I'm really excited to share with you some findings that really surprise me about what makes companies succeed the most, what factors actually matter the most for startup success. I believe that the startup organization is one of the greatest forms to make the world a better place. If you take a group of people with the right equity incentives and organize them in a startup, you can unlock human potential in a way never before possible. You get them to achieve unbelievable things. But if the startup organization is so great, why do so much fail? That's what I wanted to find out. I wanted to find out what actually matters most for startup success. And I wanted to try to be systematic about it, avoid some of my instincts and maybe misperceptions I have from so many companies I've seen over the years. I wanted to know this because I've been starting businesses since I was 12 years old when I sold candy at the bus stop in junior high school, to high school, when I made solar energy devices, to college, when I made loudspeakers. And when I graduated from college, I started software companies.

Quick recap from part one our culture is based on agile principles all engineering happens in squads and we try to keep them loosely coupled and tightly aligned we like cross-pollination and have an internal open source model for code squads do small and frequent releases which is enabled by decoupling our self-service model minimizes the need for handoffs and we use release trains and feature toggles to get stuff into production early and often and since culture is all about the people we focus on motivation community and trust rather than structure and control that was part one and now I'd like to talk about failure our founder Daniel put it nicely we aim to make mistakes faster than anyone else the idea is to build something really cool

One of the big success factors here at Spotify is our agile engineering culture tends to be invisible we don't notice it because it's there all the time kind of like the air we breathe but if everyone understands the culture we're more likely to be able to keep it and even strengthen it as we grow so that's the purpose of this video when our first music player was launched in 2008 we were pretty much a scrum company scrum is a well-established agile development approach and it gave us a nice team-based culture however a few years later we had grown into a bunch of teams

Here's the great startup myth of our time. If you only have determination, brilliance, great timing, and above all, a great product, you too can achieve fame and fortune. A related misconception is that ideas are precious. Generally, people hesitate to reveal their ideas in public - even among friends! There's this nagging fear that someone can steal the idea from you. Please ... Sorry, but an idea is never that great. I would bet my right arm that during a lifetime, the average person has at least 20 awesome ideas that could be turned into commercialized and successful startups.

You started a business and you want to compensate your early employees. Or you've joined a startup and were offered stock options as part of your compensation. How do those work? Let's do it. Most startups in the US compensate their employees with a salary, of course, and with stock options. The idea here is giving team members an upside if the collaborate to increase the company valuation. On public companies, that is, companies whose stock has been listed on a public stock exchange, this works somewhat differently, so I won't get into that.

Like it's fascinating to me that all the successful entrepreneurs I know, they look at being resourceful, they don't look at somebody else needs to pay for this thing. (upbeat music) How to fund your startup, in this video I'm going to help you overcome the challenges. Maybe you have an idea and you're wondering like where does the money come to get this thing started? Or you don't feel like you know the right people in your life to actually help support you and maybe lend you some money to build the first prototype.

How to build a hundred million dollar startup in three years. Now, I know that's a huge promise. Wait with me, I'm gonna walk you through exactly why I'm talking about this video and how to do it. I mean maybe you just want to build any kind of business and you feel like all the growth options are confusing and how would you do this and how would you fund it. To me it's like even how do you do it in a way that doesn't turn you into a stress ball? I'm going to unpack that big question and tell you where it came from, and build a sequence for you to just understand you can do it.

n 2014 me and a couple of my friends started working on creating a marketplace-based tech startup in 2015 we got our initial seed funding from a venture capital firm that valued our startup at 5 million so today i wanted to share some lessons i learned from that experience and hopefully provide some insight into what it is like to create a tech startup.

How does your company fail after raising $50MM? This was a real comment/question on one of our Startup Forensics videos. For someone outside the startup ecosystem, the amounts of money these companies raise just seem obscene. Uber has raised $20 BILLION dollars in funding, and it's yet to turn a profit. WeWork raised $22 BILLION dollars, and it's currently on life support (which is funny because our New York office is in WeWork, which makes it... weird). Even smaller companies deal with rounds in the millions of dollars, and valuations in the hundreds of millions. So why do investors pour so much money into these tech startups?

