Urchin Software Corp.
The unlikely origin story of Google Analytics, 1996–2005-ish
TL, DR: Urchin Software Corporation was a web analytics company based in San Diego, CA. The founders of the company were Paul Muret, Jack Ancone, Brett Crosby, and Scott Crosby (yours truly). In April 2005 the company was acquired by Google, and the Urchin product became “Urchin from Google,” then later simply Google Analytics. As the 10th anniversary of the acquisition has recently passed, I thought it was a good time to get the history of the company down for posterity. I don’t expect this to be a riveting read for those not directly involved; it’s more of my attempt to close the book on that era.
And maybe, if nothing else, I guess it suggests that despite the soup du jour — huge seed/A rounds, massive valuations, binary outcomes— you can sometimes do alright by just taking less money and more time.
The predecessor to Urchin Software Corp. was originally started by Paul Muret and Scott Crosby (me) in late 1995. Prior to then, Paul had been working in the Space Physics dept. at UCSD, where he was exposed to HTML 1.0 after being tasked with putting the department’s syllabus online. Paul and I were post-college roommates at the time, living in the Bay Park neighborhood of San Diego. One night Paul came home from work and announced that he saw a business opportunity in building websites for businesses. To prove the point, he showed me his bright-blue-text-on-grey-background site for UCSD. Maybe some of the text even <BLINK>ed. I agreed and we started work on a business plan. This was presented to my proverbial rich uncle (Chuck Scott), who agreed to invest $10,000 in the “company” and provide a desk in a corner of his office at C.B.S. Scientific. It would be quite awhile until he saw a return on that money.
Armed with Chuck’s cash, the new company bought a Sun SPARC 20 for webserving duty and procured a then-very-expensive ISDN line. Ever heard of “10base2”? That’s how our office computers were networked — coaxial cable with fun twist-lock fittings, kinda like TV cable. Antiquated. Anyway, Paul and I then set about acquiring customers, which we slowly accomplished. Most were small businesses paying a modest monthly fee, like Cinemagic, a vintage movie-poster company run by a couple named Herb and Roberta. Or ReVest, a financial startup whose owner didn’t “do” email, so all edits to his site were communicated via thermal-transfer fax, which spooled out onto our floor for 6 or 8 pages every morning. Another was an obscure division of Pioneer Electronics that specialized in the even-then old-timey format known as LaserDisc [1] I know I know, the quality is better.
These “wins” had us feeling optimistic enough to lease some office space in a squat brownish-green building in San Diego’s faux-historic Old Town theme park-y part of town, not far from Rockin’ Baja Lobster. Our office had room for 4 desks, or 5 if you counted the vestibule (for a secretary?) In 1997 Brett Crosby (my younger brother) joined the company, and things started improving. We managed to sign two of the larger local employers, Sharp Healthcare, a hospital system, and Solar Turbines*, the power generation subsidiary of Caterpillar. But we still had a bunch of small customers, most of whom we hosted on our lone webserver, for a recurring fee. To accurately bill for bandwidth consumed (weird right? bandwidth used to be expensive), Paul wrote a simple log analyzer to tally bytes transferred, and gave it a nice web interface. He added referrers, “hits”, pageviews, etc., and voilá, the first version of Urchin was born. After some further development to add date-range features, user authentication, etc., the product was demonstrated to customers, to generally favorable reviews.
[*this deal paid $10k/month and kept us alive for at least a year; thanks Steve!]
Brett’s girlfriend at the time (Julie, now his wife) also worked in “the industry”, for Rubin Postaer Interactive (“RPI”, a subsidiary of RPA; A=Associates). RPA was and is a prominent advertising & web development shop in LA, and they managed the Honda.com account. Sometime in late 1997, it was learned via our RPA spy (Julie) that Honda.com, which was using WebTrends at the time, was unable to process each day’s Apache access log before the end of the current day, dooming them to fall ever more behind. After some effort, we obtained a few days’ server logs to process as a demo, and the task was completed in ~30 minutes. We became the web analytics solution for American Honda from that point forward, and it became clear a business could be built on this log processing technology.
Around this time Jack Ancone joined the company as (initially) CFO and moved to San Diego. We moved into our office at 2165 India St. around the same time (Note: The Ballast Point tasting room is now located directly across the street from our old office; suffice to say we would have never achieved anything had they been there in the late 1990s.) The company was then known as Quantified Systems, Inc., and work was divided into web dev, hosting, and software dev. Be divided and conquer yourself, to paraphrase Caesar.
