Sharing  my Lessons Learned as a Startup CEO with Blue Startups Cohort 17

Last week I had the opportunity to present to the latest cohort, lucky number 17, at Blue Startups in Honolulu. Later that day, Paubox co-hosted an AI Industry Dinner at The Pacific Club.

What's happening:

• Chenoa Farnsworth, Managing Partner at Blue Startups, first invited me to speak to their accelerator back in 2017. I've been doing my best to present every year since.
• 17 is Chenoa's favorite number. Thus, lucky number 17.

My Lessons Learned as a Startup CEO:

• Just launch. For startup founders, if you haven't launched your product, nothing else matters. Obsess on getting your product into the hands of potential customers. In the case of Paubox and our HIPAA compliant email solution, I pulled an all-niter on a Friday night at a cafe on Piʻikoi Street to create v1 of our solution. I could not stop thinking about why it did not exist. No excuses. Just launch.
• Customer success is Ace. Once you get a few customers, the next step is social proof. The best way to get social proof is using customer feedback to iterate and improve your product. Happy customers mean more happy customers. Therefore, ask your happy customers for permission to use their logo, testimonial, or other signs of customer success so you can showcase them on your site.
• Cash is King. One of your main jobs as a Startup CEO is to make sure the business does not run out of cash. If that happens, it's game is over. In addition, it's a good idea to obsess on ways to cheaply acquire new customers. On that note, if it makes money, keep doing it. If it loses money, stop doing it. Cash is King.
• Content is Queen. Think about it, Google has an insatiable thirst to consume content in order to serve ads against search results. The more content it indexes, the more money it makes. The same is now true with large language models (LLMs), as they also have a voracious desire for more data to feed their models. Case in point, neural scaling laws describe how LLM performance improves as resources like model size, dataset size, or compute increase. This is the world we live in. Push out content so the world knows you exist, you're an expert in your field, and that you're open for business. Step one: Start a blog and publish a post at least once a week.

Blue Startups:

• The Blue Startups accelerator was founded with the goal of diversifying Hawaii’s economy by leveraging its unique assets. 
• It was founded in 2012 by Henk Rogers and Maya Rogers of the Tetris company and Chenoa Farnsworth of Hawaii Angels. 

Enjoy some pics from that day :)

Miki Hardisty (Founder, Olelo Intelligence) practicing her pitch for demo day

Chenoa Farnsworth sporting the special edition spam musubi Pausox