As a CEO you'll need creativity, people skills, number skills, patience, resolve... but before all that, I think the most critical skill a founder needs is the ability to learn and adapt fast. You will need to do a bit of everything in your company, especially when starting up- from tech tasks such as setting up an email to routing your domain- to understanding the employment legislation in your city, state, and country. As your company grows, you can delegate these tasks, but it's much easier to build a team by delegating your tasks, than by hiring people to do things you have no idea how to do

Most companies, less than 1% of the companies are funded by angel investors. Less than 0.5% is funded by venture capital. So you think about most startups and founders fail to raise money that they need to start the business. Most people, they actually start off with just family and friends and loans from the banks and things like that, right? It's very, very normal and it's very interesting because a lot of the times founders, they want to raise money, but they don't know how right? because it's not taught in school.

Leonardo Silva Imagine that every one of you in this audience is an entrepreneur and you're about to pitch your business to an investor. Maybe over email, maybe face to face or maybe in front of millions on national TV. And you've sacrificed everything to get to this point. This is your baby, your dream. And you think, if you can only get this outside funding, that all of your problems will be solved. Or maybe most of them. So you give your pitch and there's a dramatic pause. And then the investor says, No

One of the first things you want to do is to keep in mind that at the end of the day you need to build something useful for somebody. So, one of the first tasks is to figure out who is that somebody. Who are you really serving? And what is the job that they're hiring you to do. And looking at it from their perspective will often yield insights that are hidden from the product owner or entrepreneur, if we're purely looking at it from the product-centric perspective. A lot of it is about being at the right place in the right time. While you don't have control over timing, you do have control over two variables, the product and the market.

A seemingly booming economy now seems to be headed towards a recession, which will inevitably leave a lot of people unemployed across many industries. More importantly, 2020 is likely to represent one of the most essential 'resets' the economy will go through. Suddenly, online shopping is the ONLY way to shop, rather than a complement to brick and mortar. Suddenly, working from home is the norm, rather than a nice to have. Likely, these changes in the dynamics of how people interact and spend money will have echoes for months and years to come.

Today we are going to look into the process of raising capital, from business validation to investor meeting. This is how to raise money for a business. Very few businesses can raise money before traction. Traction is proof that your business is viable, and that you, as a founder, were able to bootstrap your way to it. We've covered this traction ordeal at length on our previous videos, as well as how to create a pitch deck- so now we'll focus the investor workflow.

Not all businesses are created equal. The guys that started Airbnb, or the guys that started Slack- set out to build a multi-billion dollar company that would IPO or get acquired for an insane amount of money. Those are the entrepreneurs that we (mostly) hear about, and that we look up to, and that's fine. Who doesn't want to build a business that transforms the world? But the story of how they built their businesses doesn't necessarily apply to everyone. Not all businesses are Amazons. Not all businesses are Facebooks or Twitters

If you're starting your first company understanding stock preferred stock options convertible notes and other fundraising instruments can be truly overwhelming we actually didn't find a single video that covered this so here we go this is fundraising for startups 101 if you're an early-stage startup in the tech space and you're looking for money to grow your company the official term for that would be raising capital the most commonly recommended instrument to do so is called a convertible note

This is a list of items which starts from before you set up the company and it's very important that you do it in this area so first and foremost you need to decide assuming that you're a team of founders you're not just one you need to decide how many shares are going to be held by each member of the team having done that you then need to have at least a discussion as to what happens if one or more of the team decide to leave the company for whatever reason sometimes founders are very comfortable with the idea of one of them

There's a lot to consider when starting a business, but the relationship with your co-founders is probably one of the most critical parts. I learned about early vesting and salaries the hard way. On the company I started in 2012, we did have a good vesting agreement in place, but failing to define salaries spiraled badly. I ended up with about $16,000 in credit card debt, which may not sound like a lot to you, depending on where you live

As we've scaled Slidebean and had the chance to connect with hundreds of companies, one of the most common questions I get is around finding a co-founder. The most common scenario I come across is an executive/business/sales founder, looking to find a tech co-founder to develop the product they have in mind. So let's dissect this situation, understand the challenge this startup faces and look for alternatives to meeting that persona