{"id":1380,"date":"2008-03-10T08:57:00","date_gmt":"2008-03-10T13:57:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/nickels-out-of\/"},"modified":"2021-02-03T16:40:02","modified_gmt":"2021-02-03T22:40:02","slug":"nickels-out-of","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/2008\/03\/nickels-out-of\/","title":{"rendered":"Nickels out of toilets"},"content":{"rendered":"
One of my favorite comments that I have ever heard concerning what types of entrepreneurs are successful was from venture capital’s wunderkind Mike Moritz from Sequoia Capital<\/a>. Mike was on our Board at Atom Entertainment<\/a> and I remember him telling me years ago that he liked entrepreneurs (and their cultures) that "dove into the toilet for nickels." While the visual may not be universally appealing, I believe in this wholeheartedly. <\/p>\n You can’t teach someone to be scrappy. They just are scrappy. I have found it very difficult to hire people form big companies and have them adjust to the real-world of a startup. It is a shock to their system. In fact, many big company types can’t adjust at all. When I talk to other startups, a couple of back-of-the-envelope questions are always in my mind that act as a litmus test for scrappiness (w\/out having to look at their cash flow statements):<\/p>\n If I get more than a couple of no\u2019s out of the list, then I start to get worried (and very opinionated).<\/p>\n One of the scrappiest examples I thought of as I was writing this post was how the original founders of hotels.com (Dave Litman, Bob Diener) would star in their own TV advertising because they were too cheap to pay for actors. It was basically them in different scenarios negotiating better deals (e.g, one memorable ad had them at the ballpark negotiating down the price of their hotdogs). <\/p>\n Remember that your burn rate is a very real thing. You need to manage it and savor every nickel. As your business ebbs and flows, you\u2019d much rather be in a position of financial strength then down the proverbial toilet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" One of my favorite comments that I have ever heard concerning what types of entrepreneurs are successful was from venture capital’s wunderkind Mike Moritz from Sequoia Capital. Mike was on our Board at Atom Entertainment and I remember him telling me years ago that he liked entrepreneurs (and their cultures) that "dove into the toilet…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1380"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1968,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1380\/revisions\/1968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1380"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1380"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/startupwhisperer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1380"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n