I'm Nuno. I bootstrapped a biz to £15m, advised founders 0-🦄 . Now I'm building Decipad AMA 👇

Don't repeat the mistake of others, you only live enough to make your own (Eleanor Roosevelt, quote probably butchered by me). You need to be driven by curiosity, not cash. Set clear goals early on, but don't deviate from what you want to build. Building a great business will have many challenges that are new to you. Some, will be unique and only your curiosity will find the answer. In some other challenges, good advice goes a long way. Read the "Element of enduring companies" and agonize about having responses to those questions. Read lot's of books, but don't go on quoting. Use them as knowledge, as a leg up for you. Not as dogma. Exercise critical thinking. Always Never hire people that you are not completely ecstatic to work with. Life's too short. Aim big. Like my fridge magnet says "If you point at the stars the worse that can happen is you land in the moon". That fridge magnet is a blatant lie, but it's still good advice. See being a founder as a school you never had, actually not being bored to death doing a job, constantly learning, and coping with the fact that when it fails, it's all on you. So aim high, learn more. And when in doubt, hire people named Giulia!

@sandra_idjoski Just like mushrooms, each founder to their mistakes. Some are too obsessed with money and make little impact. Some can't actively listen, so they depend too much on their insights. Some feel impostor syndrome and are too compliant to views of investors. Some just don't go big enough, as they are afraid to "rock the boat". At the end of the day, you can't make mistakes as a founder! You are your mistakes, and your business is a result of how fast you "begin again". So don't worry too much about mistakes, best to just try to have fun and build a product that makes you proud. Find communities of founders working in similar problems to yours. Building a product you use daily is key, early on you don't get enough feedback to make decisions. Being passionate about what you are solving ends up being the only flashlight you have in a universe of possibilities. Thanks for the question Sandra, anything happy to help!

@dscape Thank you for the comprehensive answer Nuno! Being passionate about what you're building is definitely a strong factor in how far you go when it comes to growing your startup.

@diogomartf Hey Diogo!! Nice seeing you again. I just posted the answer the same question below. If you are building something, hit me up. Would love to know more and help!

@chknoflach First there's the checklist: * Respond to the YCombinator application form * How does it fit the element of enduring companies? * Write something about the competitive space, and why your company is different This allows you to see if the business fits certain criteria, that fits VC backed businesses. Don't lie to yourself and try to pretend like responses "are good" when they are not. Worse than not having your own company, is running the wrong one for 10 years. Optimise for happiness, and hustle but hustle for things that can go somewhere. Then see if it fits your expectations of the business: For instance, I like 0 to businesses and do not enjoy managing people or inventory. So building a delivery service is not something I would do. Write a list of things that matter to you, and make sure the idea fits your world views and expectations of personal work. Finally, talk to VCs. Start with analysts, and learn more about the space. Initially, they will know a lot more than you about the space, but that learning will be essential for you. If at any point you realize the idea no longer filter your criteria, try to adapt it. If you can't, pick a different idea. Or get a cool job that allows you to learn more so that you are more prepared next. If your founding team doesn't fit certain criteria it's going to be difficult to raise cash. If this is the case, try to build as much as you can to show a strong product. Having a strong product pre-raise can increase the confidence of the investors in the team. Do not do side deals and mess your cap table, or else you can do all of the above and end up empty handed with a toxic business. After all of this, the fundraising begins.

@orliesaurus Samesies! How's the laser handling business? Come have coffee sometime

@dscape <3 next time im in London will take you up on the offer - Texas isnt around the corner I am afraid haha!

@chpopov finding a co-founder is really difficult. I think there are a couple of essentials: 1) You should be passionate with solving the same problem. 2) You need to love working together. There's no one size fit although. I think being involved in communities helps to find like-minded people. Places like Entrepreneur First, YCombinator, or local communities might be a good place to find people you share your passion with. In my experience finding co-founders is something that happened with time, and typically it wasn't like "on day one we had the same idea together" -- instead it was while maturing the idea, and finding more people passionate about the space.

