jmaskell

6 ms·

1.
Why my startup failed – three years of hindsight(medium.com)
15 points by jmaskell 11y ago|0 comments
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DuckDuckGo is now my default search engine(medium.com)
6 points by jmaskell 11y ago|4 comments
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Vodafone admits many governments have direct-access to user data(theverge.com)
5 points by jmaskell 12y ago|0 comments
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Privacy not Prism – UK legal challenge(privacynotprism.org.uk)
143 points by jmaskell 13y ago|62 comments
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by jmaskell 13y ago
It's not about fear of failing. I wouldn't do it again unless I was convinced the venture would be successful (and I think there's a significantly increased chance of that, based on what I learnt during the failed startup and
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by jmaskell 13y ago
I believe that being a solo founder contributed to the failure of my startup. In short, it puts a lot of pressure on yourself, that can't be split with other members of the team. If the ship is sinking, you have to go down with it. Oth
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by jmaskell 13y ago
This is probably skewed by finance and a small number of extremely well paid bankers, hedge fund traders etc.
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by jmaskell 13y ago
I've been living here for a few years, and the main killer has always been rent. I've been able to get this down by sharing with others, learning about nice but cheaper neighbourhoods (I live in Putney now), and being prepared to commute 30
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by jmaskell 13y ago
The urgency to interview, followed by the abrupt halt in communication isn't something that is unique to Silicon Valley or engineering positions. I had it a lot in London a couple of months ago for mostly product jobs. It's incredibly unpro
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by jmaskell 13y ago
also get used to befuddling even competent recruiters, at one startup I did almost every job in the place at one time or another, when looking for a new job it drove the recruiters crazy trying to place me I had this problem - rec
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by jmaskell 13y ago
Unfortunately I'm not a programmer (I can write enough code to be dangerous) - but more of an ops/product/sales type person instead, so it was a bit harder for me to find something. I was also surprised at how long it took our developer to
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by jmaskell 13y ago
It's definitely about having the right attitude. I was able to find a job that gives me a lot of autonomy, but also direction. At the moment, I quite enjoy letting someone else make the big decisions for me!
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by jmaskell 13y ago
It didn't make enough to support the team. There was an argument for running it as a side project / one man business, but that wasn't something that I wanted to do (and investors supported/advised when making that decision).
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by jmaskell 13y ago
The struggle was more around scaling the business. We had income, and raised some seed funding on the back of it (in order to go full time on the project). We didn't take further investment because we knew we couldn't scale and provide the
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by jmaskell 13y ago
I got this a lot. I think it was the cause of me not getting a few job offers. It's good to pre-empt the concern and be clear about wanting to take what you learnt on to another project. What I found hardest was trying to explain that I als
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How to get a job after your startup fails(jamesmaskell.co.uk)
125 points by jmaskell 13y ago|41 comments
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by jmaskell 14y ago
It's fine wine (£100 per bottle and up). Of which about 80% is Bordeaux. I calculated those figures by looking at widely used market stats, and then the turnover of the UK's fine wine wholesalers.
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by jmaskell 14y ago
It seems to me that you are saying that if buyer and seller know each other then they would eschew the market for a more intimate trading arrangement. This is exactly what I'm saying. E.g. Airbnb wouldn't work if hosts and guests al
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by jmaskell 14y ago
I hope so. I can definitely understand why investors prefer second or third time entrepreneurs so much!
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by jmaskell 14y ago
Exactly. There's a wine trading company called Wine Networks - a branch of SK Group (huge South Korean conglomerate). They're relatively successful, but are hugely inefficient (no tech).
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by jmaskell 14y ago
It's a little more complex - a lot of our customers were trading wine to make a profit, and were far more price sensitive. They traded on the site in the early days. Sadly, the novelty soon wore off, and it turns out the social element is o
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by jmaskell 14y ago
We did. I had a year of experience (on the operations side), our sales guy had several years of experience. Many people in the industry were surprised when we closed - they fully expected us to do well. There are a lot of buyers who are ver
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by jmaskell 14y ago
That would have taken a lot of money (to buy stock), and expose us to a lot more risk. Investors were backing us for the disintermediation. I quite strongly believe that someone with an understanding of tech, the ability to build something,
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by jmaskell 14y ago
Exactly. I'd have had to lie and mislead investors to get the money. That's fraud and something I wasn't prepared to do.
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by jmaskell 14y ago
They were buying a lot for consumption too. Drinking (or gifting) a bottle of Lafite or Petrus is a good way to show how wealthy you are.
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by jmaskell 14y ago
We tried this. The middle men simply weren't willing to pay for software (or at least enough to build a viable business). It's a very antiquated market - with a lot of independent traders. Their view on software (particularly web based) is
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by jmaskell 14y ago
We knew exactly what the problems were - we just had a vision for how to overcome them and how things could be different. Every business starts as an idea, with a set of hypothesis to validate (even if you don't realise this at the time). I
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by jmaskell 14y ago
Consumers/collectors wanted a better deal (they were paying minimum 10-20% to middle men when buying and selling). We did a lot of customer development work (and were customers ourselves) to validate these issues. The problem was keeping pe
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by jmaskell 14y ago
There was a huge bubble, that popped. Our timing was off completely (a lot of our target sellers want to sit on their stock until prices go back up), but the other problems we faced (outlined in the post) were greater. As for wine prices -
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by jmaskell 14y ago
Agreed. It's an interesting lesson for tech focused people. I think you can get around this by introducing social or gaming elements to the product. We didn't have the resources or the time to try that (and the size of the opportunity/marke

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