A CTO’s View of the Startup Process

The qualities you should have

In my view, these are the qualities you need to have for your startup to succeed, so you need to make sure you have them before embarking this journey:

✪	First of all –a motivation to change the world: If you’re in for the money, forget it – it won’t work. Your motivation should be “changing the world”. This is why startups succeed where big corporations fail: because they follow their hearts, not the money. It’s alright to hope to succeed and be rewarded for it, but that can’t be your sole motivation.
✪	Some funds: if you’re unable to spend a few thousands of pounds on your project, your chances are really slim. Even if you bootstrap all the way, you will need to spend money on some elements that will be crucial for your startup to take off – be it for developers, marketing, consultants, office space, designers, events or what-have-you. If you haven’t raised the initial resources to create a prototype, you haven’t joined the game yet. Finding investors normally comes after creating the prototype and not based only on an idea - remember that only the 3 Fs will invest in such an early stage: Friends, Family and Fools.
✪	Dedication: you are going to work hard, you will work weekends, holidays, nights. You will meet your friends less, you will go out less, you will live less. If it wasn’t clear - you will work.
✪	Willingness to learn: when you’re not working, you will be learning. You will also be learning through working. You will also be working through learning...
✪	Communication skills: if you don’t have them – grow them. Go to a coach, go to acting classes, go to NLP courses, go somewhere. You need these skills and there’s no way around it.
✪	Humility: don’t think you know everything, don’t think you can do everything alone, don’t think you are better than anyone else. Aspire to learn as much as you can, get as much help as you can, and as much advice as you can – in the limit of your budget and time.
✪	Maturity: being an entrepreneur is hard work, and you will find yourself in very unpleasant situations. You are on your way to be a manager of a company, to be responsible for the salary your employees feed their families with, to be responsible for a product that your users rely on. If you’re not ready for such reputability, then you’re not ready.
✪	Honesty: you will shortly learn that many entrepreneurs bend the truth a little to make their business more appealing to clients and investors. It’s not an awful thing to sugar-coat things a little, but there’s a fine line between that and a straight up lie –so watch out. Many clients, employees and investors will see through lies, and even if you got away with it at first, you may be caught later when the consequences may be much graver. And anyway – it’s bad for your karma and stuff, so just don’t.
✪	Belief in yourself and your idea: many people will put you down in the first stages, as well as in later ones. You will face challenges and will have to step out of your comfort zone many times. Learning from productive feedback and adjusting small things, while believing in the overall process and pushing on will be crucial to your success.

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