If you just join a startup as an ordinary employee, you will consider the same problems as joining any company, that is, how much money to pay, what position is it, what working hours are, and do you often work overtime? The company is not far from my home, what is the brand of the company, whether the direct supervisor is good or not, and whether I have much room for development. The only question that needs more consideration is, "What is the growth rate of this company?" .

If you join a startup as a partner or a director, you need to consider a lot more things. I believe you must have several startups to choose from, so you must remember at this time-

Choice is more important than ability.

First question, can this thing be bigger?

Several investors told me that starting a business must be a project with a big market. Failed to start the project. Many times, it is not because the team is not excellent, nor because you are not working hard enough. It's just that the market itself is small and you can't grow up.

If it is the first time to start a business, it is good to do a small and beautiful project to increase your experience. However, a small and beautiful project may become a chicken rib in the later stage. It can't die quickly without being proved by the market, and there is no explosive growth. This kind of project is the most tragic. When you have been able to join an entrepreneurial team as a partner or director, I believe you have worked in your field for some years and made some achievements. At this time, your time and opportunity costs are very high. So if you do a small thing by yourself, you might as well do a big thing with a few powerful people.

What's the big deal? It is a homeopathic project.

Every entrepreneur will shine when he talks about his own project, and feel that his idea is super awesome and will definitely go public within five years. Don't just listen to him spray. Judge for yourself.

At that time, I was talking about several entrepreneurial projects, such as tourism, e-commerce, O2O, plastic surgery APP and intelligent hardware. I have analyzed: tourism and education are very popular projects in recent two years, and they are also hot projects reported by VC and key media; O2O is also a big trend, but there is an important point in following the trend. Can't do it too early, the market can't accept it. For example, if you don't have time to read the APP on your mobile phone in 2005, then don't plunge into the Red Sea, such as 1 1 year and 12 year group purchase; That e-commerce project is already talking about the D round of financing, and all the data are particularly good, almost the rhythm of listing within two years; Although plastic surgery is a controversial matter, it is also a hot project in recent years. There are many advertisements for taxis and office buildings, high customer orders, high repurchase frequency, high decision-making cost and serious information asymmetry, which makes a third-party platform /APP have great room for development; Intelligent hardware is also very popular in the past two years, and the project I mentioned also won the B round, but I'm not sure how big the market for an intelligent hardware is.

Later, I met the original wheat hill. Because I have been in the internet circle before, I know nothing about traditional industries. When I first met the founder Allen, I didn't know what to ask.

But whether a project has a broad market can be confirmed by data and analysis. I simply Google the data, and the annual sales of bread in the whole big market in China is 300 billion. Then look at the difference from competing products. At present, some well-made bread brands on the market are Japanese sweet dough, which is small and soft, high in oil, sugar and calories. To follow the trend, the trend of the food industry is health. At that time, the former CEO of Maishanqiu told me that they made soft European bread, and the bread categories were different, all low in oil, sugar and salt. Competing products can't be fundamentally changed in category, fermentation process, baking process and equipment, so they are competitive.

Later, I also asked several investors and friends, and they told me that bread belongs to the catering industry, but it needs high frequency. There will be no bubble like the Internet, because it is a mass consumer product, hardly affected by the economic crisis, and its turnover will not be affected by the rectification in four winds.

The conclusion is, well, there is a big market.

The second question is, do I like doing it?

Different people have different views on whether to do what they really like.

For example, Lei Jun told Chen Ou to do something with a big market, not something he likes. So Chen Ou gave up the game-related things he was interested in and made cosmetics with several other guys. But in Silicon Valley, every entrepreneur will say that he founded this project to change the world, realize his own life value and pursue his own life meaning. This is also a cultural difference. I found that entrepreneurs in China still consider whether they can "succeed" when starting a business. But for me, if I don't like something so much, it's hard for me to do it for a long time.

During those years in Silicon Valley, I was deeply influenced by those who wanted to change the world with the Internet, so when I first returned to China, I thought, ah, starting a business is of course to be a social networking site or a tool or an APP. So I just returned to China, and everything I want to do is like this. What I do is still very ungrounded and unreliable.

Later, when having dinner with Wen Xin, he told me that he had started a blog China before, and he made great progress at that time. Alex, whose traffic has reached the top dozens in the world, has invested12 million dollars. Later, he couldn't find an effective business model, and that investment became the biggest investment failure in history. So he vowed never to do any projects with traffic and no profit again, and began to be a light in a box, a global e-commerce that sells a penny and earns a penny. Finally, the company went public last year.

I was touched by Wen Xin's words. I found that I was actually more interested in physical goods than intangible Internet products. Although I do marketing in any company, there is still a big difference between marketing an APP and marketing a bread chain. Lifestyle brand, I can tell stories, be creative, and plant an idea in other people's minds, which makes me excited.

So what I did later was lifestyle brands, whether it was the detox fruit and vegetable juice brand co-founded before or the original Maishan brand now.

What if you like the things made in this project as a whole, but the pit you like has been occupied by others? For example, you obviously want to make products, but as a result, they say we have a product director, so you should do marketing.

Wen Yi, the former co-founder of Union League, told me that it doesn't matter what you do in a startup, but how close you are to the CEO. Someone once said to sheryl sandberg, "If someone offers you a seat on a rocket ship, go ahead and don't ask what it is."

However, when you ask "What do I do in this startup", if the other person says "You can do anything", then you should never join. Because the CEO may not have thought about what to do after you come. Without clear responsibilities, you will hit a wall everywhere. For example, they all talk about marketing. You think you want to be a brand in the future, but what people want you to do is public relations or operation, or even sales.