Patrick Collison » blog

Someone asked me today what surprised me most about doing a start-up. This was my response:

• How slowly things change. When we started Auctomatic in mid-2007, eBay was dominant but faltering, PayPal was lumbering along without any innovation, Facebook was amazing everyone (and scaring Google) with their growth, the iPhone was reshaping the cell phone industry, and everyone was talking about Twitter. Two and a half years on, that still sounds like a reasonable assessment of things. With Auctomatic, we felt this tremendous sense of urgency. That may have been good for other reasons, but it was misguided. When building something, I now think you should assume that you’ve plenty of time, and that very little will change in the interim. (This is, admittedly, the kind of rule that works until it doesn’t.)
• Tied to this, the realization that a good product is so much more important than first mover advantage. Obvious, but keeps surprising me. Facebook, the iPhone, Dropbox, Skype, etc., have an amazing array of failed predecessors.
• Succeeding at biz dev just requires endless persistence.
• Internationalization is an underexploited axis—people try to expand on the x-y plane, and ignore this third dimension. We grew our iPhone app revenue by over 200% through internationalization. The biggest competitve advantage we ever had with Auctomatic was supporting the obscure international eBay sites that the big US players ignored. I’m generalizing from pretty limited experience, but if I were a floundering start-up trying to get to cashflow positive, internationalizing is probably the first trick I’d try.
• How dangerous the assumption that you’re going to grow is: “oh, we need to build this this way, because when we’re successful, we’ll need it”. This is often used as an argument against over-engineering for scalability, but it applies more generally. Now, when coding, I try to think: “how can I write this such that if people saw my code, they’d be amazed at how little there is and how little it does”.