In January 1998 we received our very first order for the “Pro” version of Urchin, for $199. [Side note: why does “Pro” always mean “lame” in the software world?] Anyway, shortly after, we made the decision to jettison the non-software parts of the business, and all hosting/webdev customers were rather abruptly “sold” ($0) to another local webdev shop. We were now a software company (high-five!).
As such, we needed to raise some money. Tapping our family “networks” and one boutique VC (Green Thumb Capital, of NYC, who Jack brought on board*), we raised $1m, bringing our total outside capital to about $1.25m. We would never raise any further money (with the exception of ~$400k in debt, which was repaid with interest and warrants). Not for lack of trying… more on that later.
[*to their credit, Green Thumb never once hassled us nor apparently had they any thought of recovering their investment; I can only imagine their dumbfounded shock when they found out Google had agreed to acquire us.]
As we struggled to figure out how to sell “enterprise” software in the late 1990s, we decided to try an advertising-based approach to grab market share. For some reason, we were always more concerned with popularity than money… go figure. Internet companies of the era were often valued most highly if measured by “eyeballs” and we thought we could get lots of those by giving away the software for free and showing banner ads at the top of each page. So we released Urchin ASAP, the free counterpart to Urchin ISP. Both were designed to be used by hosting operations. We thought we could make some significant fraction of a cent per click on these ads, on top of some infinitesimal CPM… (reminds me of a classic SNL skit… Q: “how do you make money at the Citiwide Change Bank? A: Volume!”) We never made anything on those banner ads, but we did get exposure. And the software was pretty good, for the era. Good enough to make our first real breakthrough.
Before Tumblr, before Blogger, and contemporary with Geocities, there was something called Nettaxi. What-Taxi? Right. But at the time they claimed something like 100,000 “sites”, and we viewed them as a fantastic source of eyeballs for our advertising-supported version of Urchin. They claimed to have no money for such a luxury as web statistics (glad that term got retired), so we “negotiated” a deal: Urchin would be 100% free for them in exchange for the anticipated ad revenue we’d get from all those eyeballs. How much money did we make? 4¢ or so maybe, I don’t recall ever actually getting a check. But that’s beside the point. From then on we claimed 100,000 “sites” were using Urchin, and that got us places.
Another “innovation” we came up with mirrored what Google does with its logo on special days — we created a dynamic Urchin guy in the upper-left of the interface called “the Urchin of the Day.” This was straight silly, but we thought it would endear us to customers. Maybe it did. It definitely occupied our design guy Jason Collins for the better part of year, as he got so into it he forgot about his more important work. The images he made still make me laugh. So good! We even had our then-friend, the pre-famous Shepard Fairey, do one, the “Power to the People” version.
He also did several promo posters and ads for us in exchange for free web hosting. Really nice, humble guy. Of course, now he gets presidents elected and such.
In 1999, Brett Crosby, VP of Sales and Marketing, was casting about trying to get Urchin 2.0 noticed. He had zeroed-in on Earthlink as our dream customer, mostly due to their vast reach and name recognition. Heck, they were almost as big as AOL! Of course, we had no idea how to reach anyone important at a place like that, so Brett did the natural thing and filled out a web form. Again, and again, and again. He must have submitted that thing 20 or 30 times. Finally, he got a response. Rob Maupin, VP of hosting (or something similar) agreed to a meeting. We were stunned. The all-powerful Earthlink would meet with a bunch of idiots like us? We could hardly believe it. So we piled into the fanciest car we had, Brett’s old Mercedes 420 SEL, which he had bought for $4,000, and drove up to Pasadena. I stayed at the office to “manage” and because I was scared of Earthlink.
Rob didn’t seem very impressed. He immediately dismissed the Urchin 2.0 interface as (and I quote) “too blue blue blue blue blue,” which I had to admit was true.
But he agreed to try it, and the tests went well. Urchin was perhaps not the most full-featured web reporting tool in the world at the time, but it was fast, and that’s mainly what web hosts cared about. It also managed log files and helped sysadmins run things more easily, so the ops guys liked it. After we made some changes as Earthlink requested, we negotiated a pretty lame deal that ensured our eventual success: $4,000/month for unlimited Urchin software across all Earthlink-hosted websites. We were ecstatic.
