4 Lessons Learned

Mozart Data turned 4 this past week, so I thought I'd share my 4 most important learnings...

1) A bit of a cliche, but it's even more true than I imagined - it's important to have a great partner for the journey. Undoubtedly, the most important decision is who to build the company with. Many recipes can work - with both skills (complementary vs. overlapping strengths) and ownership splits - but regardless, for the company to succeed, each founder will have to be excellent throughout different company stages and grow with it. Dan Silberman has been an incredible partner, and I'm lucky to be on the journey with him.

2) Almost all of our early technical hires came from our network. We spent countless hours recruiting, interviewing, and pitching Mozart to prospective employees. Many weren't the right fit for technical or cultural reasons. We had a great brand (strong investors), we had a great set of problems (data was and still is hot), and we had a great team (both in practice and on paper) to work with. But, we could only attract technical talent we had previously worked with. The exceptions to that rule have proven to be excellent, but we struggled with top of funnel and had several rejected offers. If you're building a company (and you need to recruit a team) assume that those people are already connected to you on LinkedIn and focus your energy there.

3) Manage to the winning case, but be paranoid about pitfalls. Most startups will fail - not get to PMF & run out of money. It never makes sesne to manage to the modal outcome (failure). You must instead understand the winning paths and manage to those possibilities. If something is unlikely to work, that does not mean that it should immediately be discarded (especially when if it works, it could be a large outcome for the company). That does not mean foolishly waste resources -- but if you manage to the mean/median/mode, you'll get that.

4) It's a long, often lonely, but rewarding journey. Employees join and leave. People become customers and leave (and sometimes rejoin). People change companies (and re-become customers). Many things change, but it will be the highest highs (and lowest lows) of a professional career. Nothing is more rewarding than putting your ideas and more importantly yourself out there and getting customer validation.

I've received a lot of advice and support along the way, and hope to pay it forward to future entrepreneurs.