As a repeat startup team, we bear the distinctive battle scars that can only come from launching technology startups — fast & hard startups.  When the going got tough (and inevitably, it always does), it seemed as though we were entering a zone where only those who gave a damn (not to mention blood, sweat and tears) were allowed to work.  The dedicated people at our companies all suffered the same obsession: commitment to a single vision while working round the clock to the point of losing all semblance of personal life.

Scars like these heal, but they still act as markers to a chaotic —but creative— time in our lives. There’s little that compares to the satisfaction of having created something both beautiful and original.

This time around, though, I’d do a few things differently.

Choose Functional.

The fruits of those productive few years gave each of us the freedom to innovate in new directions, grow (a few more) businesses, start an investment firm and roam the globe.  After a decade of exploring the world with my family and living in Paris, I decided to start a new venture focused on casual gaming for mobile devices. It became apparent that a startup in France would present too many challenges to a group of American entrepreneurs.  As a team, we looked at Amsterdam, London and Dublin as alternatives. In the end, Dublin’s cool factor swayed us.  Six months later, it’s clear we made the right decision.  Dublin is an amazingly easy place to do business, and there’s a wealth of local talent and strong government support.  Plus the Irish are warm and welcoming.

A startup is essentially fighting a war for its life, demanding desperate and intense effort.  There is little time to waste on protocol and subtleties.   Things are moving very quickly, almost as though there are dozens of spinning plates, all ready to collapse. And in most cases, they will. This is why it’s important to eliminate background noise by choosing a friendly environment that won’t get in the way of work. 

Beware the Fallacy of Composition.

We expected this time around to be easier than ever before.  We’d honed our tools, not to mention our team.

The “tools” part seemed to be an obvious win: After all, there’s an abundance of open source and collective code available to anyone with bandwidth these days.  Modern programming languages are easier, while hardware is faster and cheaper than when we created our first SaaS offering in 2000. It seemed reasonable to assume less time would be needed to build a product. Especially while a huge potential market was out there, hungry and online. It was clear: We’d (again) create something great and the world would want to use it. Perhaps an oversimplification of our build-it-and-they-will-come thinking, but it’s more accurate than not.  

Did I mention that the powerhouses from our previous startups agreed to come play in Dublin, too?  Steve McLelland and Jim Lears: This is where “team” becomes “dream team.” Seems we’d all grown restless and were excited about creating something unique in the mobile games market. Supernatural is the only way to describe their technical abilities… and the creative combustion that ensues.  Now we have a great team with evolved tools in a near-perfect environment. 

So, this should have been easy.  Only, it wasn’t and still isn’t.

Ready.  Aim.  Create.

Startups are about pointing an organization in a direction and hoping it lands somewhere near the target.  

I remember learning to shoot competitively, how the instructor kept emphasizing that closeness to the bullseye didn’t really matter.  What counted was grouping all the shots together. “That shows control of the gun. And I can work with that.”  

Sometimes, however, it seems that leading a startup requires just the opposite: The more control exerted, (somehow) the more unpredictable the creative results. And in our business, creativity is half the magic, with most of the rest coming from passion.

Embrace contradiction.

But as with any group of visionaries, each has an agenda driven by strong convictions that his/her approach is The One. I can’t think of anything that becomes wobbly faster than a room of talented, passionate minds on fire, trying to solve a big problem. There’s no “right way” to harness this talent.  And you certainly can’t process innovation.   It’s an intense and emotionally charged environment:  Intense, because of the unrelenting pressure to breathe life into an idea Emotionally charged, because communication becomes fast, raw, stripped of nuance or niceties, and typically, this occurs at critical junctures, like when evaluating builds.  

The startup exists in a state of contradiction:  Both everything and nothing are personal. 

Communicate.  Continuously.

This is where teams without mutual respect fall apart.  I’ve watched this happen in earlier endeavors, powerless to stop the collapse.  Defections and doubt can ruin everything.

The successful team builds a functional communication system, separating the personal from the passion.  This is clearly the foundation of growing a successful startup. Especially an agile and fast-moving one.

Agility over Perfection.

Having a motivated team comprised of smart and creative people is key, but it doesn’t guarantee success.   As a team, we’ve created successful technologies. Good, solid technologies.  So good, Microsoft purchased one.  And we’ve sold a few since then, too. But these are no guarantee of future success, either.  They are awkwardly always “in-the-room” no matter what we say or do.  A barrier, of sorts, compelling the ego not to risk launching anything less than perfection, when in fact, what’s needed is speed, continuous improvement, feedback from early adopters, users and even technology pundits, to help form the product.  

It’s better to launch an amorphous mess amendable to change, than a highly finished product with zero plasticity and even less marketability. In fact, this was the single biggest lesson for us in the first six months, even as a seasoned development team.

Ear to the ground.

So this time, it’s a different proposition (both easier and less risky) to build a technology, thanks to the ability to include consumers early in the development process.  Today it’s called “customer co-creation” or customer participation.  

During my brief (not brief enough) tenure at Microsoft, I’d watch non-programming Program Managers lock themselves away in a room for days at a time, emerging with the equivalent of application blueprints for the developers, bereft of input from the coders (which always generated resentment), but strangely, with no feedback from the intended consumers of the app. It may seem insane today, but there was a belief then that consumers didn’t understand their own needs or wants. It was as though the Program Managers were masters of reality, and consumers were clueless. We think of this as “the time of Software Tyranny” and even created an application called “Tyrant.”

Ironically, the company we sold to Microsoft gave businesses advanced ways to communicate with —and especially listen to— their customers. But today, listening doesn’t just give you an edge, it defines what and how you create.   

While we’re no longer hand-rolling each of the technologies in our machine, we’re still building ahead of the market. Open source makes the process of building applications easier, while the proliferation of amazing online communities such as Stack Overflow and Github lets us truly listen to the early adopters in the industry and in our marketplace. 

Trust Your Intuition.

I’m a firm believer that an entrepreneur’s vision is born from intuition. So, like most entrepreneurs, we’ve learned to listen-while-not-listening to the technology chants of various pundits and tech influencers. These are after-the-fact folks, not the earliest adopters. No slight intended: They are among our most constructive critics and great storytellers.  After all, there’s a big difference between creating the news and reporting it.

Tell a Great Story.

And there is a great story here, one that’s easy to tell.  Crowd sourcing, sentiment analysis and entertainment.   An endless stream of conversation, confessions, self-revelation, and breaking news surrounds us, waiting to manifest in a personalized world, where each individual can contemplate their world and the role they play in the world of everyone around them.  

We’re building the ways to experience that world.

Louis Ravenet/CEO