Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

It doesn't have to be a cookie-cutter business plan with glossy pages and lots of information. Essentially it's a plan that says what the company is going to do, what problem it is going to solve, how big the market is, what the sources of revenue for the company are, what your exit strategy is for your investors, what amount of money is required, how you are going to market it, what kind of people you need, what the technology risks are, marketing risks, execution risks. Those are the fundamentals of what goes into a business plan, and many people have it in their heads but don't write it down.

I was leading the whole team, but once we got past 25 people, you can't do that. And so I made a series of classic mistakes in hiring. And not building a good middle management structure. And not recruiting a board that could help me build the company. Big mistakes in picking a successor, big mistakes in having an undisciplined product strategy-I was much more interested in having distinctive, innovative products and thinking about what would make sense for a product line for our business overall-and big mistakes in expanding too fast and not having discipline about what we were doing.