Chris Haroun warns perfectionists that waiting for a flawless product keeps you out of the market. Reid Hoffman says releasing at 100% readiness is too late; the Nest thermostat founders pitched Kleiner Perkins with passion, not a polished demo. Ship something real and iterate.
There's a quote from Salvador Dali which is, if you strive for perfection, you'll never reach it. And that's been one of my many problems in business is I try to be a perfectionist. But if you try to be a perfectionist with your product, then you're going to miss the market entirely. And Reid Hoffman, who's the wonderful co founder of LinkedIn, also said, if you release your product when it's 100% ready, it's too late. And so there's this concept of an mvp, which stands for minimum viable product that venture capitalists talk about. And what that means is get your product out to the marketplace to at least test it, even when it's not 100% ready. And I remember when I used to be a programmer years ago, I was really excited about creating an amazing graphical user interface with nice connectivity to database, etc. And I found that the last 5% of that project that I worked on when I was a coder was getting rid of all the bells and whistles and just making sure the darn thing worked. And so when it comes to a minimum viable product, probably the best example I can discuss with you is a company called Nest. So what happened was there's this company called Nest that Kleiner Perkins, a big venture capital firm, invested it. And what happened was Kleiner Perkins made a couple billion dollars from selling that company to Google. And Nest is the company that makes those thermostat air conditioner systems in your house that are WI FI based. And so I invested with Kleiner Perkins in a couple of deals in the past when I worked in VC and when I was at Kleiner Perkins headquarters on Sandhill Road, I talked to the partner that worked on that deal. His name is Randy Comisar. Really nice guy, really smart. And I said to Randy, I said, randy, how did you know this Nest investment was going to make you billions and do extraordinarily well? You know, what kind of a product did they have? Did it work really well when you first saw it? And he said, no, all they did was they brought a piece of wood that looks kind of like this and they explained how it was going to work. And so I said to, I said to him, I said, that's amazing, but how did you know to invest? And he said, because the engineers and the management team were so passionate and, and so convincing that I decided to take a chance on them. And so your delivery is incredibly important when it comes to selling yourself in terms of getting a promotion, a raise, or selling your business. Model to be able to raise capital. And so, as Maya Angelou once said, people might not remember exactly what you said, but they'll never forget the way you made them feel. And so in my MBA program it's in the third semester, which you can start right now, just go to harounventures.com to check it out. But in the third of four semesters I have what's called a venture capital bootcamp. And this VC boot camp is based on my years of experience as a venture capitalist. I humbly had my own firm that invested in Facebook years before the ipo. I also invested in Palantir, et cetera. I also guest lecture a lot at Stanford. I went to Stanford to give advice on business models for students and I mentored tons of students as part of their core curriculum. I also worked alongside 500 startups by investing in companies that they had founded, which is a great incubator. And I take all that experience. I have all my successes and many failures and I put that into part of my MBA degree program as part of a venture capital boot camp. So I can humbly help you work smarter and not harder to start a company with no money. That's right. I don't want you to raise money from a bank. I want you to raise money from high net worth investors and to learn much more about how to raise money from high net worth investors. And I'm humbled to say I've raised and managed over a billion dollars in my career. What you can do is you can go to my website here haroonadventures.com and scroll down and download this book called Networking get customers a job or anything you want. It's a free download and I humbly hope it helps you a lot in terms of raising money. If it doesn't, and if you're having problems with your startup, then please let me know. So I can humbly help you here on this weekly webcast, through YouTube chat or during the MBA office hours starting at 10am today where I can do a zoom call with you, look over your business plan, help to fix your LinkedIn profile, et cetera. It.
