startup – my passion for startup and my experience in Poland vs USA

I have been watching startup Color recently with a great curiosity. This startup aroused enormous interest of the technology world and VC as it didn’t start off with the budget of a few million dollars but collected 41 million dollars right away (around 100 million PLN). Goddamn – what a number ! It is a complete contrast to a popular trend today of a lean startup (relatively little money to start with, relatively much work done, fast pivots).
After launching application Color into the market, the startup came in for some criticism from American and European media that it does not add anything new to the existing state of affairs. There were some posts saying, that Color does not solve basic problems in the field of photo sharing and it is some odd social-photo network.

For I chewed on this subject I share my conclusions and observations with you. Has anybody else pondered on this too?

I think that criticizing Color for collecting 41 million dollars is risky. Color, having secured such amount of funds at this stage doesn’t have to bother about next rounds of financing. There will probably not be round A, B and C with regard to the amount of secured capital (fuel). If there is a need for additional financing then Color will already have many users around the world. Color has struck globally at once. Global strike of a startup company from USA is usually rather rare. U.S. startups try to dominate U.S. market in the first place, then bounce on the springboard of American dollar and conquer Asia and Europe.

Going further, the importance of the team forming startup Color is increasing. With such amount of cash, ability to pivot decreases, considering certain comfort of fuel (cash). In relation to this, role of the team (appropriate people) increases. Ability of picking the right moment for changes can be considerably dormant. In a way having such amount of money doesn’t change anything considering flexibility of changing the course (which is beautiful in startups).

Apple and Color. In theory of management there is a term of company revival. Every company, even the largest and the richest one, enters the heights of its achievements and needs revival. I think if you study this problem academically the result would be that this company needs startup culture. Why? Well, revival of the company which has already implemented procedures and systems, has plenty of cash in its account and products on the market, requires energy. Large, heavy, organisms don’t have the energy. First of all because of habits and second of all because of fuel security (cash in the account). Apple revived perfectly. In a way it was a startup with a large amount of cash and the competent leader. Color is surely forming its structure because launching its global operations requires commitment of many people. Various sources show that Color has noted significant success in Japan. Therefore the need (if it occurs at all) to pivot will require changing much bigger structure (although younger) than for instance in case of a lean startup. Maturity stage of Color’s structure will come faster with regard to the scope of a global PR operation this company took up. It is definitely a great challenge to navigate such a fully loaded jet. I keep my fingers crossed for the success of this team.

Maybe you have some thoughts on this matter? I just want to add at the end that the startup world is amazing, so many wonderful things are happening in this world. Speed of changes, creativity, inventiveness. This is just fantastic. I love it!

For a certain time I have thought that it would be a very interesting idea to organize in our beloved country a conference dedicated to failure. Our cultural background makes us hide failure and only expose it to our relatives and close friends. Moving in the startup world is a series of failures, small and big ones. Burned millions of złotys (dollars) and lost 2 clients – small and big declines, fluctuations of self-confidence, positive and negative moods. It reminds me of McClure words “startup life is great except you fail a lot”.

I’m convinced that more and more often failure is a word that comes out of our mouths. It is not a disgrace to talk about failure. Our culture loosens up and people don’t look with disdain at those who didn’t succeed.I encourage all of you guys who organize events and conferences to organize meetings dedicated to failure. To support that idea I’m willing to share my experiences from USA and UK where I had the opportunity to participate in this kind of meetings. Hypothetical agenda of such conference/meeting could be as following: (every fallen entrepreneur speaks about themselves):

1. My business model I executed and failures (weaknesses) during its implementation

2. Where did I fall as a founder and originator?

3. Where did people (my team) fall?

4. Postmortem – i.e. what can I do in the future based on points 1, 2, 3?

Such compact challenge could last 15 – 20 minutes.

After set of talks a workshop could follow – discussion on improvements. Evening with the drinks at the bar could be an appropriate summary of the day.If you are starting with such event don’t hesitate to ping me for help, I’ll try to share my contacts and help in organizing such event.