To truly launch a great product, you need partners. Channel and marketing partners share in your success and share in the costs of reaching your target audience. – Jay Samit
What most entrepreneurs don’t understand is that it isn’t the economy that bursts a bubble, but investor psychology. – Jay Samit
Companies with significant revenue (more than $100 million) have, by definition, significant traction. They have proven out their thesis and can scale up or down as investment capital becomes available. – Jay Samit
Consumers value their personal time and are loyal to those companies that make their lives more productive. Brands gaining some of the biggest successes in social media are engaging with millions of consumers through value exchange. – Jay Samit
Building a great team is the lifeblood of any startup, and finding great talent is one of the hardest and costliest tasks any CEO will ever face. – Jay Samit
All too often, new hires have a different expectation of their job and responsibilities than the organization does. Any miscommunication during the recruiting process needs to be cleared up ASAP. Whenever possible, give new employees a written plan of objectives and responsibilities. – Jay Samit
No first-time entrepreneur has the business network of contacts needed to succeed. An incubator should be well integrated into the local business community and have a steady source of contacts and introductions. – Jay Samit
The Industrial Revolution was about making physical things. Many of the manufactured goods that were once tangible objects have now been reduced to bits and bytes of data. – Jay Samit
A successful entrepreneur is one who recognizes her blind spots. You may be the world’s best engineer, but you probably have never run a 10-person sales force. You may be a brilliant marketer, but how do you structure a cap table? – Jay Samit
For a startup to overcome obstacles and succeed, it must foster limitless thinking. By hiring students into their first career job, you get to set their framework for how a company functions and instill them with your values for your company’s culture. – Jay Samit
You don’t need to be an engineer or a tech person to benefit from technology. You can hire them. – Jay Samit
No matter how much we tweet, blog and post, nothing in business is as powerful as actual face time with prospective business partners and customers. – Jay Samit
Every new startup business creates new opportunities. It doesn’t matter whether you have a new app for college students or a home medical device for senior citizens; there are other multibillion noncompetitive corporations that are spending millions of dollars trying to market their goods and services to your same audience. – Jay Samit
The answers to all a startup’s challenges are out there. By setting up the right mechanisms for gathering feedback, the road to success can be a less bumpy ride. – Jay Samit
Just as the music industry couldn’t combat the financial impact of digital piracy, major corporations will have to rethink how to maintain margins when many of their most profitable items can be easily manufactured at home. – Jay Samit
Networking is all about connecting with people. But then again, isn’t that what life is about? The more time you can find to get out of the office and build true friendships, the farther your startup will go. Entrepreneurs need to remember to spend as much time working on their business as they do in their business. – Jay Samit
I tell people: walk around for one month and write down three problems in your life every day. At first it’s easy – you got stuck in traffic, you missed your alarm – but by the end of the month you’re looking really hard to get your 90 problems. The most common things on your list are now billion-dollar businesses. – Jay Samit
Onboarding starts with satisfying the most basic of Maslow’s psychological needs: belonging. New hires shouldn’t arrive to an empty cube and be forced to forage through corridors searching for a computer and the bare necessities of office life. A new hire isn’t a surprise visitor from out of town. Plan for their arrival. – Jay Samit