Georgia Tech Startup Competition Kickoff

Tonight I enjoyed attending the kickoff meeting for the Georgia Tech Startup Competition. Keith McGreggor and Paul Freet presented some great thoughts on startups.

My notes from the event are below:

Startups are NOT a smaller version of a large company. In fact, to assume so is “amazingly, gobsmackingly, stupidly wrong!”
Startups are a temporary organization designed to search for a repeatable and scalable business model.
Business plans are “shocking, horrible works of fiction.”
Five year forecasts are “magical thinking.” Year 3 is always breakeven!
Value planning, not the plan.
The business model is more important than the business plan.
Startups fail because they fail to make something someone wants to buy from them.
There are 3 reasons customers buy: Pains, Gains, and Jobs
Pains are the best. Ask yourself: Are there important problems that are currently being solved poorly?
Here are 4 different market types for startups: Existing Market (incumbents defend turf and it’s hard), Resegmented Market (this is great), New Market (this is the toughest because nobody is looking for you), Clone Market (take something that’s successful in one market and make it successful elsewhere)
You want to be Whole Foods, the company that redefines a market, charges a premium, and has great quality (the nickname is Whole Paycheck because they charge a premium)
“If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have said a faster horse,” Henry Ford
- Don’t ask customers what they want. Learn about their pains, gains, and jobs and innovate.
The process to creating a business is described by the image below.

I look forward to mentoring these student teams as they take first steps in technology entrepreneurship.