Building vs. Selling

I’ve been receiving a lot of emails lately from friends asking how to get involved with a startup. Aside from referring them to some great posts by Alex Taub and Eric Friedman, I often start by emphasizing the value of these words:

“you’re either building, selling, or leaving.”

As an early hire you’re either part of the team responsible for innovating a new product, or you’re part of the team charged with acquiring (and retaining) users, customers, or anything else that will help keep the lights on for another month. You need to be prepared to do anything.

Sure, the titles may vary. You might be hired for marketing, sales, or customer support, but it is critical to understand that each of these share a common goal: help the company make it to the next level. Everyone at a successful, growing company is a salesman of sorts. The sooner you realize this and own it, the more valuable you are to a young, agile team. If you don’t know how the role you’re applying for will help sell the dream, you’re wasting your time.

Here to Stay

I’m pumped to share some news with those of you who have been following my experiences through tech this past year. It’s been an exciting and challenging journey full of insanely smart people who have humbled me time and time again. I have accepted an offer to join the Business team at Bitly, a Betaworks company, and will be helping to expand the Enterprise business to new verticals and larger clients. 

Over the past three and a half years Bitly has become the largest link shortening platform in the world reaching almost 90% of internet users monthly. How? Bitly shortens an average of 100 million URL’s daily and tracks almost 10 billion clicks per month. That’s a lot of data. If you’re active on Twitter you’ve almost certainly come across one of our Enterprise customer’s branded URL’s:

ESPN - http://es.pn/x4kXkv

NY Times - http://nyti.ms/J4Jnb2

GILT - http://gi.lt/HOFpb9

Amazon - http://amzn.to/J4JEuJ

We’re building the future of Enterprise level social analytics and I couldn’t be more excited to be part of the team. Over the next few months you can expect to see the launch of some game-changing features, a ton of new hires, and a few things I wish I could talk about..

Lastly, if your company is struggling to engage users across social channels, to identify powerful influencers, and to maximize ROI on social media.. Get in touch. 

- ms

Last night I taught a class via Skillshare (disclosure: Founder Collective is an investor) about how to raise a seed round. After a long day I wasn’t particularly looking forward to it, but it turned out to be a lot of fun and I stayed well past the scheduled end time. I think it worked well because the audience was full of people actually starting companies, and they came well prepared (they were all avid readers of tech blogs and had seemed to have done a lot of research).

I sketched some notes for the class which I’m posting below.

Chris Dixon drops knowledge and a whole ton of resources
Meanwhile, many early-adopting merchants find that the burst in customers immediately disappears, and since they can’t perpetually discount 75%, those merchants stop using Groupon. But Groupon’s sales force adds many more new merchants than it loses (for now). And Groupon goes out and raises another round at an even higher valuation; they hire even more salespeople and expand into even more virgin territory. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Groupon Is A Straight Up Ponzi Scheme