Sachin Rekhi

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.

Those who know me know that outside of software, music is a great passion of mine. But not just any music. More specifically, music from up and coming unsigned artists on YouTube. What excites me about artists at this stage is you see them acoustic and raw, often just a guitar or piano and their own vocals. By following them over time, you also watch them grow in confidence and mature over surprisingly short periods of time. Many of them go on to sign deals with record labels, put on national and international tours, and much more. One of the greatest disruptions YouTube enabled was making it possible for individuals with talent to showcase it online, gain an audience, and become successful without the traditional talent scout approach.

But there is an even more interesting trend that has emerged on YouTube in the last couple of years - that of the collaboration. It’s become popular for up and coming artists on YouTube to collaborate with other such artists on a single recording. The recordings always ends up being richer with the combination of two different artist interpretations. But equally important is the cross-pollination of audiences across both artists. Existing fans of one artist are exposed to the other artist and vice versa, significantly growing the fan base for both. It’s a win-win-win user acquisition strategy for each artist as well as their fans. I know I’ve discovered many new artists in this exact way.