Shana Fisher on product strategy
From Shana Fisher at Startup School NY 2014 · · YCombinator
“Today, there's thousands of startups ... I actually think you should take as much time as possible to make your product perfect — if it takes you a year to make your product perfect, then you should take a year.”
On , Shana Fisher, Managing partner at Third Kind at Third Kind Venture Capital, spoke about product strategy during Shana Fisher at Startup School NY 2014 on YCombinator.
About Shana Fisher
At the Startup School NY 2014 event, Shana Fisher, then managing partner of High Line Venture Partners and a board partner at Andreessen Horowitz, discussed her investment philosophy and advice for startups. She stated that she rarely blogs or tweets about her work and that she decided to speak because she is often told she gives the opposite advice of what people normally hear. Fisher advised founders to "build for today" while holding a big vision, and said that if it takes a year to make a product perfect, they should take that time. She also expressed support for single founders, saying it is "not always right to have co‑founders." Fisher commented on the startup ecosystem, noting that New York is a creative city with early-stage money but that California still has an advantage for company trajectory due to more middle-stage funding. She emphasized the importance of diversity, stating that founders should prioritize bringing women and people who think differently into their companies. On design, she remarked that "great design is getting homogeneous" and encouraged designers to push past common templates. She also described the "equinox" as the time horizon between when a company does not have to make money and when it does, adding that founders control their destiny by controlling either raising money or making money.