Tangential, but:<p>> <i>I don’t mean sticking with a failed idea for too long. That is a mistake I see a lot of entrepreneurs make in the Seed and Series A stages. That does nobody any good.</i><p>How do you actually know an idea has failed, though? Because I feel assessing this is harder than he makes it sound. If you are building it, unless it's a complete and utter catastrophe that attracts no users and makes no revenue, there's always room to improve it even if you are still living off ramen.
RE: FourSquare. Very interesting to me that he doesn't mention that they just changed out the Founder/CEO this week and did a significant down round. I almost feel like the entire article was a camouflaged smoke screen for propping up FourSquare. Just odd.
Many great companies takes decade or more to build.<p>A lot of the most valuable companies have their founders/early employees as their CEO vs. someone who join later (usually a professional one):
<a href="http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos" rel="nofollow">http://www.bhorowitz.com/why_we_prefer_founding_ceos</a><p>Though you may argue it is a survivor bias, I believe sticking longer with something that works give an edge vs. leadership changes every few years.
<i>For the past three years the narrative around SoundCloud has been that it was stuck in the mud, that remixes and other derivative content were getting taken down, that labels were forcing artists to take their content off the service. All of which was true, but the real narrative was that SoundCloud was going through a difficult and complicated process of developing a new business model for audio content in partnership with an existing industry that has done things a certain way for a long time.</i><p>It's a shame that SoundCloud was forced to yield to the established music industry like this. The world doesn't need yet another way to play "artists as diverse as Avicii, Bob Marley, the Beatles and Justin Bieber" (<a href="http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/soundcloud-universal-music-interview/" rel="nofollow">http://techcrunch.com/2016/01/13/soundcloud-universal-music-...</a>).
Looks like avc.com is down. Here is a cached version for now<p><a href="http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YSjjxaEGetoJ:avc.com/2016/01/tenacity-2/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us" rel="nofollow">http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:YSjjxaE...</a>
I think what's interesting about this piece is that it again highlights that many companies are not 'overnight successes' and the true commitment and time it takes from a founder and/or CEO to develop an organization. It gives hope to people who still feel like they're in the trenches and not seeing as many deliverables as they would like.<p>The author also highlights the importance of a good Board. Often not enough thought goes in to selecting a Board. A Board that believes in the idea and the people, has a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds, and has a relationship with the founder/CEO where there's room for disagreement and discussion can make all the difference.
This is a weak article.<p>1. Soundcloud: 99% of founders would love to have the level of success that Soundcloud had leading up to these 3 years of "hard work" getting labels onboard.<p>2. Foursquare: Got so much money and press for almost a decade now. The least they could do would be to go to work and figure out how to honor all the good fortune people bestowed on them.<p>Again, its not hard to keep working if you have massive traction in terms of users or money (VC or otherwise). What's hard is when you have neither of these things.<p>This reads as a motivation piece because Foursquare has shat the bed and like anyone, AVC wants to get out of it what he still can.