In 2001, the company was rechristened Urchin Software Corporation. Product and sales were sufficiently far along that we thought it would be a good idea to raise more money. Anyone who’s pitched VCs knows it’s a long, distracting slog, and the business really suffers during the months the leadership is preoccupied. But things went pretty well, and after dozens of meetings and plenty of travel, we finally secured term sheets from two respectable VCs — Ampersand and JMI. The closing was scheduled for late August, but then Labor Day rolled around, and a few more days passed, and finally the capital call to the LPs was supposed to happen on… September 12th (2001). Uhh, no. Suffice to say, the world had bigger things to worry about that day.
By that point, having anticipated a capital infusion of approximately $7 million, we had ramped up hiring and infrastructure spending, as one does. We had leased two additional office spaces in the same building, and built out the interiors. So without the funding, we had little choice but to pare back down. On a Friday not long after, we laid off 12 people and shortly afterward relinquished one of our office spaces. We called it, somewhat unimaginatively, Black Friday. Our financial situation was bleak (like, we couldn’t make payroll in two weeks), and we saw no alternative but to borrow money from our rich uncles — Chuck Scott and Jerry Navarra. They saved us, and got interest and warrants for their trouble. But Thanksgiving was uncomfortable for a couple years.
2001 and 2002 were very difficult years for Urchin Software Corp. — I remember walking down our hallway, praying to the acoustic ceiling tiles on more than one occasion, “please, just let it die” — but it wouldn’t. Costs were cut way back, and some employees took voluntary pay cuts of up to 60% to help with cashflow (this “back pay” was eventually repatriated, thank goodness).
Tech spending was slow in the early 2000s post-bubble, and while things were gradually improving, revenue was uneven and not growing as hoped. Until 2002, our major source of inflow had been large annual licensing deals that were complex and long negotiations. Our biggest deal, at over $1 million, was negotiated by Jack Ancone with Cable & Wireless, a major global telco/host/ISP.
Similar deals were negotiated with Winstar, KeyBridge, and Ireland-based Worldport, all VC-backed hosts with seemingly limitless resources. As it turned out, they were indeed limited. All of them expired before we got paid.
So to jumpstart sales, the decision was made to radically simplify our enterprise deals to hosting companies, even though it meant less money in the short term. Essentially, we made the financially-puny Earthlink deal the standard, but included some potential upside, at least. The Site License Model (“SLM”) was about as simple as it gets: $5,000/month per physical datacenter, all the Urchin software you want, 1-page contract, no legalese, and nothing really to negotiate.
The SLM was immediately a hit, and we signed deals with many of the largest US and European hosting companies in the ensuing year. Rackspace (now part of IBM), Everyone’s Internet (aka EV1 Servers), The Planet, mediatemple, and many others signed on, with several agreeing to multi-datacenter deals. By around fall 2003, we were cashflow-positive on these alone, and we were also selling more and more individual licenses to self-hosted organizations including much of the Fortune 500 and many university systems.
We had released most of the sales team during our near-death experience in 2001, but the few who remained — Paul Botto, Nikki Morrissey, and Megan Cash— worked for nothing and slowly, fitfully started selling our way out of the doldrums. Once we finally figured out a workable commission model — low base, high commission with fully retroactive kickers — these three positively rocked. Paul and Megan went on to work for Google for years (Nikki declined to move north in 2005, in favor of having kids.) Paul is still the best sales/BD guy with whom I’ve ever worked.
After a failed attempt at running an international office in Tokyo (the moneys did not come[2]), we launched a channel program, which ran in parallel to direct sales. I still think for certain markets where English isn’t the primary language, it makes sense to have a local partner. Japan in particular generated strong sales for many years, and for this we can thank Jason Senn, our channel guy and chief office builder (we were too cheap to hire contractors.) Japan is also the most fun place ever to party it up in the name of business. On-sens and fire festivals? Yes please.
If Urchin 2 got us in the door, and Urchin 3 didn’t suck, Urchin 4 was actually pretty respectable. It had the then-Apple-esque brushed-aluminum look, some fancy-for-the-time interface elements, and most importantly, it had the UTM. The UTM, or Urchin Traffic Monitor, was an early method for augmenting Apache (or IIS, etc.) log files with cookies, such that unique visitors could be established. This method entailed a line of javascript in the <HEAD> of each page on the site, and a small modification to the webserver’s logging behavior. Most of our competitors at the time used either logs only (old school) or javascript/cookies only (WebSideStory, etc.), and both necessarily missed out on a lot of available information. Urchin was the first to use both data sources in one unified collection method, neatly contained in augmented access-log files. Nowadays pretty much everything you’d want can be had via the cookie method (á la GA), but analyzing logs still has its advantages.
