How to Speed Up Your Startup

Memo from the fast-moving world of Internet startups: Life in the fast lane keeps getting faster. Consider the messages offered by the following three people, who spend virtually all of their time wrestling with the implications of the accelerating pace of work and life.

Four months: That's the narrow window of opportunity that a would-be Internet entrepreneur has to transform an idea into an actual product that's available on the Web, insists J. Neil Weintraut, a general partner at 21st Century Internet Venture Partners, in San Francisco. "Time to market is the only advantage of being a startup," he explains. "Put simply, it's four months -- or game over. If you have an idea that you want to ponder for half a year, you might as well forget about it. On the Internet, if you can, then you must. Because if you don't, someone else will."

"You can always get more money, but you can never get more time." That's a favorite saying of Jeff Levy, founder, president, and CEO of eHatchery, an Atlanta-based e-business incubator. And it's a credo that is repeated frequently by the entrepreneurs who populate the sleek, loftlike, converted ice-cream factory -- and who gladly give up equity in their companies for the chance to slice weeks or months off their product-development and marketing plans. "Time waits for no one," insists Levy. "If you don't do it now, the opportunity will be gone forever."

Where does work end and life begin? As the pace of work accelerates, and the demands of work increase, "home" becomes a metaphor for all aspects of life, argues Chuck Darrah, who's part of a team of anthropologists studying the harried lives of people in Silicon Valley, particularly those of dual-career couples with kids. "These people 'work' on everything, including their families," Darrah says. "Relationships are something that they have to work on. So is marriage. And kids. And family. They see everything in terms of work."

We may not always like it, but it is, for better or worse, a fact of life: Business is moving faster than it ever has before. And if you can't keep up -- as a company, as a team, as a leader -- you will be left behind. One way to move faster is to learn from people who know how to keep up. What follows, then, are provocative insights and hands-on techniques from speed demons of the dotcom economy.

Venture Capital's Speed Demon

Among the hundreds of business plans that circulate through the offices of 21st Century Internet Venture Partners, based in San Francisco's South Park neighborhood, are countless variations on the same idea. In one six-week period last year, J. Neil Weintraut, 41, read 10 different proposals on using the Web to sell pet supplies. That wasn't necessarily a bad idea, but it certainly wasn't an idea big enough to support 10 entrants. "If you have an idea, you have to act on it now," he emphasizes. Winning startups aren't the ones that outthink the competition; they're the ones that outexecute the competition. "With the Internet, an idea has no time to evolve," he continues. "It has to happen now."

Weintraut should know. As a venture capitalist, he provides the early funding that helps entrepreneurs turn ideas into companies in just a few months. He's been a player in the Internet space since it mushroomed in the mid-1990s. During his career, he's built the Internet practice of Hambrecht & Quist Group, an investment bank that underwrote the stock offerings of such pioneering Web companies as CNet, E*Trade, Lycos, and Netscape. (The bank was acquired by Chase Manhattan Corp. in 1999 and is now known as Chase H&Q.) Today, at 21st Century (which Weintraut cofounded in 1996), he and his partners oversee a fund that specializes in early-stage investments in Web companies. They funded AdForce, which has since been acquired by CMGI for $1.5 billion; CareerBuilder, which now trades on the NASDAQ; and When.com, which America Online acquired less than a year later.

What does it take to move that fast? The answer is not mountains of cash or cutting-edge technology. To build a fast startup, says Weintraut, you first need to hire fast people. More important than time to market, he says, is "time to hire," since the latter will determine the former. "An entrepreneur has only one job: to hire," Weintraut explains. "Starting a company is no longer about raising capital; it's about raising teams. The single biggest challenge for any startup is finding people who will enable you to move fast."

That's why, when screening companies for potential investment, Weintraut and his colleagues look not just for innovators but also for team builders. "We ask ourselves, 'Is this person going to be a hiring person or not?' " he says. "The mark of a successful entrepreneur in this environment is the ability and the attitude to hire and to let other people do things. CEOs who tell me how hard they're working don't impress me."