical resources.  The hypothesis is that this would lead to the prioritization of knowledge and creativity as capital, rather than of tangible or strictly monetary (in the contemporary sense) goods.

While those most interested in the field tend to skew towards a theoretical and utopian perspective, I think the core tenets of the theories hold some valuable insights for our current era of increasing digital consumption.  Specifically, by further questioning the relationship between creative/physical capital, we can gain a better understanding of how we value and consume goods and services.

Just in the past 10 years, Apple and Netflix are well on their way to eliminating the physical scarcity of our media consumption.  They have taken one step further the scalable, mass reproduction of plastic discs, and replaced it with the nearly infinite scalability of bits and bytes.  As the cost of data transmission continues to fall, eventually the cost of delivering entertainment will effectively be zero.

At this point, we will have approached (at least in this specific industry) the utopian ideal of the post scarcity world: Entertainment will be valued solely on the expense of envisioning, creating, and recording a single instance of it.  Afterwards, the cost of duplicating and transmitting it (legally) will actually be zero.

Yesterday, amidst the buzz surround LinkedIn’s $8+ billion post IPO valuation, Barnes and Noble quietly fielded an acquisition offer that valued the company at $1 billion.  Barnes and Noble controls 1300+ physical retail locations, in addition to owning millions of dollars in physical book inventory, while  LinkedIn’s only physical assets might be the desks and chairs in their offices.

When you put it that way, the idea of a “post-scarcity” economy doesn’t sound so crazy, does it?

The Future Of Startup Finance

Even though I love consuming as much startup related content as possible, I consistently make an effort to ensure that my media time is never purely startup focused.  On my iPad, I spend just as much time reading the Economist as I do the great startup blogs like A VC and How To Make It As A First Time Entrepreneur.  On my Kindle, I make sure to devote just as much time to reading Gary V’s “Thank You Economy” as to Orson Scott Card’s “Enders Game” (On which I have a great post percolating by the way).

I find incredible value in getting outside the Startup Bubble (No, not that Bubble) and exploring other works of both fiction and nonfiction.  My most recent Kindle read, “Barbarians At The Gate“ was especially valuable in encouraging me to step outside of the current startup funding paradigms, and really evaluate the way that shifts in financing models can dramatically alter an industry.

A bit of background on “Barbarians at the Gate”: The story of one of the largest Leveraged Buyouts in History, “Barbarians” follows the twisting narratives of the various players attempting to complete the $25 billion buyout of RJR Nabisco.  More importantly, it also explores the incredible phenomena that was the LBO craze of the 1980′s.  This shift would eventually have enormous consequences for resource allocation, corporate organization and institutional investing.  The book is a phenomenal (if lengthy) read, and I highly recommend it.

The book does a great job of following the deeply personal stories of executives and investors who are watching every semblance of “normalcy” in their industry get flipped upside down.  Reading these stories of disruption really got me thinking about how the Startup world would handle such a similar disruption.

I’m not referring to a bubble bursting (we’ve seen that before), or to relatively minor disruptions like the rise of seed stage financing.  Instead, i’m talking about a wholesale shift in the very core of how startups are built, funded, and acquired.  What if institutional investors leave the venture capital world en masse as pension funds take an enormous hit in the coming entitlement crisis?  What if a new class of fund comes into existence that seeks to aggressively acquire startups along a specific vertical or horizontal chain of integration?  (UberMedia 2.0?)  Will the second and third tiers of consumer web startups be aggregated into modern “conglomerates” in a search for relevance and profitability?

I recognize that these “What-ifs” may seem odd or impossible, but thats exactly the point. If you had told a room of corporate executives in 1979 that the next decade would see the $25 billion dollar Private acquisition of an enormous food and tobacco conglomerate, they would have laughed you out of the room.  My goal is not to predict these potential shifts, or to even pretend to understand their potential implications.  In fact, Black Swan theory would argue that nobody has the ability to predict the way these coming changes will happen.  The only guarantee that anyone can make is that the current model will not last forever.  Bubbles will come and go.   Minor disruptions will alter the valuation environment. Eventually, the entire underpinnings of startup finance and acquisitions will see massive changes.

Of course, in the end, the only important question is this: When the Startup world gets flipped upside down, which side of history will you be on?

Think Different, But Get Out Of The Office

There is a bit of a rebellious streak that runs deep in startup culture.  A desire to “Think Different”, and a disregard for the pace of life that society attempts to dictate.