@john_brett When we picked the challenge for Decipad we knew it was going to be one of the world's hardest problems to solve. Excel the most successful piece of productivity software of all time, and it's loved all around. However, its limitations are pretty obvious, and 1001 other companies have tried to tackle these. But we don’t just want an exit. We want to find a new way for people to interact with numbers -- a way for regular people to connect and make decisions, which poses massive challenges in terms of go-to-market and product development. For example, some big bets we’re making are on format, as we think that notebooks, as in jupyter, is the best approach. We also believe it should be a fun process. Many platforms (airtable, webflow, zapier) have shown that it can be easy to work with data and numbers. We want to extend that further, while keeping the "Excel ease of use feel. Plus we would like to lighten the load, make it fun for people. And last but not least, collaboration and sharing. We want Decipad to be a place where people share their knowledge, regardless of what their skill is. The issue is, how do we prioritize? In our previous businesses, priorities were defined by clients: I need my software engineers trained in X, or we need to serve Y number of users in our platform in 120 days. Most enterprise businesses are fairly trivial to do something like this, or at least trivial to our teams. When you do a community product lead growth company around changing people's behavior to numbers, then you see how difficult that is. In the last three months, we focused a lot on giving people actionable insights quickly. Next we will likely prioritize multiplayer and some financial use cases. We think entrepreneurs are a great community to partner with. Now you asked, "is there anything we could have done better"? Hell yes, but hindsight is not foresight. We are all the result of our "lovely" mistakes. I don't think you can change a “bad decision” and have a better outcome when building something as ambitious as Decipad. The road isn't that linear, it's not like you didn't get some banking permit and now you cant do banking. But if you ask me, sincerely, what was the most agonizing thing for me. Well I always look at sequoia elements of enduring companies, and that "team dna" is what bothered me the most in Decipad. With covid, building a connected team to start with was incredibly difficult, and the DNA and product culture just wasn't there. We acted on this, of course. And now i'm super happy with where we are. Was this a mistake, though? It was that same team that fought tooth and nail to have a new Decipad language as the focus of the product—something I always stubbornly opposed. These days, we think of open sourcing it, so more people can benefit and contribute to it. Or like my personal mantras since im like 16 "Begin again, never give up". -- we are not our mistakes, we are how we react to them (and how quickly we get back up again) Lets go! (Do you have access to the product John? Come to our discord please, must show you)

@dscape I haven't tried it yet I'm shameful to admin :/ I keep meaning to, but I think I've discord fatigue from a few services that are "join discord to signup" which has made me procrastinate on this (maybe something to keep in mind in case others experience this!) but I will do it this week, I've a few use cases in mind for this that I've been meaning to try!

@lucca0camargo Heya Lucca! Thanks for the message! University was significant for me, as I ended up pursuing a far more technical path than I would have otherwise. I ended up dropping out because I already had a job in the industry and seemed a bit dull to finish a master thesis, but I think the experience was great. Plus, I met my wife there, and not everything is just work. I do think there are many advantages of not going to university, if you are an entrepreneur. You learn far less and slower at university than you would building your own business.

@dscape thanks for the reply! That was my contention as well, it pushed me into a much more technical direction.

@isaac_yeo Other founders, how can I help you Isaac? I can't stress enough how much i love new founders seeking to learn, and helping them. I built decipad cause i was tired of using and sharing google sheets with founders :) In terms of Decipad, I think it's a massive privilege to work on the product. It's such a cool problem, and if we solve it will have a lasting impact on the life of many. I think people's are disconnected from critical though, and bad numeracy is a big part of that. They just feel like if they try, they will look "dumb" or expose their lack of capabilities. Excel is great for those that know how to use it, but creates a chasm for _everyone else_. Everyday, i wake up and i get to work on trying to solve that. And that puts a big smile on my face.

@haserk Hi Khasan! I'm uncertain if there's content on raising capital with VCs, but there are sure lots of opinions on twitter :) If you need help looking at some numbers though happy to help

@gnclmorais Hey Goncalo long time no see! I keep notes of cool ideas I had over the years —things that fascinate me, and are within my skillset. Over the past five years i evaluated a few, but they never went past that, until Decipad came along and really hit with everything i wanted to build. so kind of a slow burner of an idea, turned into reality over a matter of years not months! Hope you are well friend, we should do coffee sometime!

@dscape, I see… It’s good to see that older ideas we have are always useful, sometimes they even just need time to mature. I’m doing great but not in London anymore, so if you’re ever in Lyon, let me know (or I’ll ping you when I’m back in London)!

@nunojob @danflopes Thanks Daniel, perhaps we should do it again? :)