Running a scrappy startup – what would you like to hear about?

/ rashmi

Next Sunday, I am giving a talk at Entrepreneur Trek at Stanford on a topic close to my heart: how to run a scrappy startup. It is something I know a lot about, having run SlideShare on a small budget. We took a modest round of funding in our second year, post funding, we remain a scrappy startup.

I will cover a whole gamut of startup issues from when to spend on marketing and bizdev, how to get started with sales, how to choose a lawyer and accountant, how to negotiate the best rates for every service you spend on. But most of all how to do this without compromisng the quality of the product and keeping up a fast pace of growth. At the end of the day, it would not matter how scrappy you are if your product is not great and if you are not growing fast. So the trick is knowing what to spend on (great developers, designers, good hardware) and what to skimp on (marketing, PR).

If you are running a startup or thinking of one, what topics would you like to hear about? What startup issues do you always have questions about?

9 thoughts on “Running a scrappy startup – what would you like to hear about?”

  3. I was pondering about this:
    at the beginning startups are small on resources and cash. How could they take advantage of business value networks and crowdsourcing to focus on generating/orchestating value they can start selling and grow?

  4. If you weren’t sharing the slides how would we believe you really believe in your business, right? ;)

  5. Not only do I share the slides, I also make them all downloadable. Once I forgot to make them downloadable and was beseiged by requests till I enabled. yes, we are a community driven site :-)

  6. The topics you listed in the description are right on ! Looking forward to the slides. Do you know if the session is going to be recorded?

    Thanks
    Ashok

  8. Good thought! Some of the challenges i have seen from some of our SMB type of customers are things like long term vision, uncertain growth estimation, unbalances spending (spending too much on IT or marketing VS infrastructure or product development etc)

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