Sandy Jen: Startups: A Seven-Year Commitment

As a second or third time entrepreneur, you have a lot more experience obviously, because you've done a lot and you have better tuned instincts than the first time around. And as first time entrepreneurs, which I think a lot of you would like to be, the excitement of being an entrepreneur, it's kind of like a shot of adrenaline. So it's sort of the sustained adrenaline shot that kind of like rides you through the first startup because you're just like full of energy, full of enthusiasm. You can work like 40 million hours a week and you're just like, you're crazy. And later on that adrenaline kind of wears out, but the adrenaline is replaced by sort of more efficient muscles, better thinking, a little bit more pause when you act, and a lot more experience, which is actually really helpful. And for the second startup, it was actually a big deal to decide to jump back in. And the reason I say this is that they say the average lifetime of a startup is about seven years. So if you're going to think about doing a startup and really committing to it, you should really commit. Seven years, that's usually like seven years till some sort of exit event or whether it dies or succeeds or whatever. And it's a commitment. It's sort of like you're trading off social time, family time, personal time to really commit yourself to this venture because ultimately you're responsible for your team, the product, it you have fiduciary responsibilities to your investors, things like that. And so when we decided that we were going to jump back in, we kind of had these sort of like stipulations of as a first time entrepreneur, Meebo was really exciting, it was really cool, it was social media esque stuff, but it didn't have the world impact that I think an honor had. And when I wanted to do it again, I really wanted more impact. I was hungrier, I was greedier to make a bigger difference in the world because I had these skills and I had these things that I had learned and I really wanted to use them for better. And so the four of us got together and we're like, okay, we're really picky, what do we want to do? And so we decided that it needed to meet three criteria. And the first one was it had to be a huge market. So huge market translates to huge impact. So if I picked a small, tiny market, like people who liked purple cars, that's a really tiny set of demographic that I can work with as opposed to senior care, which can affect people worldwide. So huge market. The second idea of the second sort of stipulation was it really had to help people. I can argue how amiibo in the beginning helped facilitate communication between friends and family and opened up chat networks for folks who couldn't get online. But at the end of the day, it wasn't like it was changing someone's life. And so we wanted something that I could look you in the eye and be like, I made your life better. And then the third one, which is interesting, is that we wanted it to be an execution risk. And so the way we think about it, and this sort of framework was my co founder came up with, which I think really resonated with all of us, which was if you think about a spectrum of a startup, there's market risk and then there's execution risk. And market risk is kind of like Snapchat. Where did the world really ache for a messaging platform that had messages that expired after three seconds? I don't know, like, who knows? I have no distinct advantage over all of you to figure out whether or not that would work. So there's this sort of market risk of well, if I build it, will they come? And on the other end of the spectrum there's if I build it, which is execution risk, will I build it? They will definitely come, but it's really friggin hard to build. And so we wanted this end of the spectrum.