We invited Stanley Lapidus, founder of Helicos, to our New Enterprises class. Stanley had previously founded Exact Sciences and Cytyc. Cytyc went public after 9 years and it was later acquired for $6Billion by Hologic.
His talk was about entrepreneurship:
- He recommended to have key team members invest some of their own money (e.g., $15K) in the company to show their committment. If team/board/investors do not think that investing in themselves is the best thing they could do (as opposed to invest in the market), then you do not want them in your company.
- He recommended that after a failure, you should always ask the reasons why it didn't succeed and learn from them (do not repite them). That is why VCs are good at identifying what can be a success: they have seen too many failures.
- He also adviced to target huge markets. The upside is always limited by the market size.
- For him, serial entrepreneurship is like Hollywood: making movie after movie. Some of them fail, no matter how good was the previous one.
- The team is a reflection of you (the CEO). If your team is good it is because you are good.
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