Vator.TV CEO and Founder Bambi Francisco shares tips for entrepreneurs for focusing, from successful CEOs and a super angel ahead of her Splash Vator event.
Life as a techy means perpetual distraction: iPhone notifications, Twitter alerts, Farmville reminders… if you’re a member of the digerati, you necessarily have ADD, writes Bambi Francisco, the CEO and Founder of the Vator.TV website and the host at the upcoming Vator Splash event in San Francisco, Calif.
And if you’re a startup CEO, this can be fatal. It’s no wonder, then, that Silicon Valley leaders are putting a premium on entrepreneurs’ ability to focus. For PayPal founder Peter Thiel, Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz, and superangel Aydin Senkut, the ability to focus is among the most important qualities for startup founders.
“Focus your business as precisely as you can,” Thiel, who now runs Clarium Capital, and was the first outside investor in Facebook, told Bambi Francisco. “Don’t try to do half a dozen things sort of well; do one thing better than anybody else in the world.”
For companies like Thiels’, this means winning over users.
“For a consumer internet company, the question is distribution. If you can’t get distribution for a consumer internet company, your company’s worth approximately zero. Solving the distribution problem is the single most underestimated challenge businesses have.”
Eventbrite CEO Kevin Hartz says the distractions can come from other companies in one’s sector. “Don’t spend too much time looking at the competition. Focus on doing what you do best rather than spreading yourself too thin too early.”
Senkut says the abundance of information, which so easily distracts entrepreneurs, can be a valuable asset when approached with focus and discipline.
“On the internet, everything is measured, feedback is real-time, and being able to leverage that and translate that into a great user experience, reiterate and refine the product can make a big difference,” says Senkut.
Thiel, Hartz and Senkut will be among those appearing onstage at Vator Splash this September 30 at the Café du Nord in San Francisco.
Jean-Baptiste Su is the technology columnist for L’Expansion, the leading business publication in France. He’s also the co-founder and editor of TechPulse 360, a blog at the crossroads of business and technology, exploring the innovation and companies defining the high-tech and clean-tech industries.
Jean-Baptiste started his journalistic career 18 years ago at IDG in France, first as reporter at InfoPC (PC World) and then senior editor at Le Monde Informatique (ComputerWorld). He later joined Decision Informatique, part of Groupe Tests (01 Informatique, 01net.com…) as senior editor, before heading to France’s financial daily newspaper La Tribune as its local Silicon Valley correspondent.
