Sachin Rekhi

The best startups choose a main dimension or two of innovation and invest significant effort to truly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market along that dimension. At the same time, they leverage existing best practices along other potential dimensions of innovation and choose not to reinvent in those aspects of their business. This enables them to take smart risks by focusing on what they can dedicate the needed resources to win.

On the other hand, those startups that choose to innovate across a myriad of dimensions often find it difficult to focus given the large number of unknowns they need to solve. And while in theory the sum of their collective innovations should result in an even greater reward, the reality is executing extremely well becomes exceedingly difficult.

The meteoric rise of developer platforms over the last seven years has been impressive to watch and a major boon to the social and mobile ecosystems. Twitter (API launched in 2006), Facebook (2007), and Apple iOS (2008) alone have spurred developers to build massive businesses on top of their platforms and simultaneously driven significant user growth for the platforms themselves.

Despite these successes, designing a successful platform today remains an elusive challenge for new entrants. Through my work of building Microsoft Visual Studio's extensibility platform as well as imeem's Media Platform, I know first hand how difficult it can be to get the equation just right. In addition, Connected is in many ways the ultimate mashup, leveraging over 30 different third-party APIs to give you a consolidated view of your contacts and conversations. In developing Connected, I saw some third-party APIs that had well functioning API ecosystems, while many certainly did not.

When evaluating a startup idea, it's important to leverage the collective wisdom of what makes a startup successful, including evaluating the market opportunity, understanding how your product will significantly improve upon what already exists, evaluating the team's strengths, understanding your user acquisition strategy, and critiquing the business model. These are all critical criteria that are indeed important in understanding the potential for success of your next venture.

However, in addition to these standard criteria, I'd like to suggest three additional ones that have become extremely important in my own evaluation of startup ideas.

Alec Baldwin’s epic performance in Glengarry Glen Ross is a great reminder that selling is all about confidence. And it’s equally important when selling yourself when first meeting someone. Having strong conviction and confidence will signal that you are certainly someone worth remembering.

Throughout our careers, we are often lucky enough to work with a few individuals that far exceed our expectations, have the ability to move mountains, and inspire us to do our best work. These individuals are often directly responsible for our own success as well as the success of our projects and direct contributors to our proudest professional accomplishments.

I call these rock stars members of my draft pick. And after every job, I update my draft pick with individuals who fit the bill. I then ensure that I touch base with each of them at least once a year.

That way when it comes time for me to build an all star team, I can call upon the very best.