Urchin 4 continued our tradition of supporting way, way too many random platforms (Google still has Urchin 4 help: check out the OS support… ever heard of Yellow Dog Linux?). I had this idea that platform-carpet-bombing might get us into some big corporations or universities running AIX or HP-UX, but no, everyone bought the Linux or Windows IIS versions. I guess I just liked buying random servers off ebay and getting Apache and a compiler running. We even compiled a NeXT version at one point, if I’m not mistaken. But no DEC, at least (I couldn’t get the machine to boot up).
Urchin 4 was the first release I really felt could compete against anyone, and not just with regard to back-end performance. But Urchin 5 was superior in every way, and I’m sure thousands of instances still run to this day. If anything, Urchin 5 was just too much of a good thing. Almost every menu item had submenus upon submenus. It was pretty overwhelming and dry, but analytics nerds dug it.
Urchin 5 had e-commerce/”ROI” tracking, the Campaign Tracking Module, and multiserver versions that could all conspire to get the price pretty high. But the real killer feature IMHO, which was released in Urchin 6, was individual visitor history drill-down. If this sounds potentially, um, sensitive, that’s because it is. Google wouldn’t touch this feature and it was summarily axed, never to return.
Up through Urchin 5, we’d been a traditional licensed-software outfit — you pay us money, you own the software. But by 2004 it was obvious we needed a hosted version (“hosted” would later become “cloud”, but we didn’t know that yet.) So we bought a bunch of servers, upgraded our T1, and released Urchin 6, which was available in on-premises (you run it yourself) or hosted by us, for $500/month(!) We didn’t have much time left as an independent concern, but businesses were surprisingly willing to pay up for the privilege of not having to run Urchin themselves. That business was a winner from day 1.
By Summer 2004, Urchin had the largest installed base among web analytics vendors on a number-of-websites basis[3]. Tradeshows had become fun again, and we planned our biggest spread yet for Search Engine Strategies 2004, in San Jose. It was there that two Google people, Wesley Chan (PM) and David Friedberg (Corp. Dev.), went “shopping” as they put it, for a web analytics company. I guess they weren’t overly put-off by what they saw.
A few weeks later Google had made an offer for the company. By then we had interest from other quarters too — remember WebSideStory? They were actually a public company at the time and offered us more. But I think we made the right choice.
Sidebar: Friedberg left Google in 2006 to start what became The Climate Corporation, which was acquired for over $1 billion by Monsanto. Now that’s an exit. He also started Metromile and Eatsa. Legit!
Selling the company was a needlessly rough process. It should have wrapped up just after the Google IPO in late 2004, but frankly the Google lawyers were prickly CYA types, demanding all kinds of IP-related protection — the four founders were personally on the hook if we were later found to be violating anyone’s patents etc. As we were now part of the big G, it seemed distinctly possible that WebTrends or someone would see fit to sue us. In hindsight, probably all boilerplate, but it was scary to risk it all like that. By the time we finally got it done, it was April 2005, and Google’s stock had doubled (half our payout was in stock). Oh well.
The still-young Google of 2005 was, I think, a lot more fun than the Mature Google/Alphabet of today. It was small enough (~3,000 employees) that everyone could get together for one (awesome, incredible) holiday party. And MC Hammer was always around. That was cool.
The day we joined, Eric Schmidt took time out of his day to hang out with us and learn about our flavor of web analytics. He immediately saw the potential with regard to Adwords spend, and was ever after helpful and available. I really liked the guy. Years later, Brett (then Sr. Director of Marketing) had an office right next to Eric, and they were bros. Kinda. I mean, billionaires are not like the rest of us.
Our first office at Google (for some of us) was the “fishbowl” of Building 42, in the nucleus of the Mountain View campus. We were actually really close to Larry & Sergey for awhile. Sergey had this laser engraver in his office with a long air duct snaking down the hall to vent the gases. He’s a nut, that Sergey. The fishbowl was also home to a new Google engineer named Mike Stoppelman, whose brother would soon start a company called Yelp. Mike is SVP of engineering there as of this writing.
