It's the execution that matters

I'm currently watching Mint.com's CEO Aaron Patzer speaking about 'Accounting for Startups'.  If you don't read TechCrunch six times a day like I do, check out the video here.  And if you don't know about Mint.com's success story, they started the company about two and a half years ago and just sold their company to Inuit for $170 million cash.  Not too shabby.

While the video is supposed to be about the dry topic of accounting, Aaron's presentation is more about how to start a successful startup.  Quite simply, "It's the execution that matters".  While there are tons of people with good ideas, you need bright people to actually execute and see the vision through.  Aaron goes on to say that a technical cofounder adds $500K in valuation to a company, while a business cofounder subtracts $250K in valuation.  You have to be able to build the product before you can do anything else.

At GrubWIthUs, we've always believed that you have to build the alpha version in house.  It doesn't really work when you have to outsource all your development in the beginning stages.  You're not only losing valuable capital, but your contractors definitely don't care about your vision or drive, and will only do exactly what you tell them to do.  You're basically spending all your time managing people and you can't tweak your code at a moment's notice.

We have two cofounders here, Daishin and myself.  I majored in Computer Science, so I naturally do most of the coding, but Daishin being the political economics major, didn't want to be labeled a negative valuation business cofounder and decided to get dirty as well.  He designs the site, codes all the stylesheets, and photoshops all the images.  It's definitely a huge help for me that he handles most of the front-end stuff so that I can focus more on the logic.  I honestly don't know if our company would even be here if I had to do all the programming myself. 

Anyway, speaking of execution, I'm going to stop this blog post right now so that I can finish integrating our site with Facebook!

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