From Big Idea to Profitable Business
March 3, 2010 in General Information
Business Week has an article featuring Caterina Fake, co-founder of Flickr:
Fake, center (next to the dog), with the Hunch team.
Getting the Startup Equation Right – BusinessWeek
The Entrepreneur: Caterina Fake, 40
Background: Social media pioneer and co-founder of the photo-sharing service Flickr, she led the technology development group at Yahoo (YHOO) after it acquired her company in 2005. In 2008 she left Yahoo and joined Hunch as co-founder.
The Company: Hunch is a recommendation tool that uses machine learning to harness its users’ knowledge and offer customized answers to their questions. The 12-person business launched the public version of the service in June 2009, had 1.2 million unique monthly users in January, and has raised $6 million in funding.
Her Journal: I have always been very interested in invention and creation and the Great Idea. But the idea is just the starting point, just the first step. You also have to find the right people to help you do it. No successful company has have ever been the product of just one person.
The way the story is told is that Martha Stewart or Steve Jobs or Richard Branson is the sole driver. But that’s because people like to have a protagonist, just as there’s a protagonist in every novel. A group of people makes a bad protagonist. Turning an idea into a company means you have to find brilliant, capable, amazing people and put together a team. [Ed. note: emphasis mine] And then you have to get everybody on board with the Great Idea. And then figure out how to get there.
Putting together a team to help you implement your idea is essential, and quite probably harder than you think. I have put together a couple of teams, and been on some teams, and it is not easy to keep everyone motivated and in the game.
My number one tip for making it work: establish a budget early on and “hire” the team members. The financial incentive works very well. Building a team of entrepreneurs is like herding cats. It takes a lot of time and effort and the cats don’t like it very much!