The pervasiveness of Google Analytics now seems kind of a given, but in the spring of 2005, we were fairly panicked that its Google-fied release would be greeted with a shrug. So Wesley Chan, the Google PM who spearheaded the integration effort, commenced a daily “war room” and everyone was given milestones (OKRs, in Google land) with pretty tight timelines. Paul got a bunch of engineering tasks, I got a bunch of sales-ish/adoption tasks around penetrating the Fortune-500, Brett got marketing/PR/branding stuff, and Jack got BD/partnerships.
It was a fun and hectic time, with much of the effort centered around bringing the rest of Google up to speed — some of us toured the nation visiting the various remote Google offices, small outposts that appreciated visitors from the mothership. By the time we thought we were ready for a public launch in November of 2005, we were sweating it. Would anyone care? Turns out they did. After we announced “Urchin from Google” was now free for any website in the world, the demand was sufficiently high that even Google’s infrastructure (well, the part allocated to us) was groaning, and the SRE team made us shut down signups until we could arrange the server resources etc. we needed to reopen.
This is one of those nice-to-have problems, but a lot of people were still pissed off. Several months later, signups were reopened via the old invitation model, and the GA saturation we know today started happening in earnest.
Now, Google buys a lot of companies. Some of these are huge successes, like YouTube and Keyhole (Google Earth), but many just kind of scatter to the four winds, despite being worthy. Dodgeball, for example. I think this happens partially because of the way Google buys companies and partially because of big-company inertia/fog. Under some dollar amount (I’ve heard $50 million) all it took was one VP to say “buy them!” and it was done. Once they get onboarded, that VP maybe had left, or may have just been distracted. Turns out no one else cares, and the corporate soup subsumes the employees and the product melts into a shapeless saltine. In reality, no one at Google much cared about a product if it didn’t generate at least something like $100 million per year. Urchin of course didn’t either, but we were lucky enough to have some powerful allies: Wesley Chan and Eric Schmidt. Wesley was a PM (product manager) who understood Google needed effective analytics to drive Adwords spend. He was also dead determined not to let “his” acquisition be a failure, and he never let up until it could motor under its own power. But of course nothing can compare to having the CEO on your team, and lucky for us, Eric immediately got how web traffic analysis could positively affect Adwords. A few years later, Google did a big internal study with a bunch of “quants” running various models, and they pretty well proved an XX% increase in ad spending across the broad swath of customers studied. That was big money, with a “B.”
In 2006, the Urchin people started drifting around Google, and some left. Today, my guess is about 12–15 original Urchin types are still there, and some still work on GA. Most notably, Paul is a senior VP of engineering, with hundreds of engineers reporting to him. He owns not just GA, but display ads too. Smart guy, that Paul.
Last I checked, Google Analytics is running on some large and increasing percentage of domains across the internet. Here’s one study by Pingdom showing 62% of the top 10,000 sites use it. Here’s another claiming over 10 million sites were using it (15,429,94) as of 2012. Here’s another claiming over 45 million sites were using it as of 2015. Pretty cool any way you slice it.
Urchin/GA have touched a lot of people, and that’s probably the most satisfying thing about this whole adventure. It’s also great to see Urchin people like Nick Mihailovski and Nathan Moon do so well at Google. And of course Paul Muret, who is now a top exec in the engineering org. I’m also happy and very relieved that all our investors made money and got Google shares at 2005 prices. Thank you again for making this bumbling comedy of errors work out in the end. We (obviously) couldn’t have done it without you.
Footnotes
- Laserdiscs: The 12" ones, like a shiny record. I’m sure some people still prefer them.
- The moneys will come was the mantra of one Chi Kwan, president of our Japan division. Quite possibly the stupidest thing we ever did was open an office in Tokyo. It absolutely incinerated cash, and didn’t sell anything. We must have blown close to a million dollars on that poorly considered idea. That said, we did finally figure out how to make money in Japan — partner with a distributor. They took a 70% cut, but they did everything, including put it on a CD in an actual physical box. Hats off to Runexy! And we have a fun phrase to say all these years later. Anytime I’m short on cash, I just repeat “the moneys will come,” and they always do.
- Most-sites marketshare — this did not translate to most revenue. Kind of a vanity metric, but we got a lot of mileage out of it.
Appendix I: Personalities
Plenty of the old Urchin team is still at Google — Paul Muret is VP of Engineering, Analytics and Display Ads, which is something. Some of the other guys went on to start new companies. Here’s the Urchin Team over the years, in off-the-top-of-my-head order, with links to companies they started, if applicable.
