Postmortem of a Venture-Backed, Acquired Startup

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11 pointshsukenooi3 comments

Lessons learned from Decide.com. From my brother's basement to $16.5M in funding, 30 employees and acquisition by eBay.

As a former Decide engineer, I'm happy you made the decision to expand so rapidly. :-)

The point about hiring for agreement is interesting - I'd never considered how much constant questioning could slow growth. My initial reaction was to worry about stagnation of ideas, but I think you could still get a lot of diversity of thought even when being likeminded on a few points. Is it possible to scale this hiring practice indefinitely?

As you know, we were never short on ideas :)

Someone made a good point yesterday. You want to have debates about whether you should do A.1 or A.2 not A or Z. Even amongst likeminded people (like HH, BMA, Ian and I) there's plenty of debate.

Good points, all. I especially like the point about hiring similarly minded people. Diversity and variety of opinion is necessary in large companies where risk mitigation is valued, but in a startup, it's better to fail fast and keep moving.

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