We see it in the stories of college dropouts who go on to found billion dollar companies.  In the long hours that look brutal to outsiders but are relished in a startup.

Like many other staunchly independent communities, our separation becomes a point of pride.  It can be all to easy to feel disengaged from friends or family who don’t share our passion.  We dismiss those who aspire to mere “corporate” jobs, and we assume every one of our friends should be an early adopter of the latest cool tech.

But this isolationism is a dangerous thing.  With the growth of a robust and enthusiastic startup community comes the tendency to withdraw completely into the jargon and lifestyle of the entrepreneur.  Its easy to forget what a remarkably tiny segment of the population we represent.  For entrepreneurs building consumer oriented products, this can be especially dangerous.

Thats why I am such a huge fan of the greater emphasis on “getting out of the office” and testing your product with real potential users.  Just today, one of our Techstars companies was hanging out in Union Square, asking complete strangers to test their product.  I love this because not only does it take guts (ever tried asking a stranger for anything on a NYC street?) but it also shows foresight and a dedication to the user that will help the company tremendously in the long run.

Appreciate and engage with the phenomenal startup community that we are lucky to have- but always be ready to walk out into Union Square and put your product in front of the real world.

Build Globally, And Do It Now (Featured In PulsoSocial)

Note: This is a repost of an article I wrote for PulsoSocial. Check out the original here.

One of the best lessons I have learned from working in New York is to “think big”.  It sounds cliche’, but there is something about being thrown into this vibrant entrepreneurial community that dramatically expands your perception of the world and its opportunities. Everyone is hustling to build around concepts that have never been tried before, and “Can it scale?” is a question heard every single day.

What I have also learned is that there is no reason why every other entrepreneurial community should not be built around a similar “big picture” vision.  The tools of the modern Internet mean that any startup can be bootstrapped to profitability while maintaining a similar global long term strategy.  Rather than building localized versions of existing companies, or struggling to keep up with well funded competitors in crowded spaces, Entrepreneurs should build products focused on immediate profitability but geared towards a broad long term vision.

The Lean Startup methodology provides an excellent framework for this kind of thinking. (Anyone who is unfamiliar with Lean Startup should check out Eric Ries’ excellent blog)  Although it  has seen broad adoption among US Entrepreneurs, I believe the Lean Startup approach can be most valuable for entrepreneurs working out of emerging markets.  Using Lean Startup style customer development, companies can build an understanding of their customers from anywhere in the world, and they can do it extremely cheaply and efficiently.  A basic outline of the process could look like this:

• A founder or team creates an early hypothesis for a product
• The team creates a simple landing page and drives traffic to it to measure interest in the hypothesis
• If the market response is positive, the team should build a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in order to further test the hypothesis.  This is an early version of the product with the minimal feature set needed to gather customer feedback.
• Based on the response to this MVP, the startup can either continue with development, or “pivot” and adjust their hypothesis and start anew.

This is a bare minimum explanation of the Lean Startup concept, and I strongly encourage any aspiring entrepreneur to read as much Steve Blank and Eric Ries as possible.  However, even at a basic level, the concept remains the same: using tools like Google Adwords and a simple landing page generator such as Unbounce, a startup can be testing receptiveness to a product in a just a few hours and for less than $100.

An excellent example of a startup following this methodology is current Techstars NYC company Onswipe (formerly known as Padpressed).  The entire Onswipe development team was working out of Latin America, and they were able to prove traction and validate their concept before closing $1 Million in funding.  Onswipe’s story almost perfectly parallels the Lean Startup Methodology:

• The Co-founders recognized there was an opportunity to make content more visually appealing on tablet devices
• The team created a simple WordPress plugin working with their development team in Mexico
• The market response was very positive, and their hypothesis was validated by the acquisition of a sizable number of paying customers
• Based on the response to this MVP, Onswipe was able to raise financing and move forward with the next iteration of their product.

The barriers to entry in the web ecosystem have become so absurdly low that there is quite literally no reason why any individual with an idea for a startup shouldn’t take the steps to explore their early hypothesis.  If early feedback looks promising, a company can bootstrapped quite easily while pursuing further validation.

The startup journey will always be a challenge, and being an entrepreneur is not for the faint of heart.  However, the old fallacy that only US based Entrepreneurs with access to venture capital can build successful Internet companies is dead wrong.  As the Internet continues to achieve near global ubiquity, it is my hope that the next generation of entrepreneurs will have a similarly global flavor.