Jay Samit Quotes
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In order to protect against being disrupted, startups also need to recruit employees that are committed to life-long learning. The skills that made your team members valuable may not be the skills needed to take your company to the next level or to compete in emerging markets.
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Design is how you make your first impression with your consumers. Make sure it is a lasting one.
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Every new startup business creates new opportunities. It doesn't matter whether you have a new app for college students or a home medical device for senior citizens; there are other multibillion noncompetitive corporations that are spending millions of dollars trying to market their goods and services to your same audience.
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Microsoft first entered the living room with Ultimate TV way back in 2000 - a year before Apple's first iPod was announced. Ultimate TV offered consumers a DVR and supporting online services, including 14 days of programming and the ability to record 35 hours of programming. Microsoft's reach was then thwarted when Echostar acquired DIRECTV.
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From the very first inkling of a concept, founders need to gather a target group of five to ten potential users to begin the feedback loop. We all think we know how the market will react to new ideas, but actual users live with the pros and cons of the existing market conditions every day. They are the market experts.
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Pick a co-founder that communicates in the same fashion that you do. If you are a screamer, then the only way you will ever listen to a conflicting point of view is to find someone who is passionate enough to yell back at you.
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Creating something that builds lasting value and changes the lives of millions of people requires forging a team that will work hard to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles, stand up to the pressures of fame and fortune, and stay true to the original vision long after others stop believing.
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Betting all your funds on the belief that you know what consumers want and are willing to pay for is like jumping into a river to test its depth - you'll need a lot of luck to stay afloat. To have a truly successful product launch, the conversations with your customers must start long before you write your first line of code.
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Building a great team is the lifeblood of any startup, and finding great talent is one of the hardest and costliest tasks any CEO will ever face.
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Many first-time founders fail to understand the difference between the potential of the Total Addressable Market (TAM) and the very finite subsection they can hope to capture. No company ever captures the entire market they pioneer. Innovation doesn't happen in a vacuum, and others will jump in from the moment you've identified the potential.
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The Industrial Revolution was about making physical things. Many of the manufactured goods that were once tangible objects have now been reduced to bits and bytes of data.
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The greatest challenge to most innovation centers around the world is many nations' punitive attitudes towards failure. In most of the world, if your first business fails, no one will work with you again. But, trial and error is the genesis of innovation.
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As good and as smart as you may be, no one knows everything. I truly wish I was as smart as I thought I was when I started my first company.
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Social media and personalization are providing both brand advertisers and end-users with hyper-targeted choices and opportunities for double-digit growth.
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Your innovation can create new winners and losers; or at the very least, make existing companies look fresh and innovative by partnering with you. Everyone wants to align with market makers.
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As counterintuitive as it sounds, 'speed to fail' should be every entrepreneur's motto. Success isn't born wholly-formed like Venus from a clamshell; it's developed through relentless trial and error.
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In my experience, there are only two valid reasons to take a company public: access to growth capital and investor fatigue.
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Onboarding starts with satisfying the most basic of Maslow's psychological needs: belonging. New hires shouldn't arrive to an empty cube and be forced to forage through corridors searching for a computer and the bare necessities of office life. A new hire isn't a surprise visitor from out of town. Plan for their arrival.
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As a serial investor who has raised hundreds of millions of dollars for startups, I know that the business plans coming out of incubators tend to be vetted and more thoroughly validated. The incubator's input into your business plan will make you look far more polished and experienced - even if you have never run a business before.
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Entrepreneurs always begin the journey believing that they have the next big idea. They dream of the fame and fortune that awaits them if only they had the funding to pursue it. But the reality is that as the product is built and shared with customers, flaws in their concept are discovered that - if not overcome - will kill the business.
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No first-time entrepreneur has the business network of contacts needed to succeed. An incubator should be well integrated into the local business community and have a steady source of contacts and introductions.
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Creating the right advisory board for your startup can be the single most important step you take in building a new business.
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In an era of endless innovation and constant disruption, what is any company really worth? How does a startup determine its valuation?
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With less and less television being watched live, consumers are enjoying the freedom to record at home or in the cloud, watch locally or on the go, and binge watch entire series that they never had the time to enjoy.