- Paul Muret
- Brett Crosby — PeerStreet
- Jack Ancone
- Scott Crosby
- Paul Botto
- Rolf Schreiber
- Jason Senn — ProFundr/Marketface
- Jim Napier
- Hui-Sok “Nathan” Moon
- Alden DeSoto
- Jonathon Vance(s with Wolves)
- Doug Silver
- Jason Collins
- Justin Beope — Upas Street Brewing
- Megan Cash
- Christian Powell
- Nikki Morrissey
- Mike Chipman — Actual Metrics (Angelfish product)
- Steve Gott — Ecomiq
- Ted Ryan
- Jeromy Henry
- Annie Aubrey
- Alex Ortiz
- Kelley Wilson
- Christina Hild
- David Cerce
- Ryan Walker
- Nick Mihailovski
- Bill Rhodes
- Jason Chen
- Juba Smith
- Bret Aarons
- Merrick
- Bart Fromm
- Chi Kwan
- Ed Schwartz
- Andy Smith
- Ed Petersen
- Cindy Lee
- Davee Schultie
- Joanna Rocchio
- Ben Norton
Epilogue: Some lessons learned
If I had to do it over again, I’d do a few things differently, of course. Here’s a distillation of my/our painfully learnt truths, along with some reinvention of the wheel wisdom we had to live to believe. Dispensing generalized advice is always a dicey business, but I think I can defend these. Read with a grain of salt.
- Be willing to leave money on the table. I can’t emphasize this enough. Deal velocity is far more important than getting every dollar you “should” from a customer. Doing two deals for $1 each is better than one deal for $2.
- Reduce legalese, reduce text, shrink your contracts. One page is best. Somebody, probably an underling concerned with CYA, is actually going to have to read that 40-pages of lawyerspeak and it’s going to take that poor sap a long time. Make it so your counterpart on the deal reads it instead and execute the deal that day. Shun terms that you need a lawyer to interpret. Warren Buffett lent Goldman Sachs $5 BILLION on a hand-written note. It’s a legally binding agreement. Simple=less room for wiggling, and no excuse to delay.
- Time kills all deals (just to recap 1 and 2).
- Specialize sooner. Narrow your market. No one believes you if you say you serve all customers. Legitimacy/credibility are contingent on tight focus. No one can do it all, but even if you could, no one will believe it.
- Put more thought into the right sales incentives and don’t limit the earnings of your sales people. Make commissions bigger as targets are hit, retroactively to all dollars — eg., maybe the commission is 8% up to $100k/month, then it becomes 10%, which applies to the entire $100k, not just the marginal amount above that. If your sales people make more than the CEO from time to time, you’re on the right track.
- Pay commissions at least monthly — quarterly is too long to wait, and will hurt motivation. Sales people think short term, as they should.
- Accounting transparency — be more transparent with employees, sooner, until you are really uncomfortable. All employees should have access to a sales dashboard showing daily/monthly sales in real time, along with a “here’s our nut” indicator so everyone knows what to shoot for — profitability. The nut itself can be just a simple number, but the more transparent the better, even with salaries. They should be defensible, after all.
- Overcommunicate organizational clarity.
- Hiring is a bitch, firing is harder. Everyone talks about hiring “A” players and sh*t like that. Of course, that implies you can divine which ones they are without seeing their work at your company. You’re better at hiring than I, if so. The reality is that you need to have the backbone to fire people that don’t work out. Do it as soon as it’s clear it’s the right move. Be generous with people you offload — if they speak positively of your company after the experience, that means you did it right. Do your best to hire the best (smarter than you is a good thing to strive for), but let’s admit the truth: it’s a crapshoot. Try hard, then cut loose your mistakes. Then there’s no fault, no guilt.
- More on hiring: Degrees are for working at Google. Also take a good look at highschool/college dropouts that are awesome. They usually can’t get a job at Google, so they might actually meet with you.
- Money will burn a hole in your pocket. Consider only raising as much as you need to get to break-even, plus some % to account for how slow things are in the real world. Every $1 you raise is another $10 you have to sell for to make VCs happy. Moving the goalposts farther away makes it harder to score (sorry, I hoped to avoid sports metaphors).
- And finally, the most important “rule” of all: if you want someone to read your email, make it short.
Thanks for reading! You rule.
