Here’s The Reason Why Startups Crash And Burn, According To Silicon Valley Investor Paul Graham; they’re just not energetic enough. Part of what you have to be energetic enough about is going out and making users real, real happy

December 27, 2013 Leave a comment

Here’s The Reason Why Startups Crash And Burn, According To Silicon Valley Investor Paul Graham

MEGAN ROSE DICKEY

DEC. 26, 2013, 4:32 PM 3,045 3

Startups fail all of the time, but what’s the reason for that? Prolific investor Paul Graham recently shed some light on that in The Information, Jessica Lessin’s new tech news site. His theory? Companies spend too much time making products people don’t want. Here’s the full quote:  Probably the biggest cause of failure is not making something people want. The biggest reason people do that is that they don’t pay enough attention to users. For example, they have some theory in their heads about what they need to build. They don’t go out there and talk to users and say “What do you want?” They just build this thing and then it turns out users don’t want it. It happens time and time again. Another reason might be that they’re just not energetic enough. Part of what you have to be energetic enough about is going out and making users real, real happy. They just do a half ass job of it. Maybe they’re pointing along the right vector but they only go half as far as they need to. Users look at it and they say, “Ah, it’s pretty good.” A million pretty goods, and you’re dead.

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Kee Koon Boon (“KB”) is the co-founder and director of HERO Investment Management which provides specialized fund management and investment advisory services to the ARCHEA Asia HERO Innovators Fund (www.heroinnovator.com), the only Asian SMID-cap tech-focused fund in the industry. KB is an internationally featured investor rooted in the principles of value investing for over a decade as a fund manager and analyst in the Asian capital markets who started his career at a boutique hedge fund in Singapore where he was with the firm since 2002 and was also part of the core investment committee in significantly outperforming the index in the 10-year-plus-old flagship Asian fund. He was also the portfolio manager for Asia-Pacific equities at Korea’s largest mutual fund company. Prior to setting up the H.E.R.O. Innovators Fund, KB was the Chief Investment Officer & CEO of a Singapore Registered Fund Management Company (RFMC) where he is responsible for listed Asian equity investments. KB had taught accounting at the Singapore Management University (SMU) as a faculty member and also pioneered the 15-week course on Accounting Fraud in Asia as an official module at SMU. KB remains grateful and honored to be invited by Singapore’s financial regulator Monetary Authority of Singapore (MAS) to present to their top management team about implementing a world’s first fact-based forward-looking fraud detection framework to bring about benefits for the capital markets in Singapore and for the public and investment community. KB also served the community in sharing his insights in writing articles about value investing and corporate governance in the media that include Business Times, Straits Times, Jakarta Post, Manual of Ideas, Investopedia, TedXWallStreet. He had also presented in top investment, banking and finance conferences in America, Italy, Sydney, Cape Town, HK, China. He has trained CEOs, entrepreneurs, CFOs, management executives in business strategy & business model innovation in Singapore, HK and China.

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