Best And Worst Decisions - Greg Linden

A few years ago, for Startupping, I asked several entrepreneurs about their best and worst decisions. With the shuttering of that site, their answers vanished from the web. I’ll be reposting them here. This was originally posted on February 22, 2007: Greg is the founder of Findory, a service that uses personalization technology to help readers discover information they would otherwise miss. Previously, Greg was at Amazon.com, where he wrote the recommendation engine and led the software team that developed Amazon’s personalization systems. Greg blogs at Geeking with Greg.

Solve a problem you want to see solved. If you do this, you will be excited about every day no matter what happens. I loved the problem Findory was trying to solve — helping people find the information they need by learning from what each person does — and enjoyed every moment I was working on Findory. Be cheap, but not too cheap. In retrospect, I think I have been too cheap running Findory. Budgeting is an exercise that has death by burning out at one extreme and death by resource starvation at another. Findory lived a long time with a very low burn rate, but has been starved of resources, slowing growth, restricting hiring, and limiting paths for expansion.