Stop watching this video and Go build things l Paul Bragiel, Golden Gate Ventures | EO

Execution, not the idea, decides which startups win

Bragiel's case to would-be founders is that ideas are worthless because everyone has the same ones, and only execution separates winners from the graveyard of 2004 social networks. His own record makes it concrete. He signed a game deal with Capcom at 21, lost a social network to Facebook, and got into Uber because a friend asked for help hiring engineers, a check that returned more than 2,000 times his money.

Takeaways

• Ideas are worthless without execution. Everyone has the same ideas, he says, and flying cars prove it. Nobody disputes that flying cars would be great, and nobody builds one. The work behind the idea is what separates founders.
• Uber started as a favor to a friend. Travis Kalanick lived three or four blocks away and asked Bragiel to help hire engineers. Bragiel joined as an advisor, then invested. The check returned more than 2,000 times his money, and he still owns 30 to 40% of those shares.
• Best deals come through people he knows. Many of his strongest investments came from people he already knew or a friend of a friend, and his firm is usually invited into rounds rather than fighting for allocation. Most of his best deals were founders nobody else wanted to fund.
• How you fail decides your credibility. Failing does not cost a founder credibility, Bragiel says. Going quiet does. He will not fund founders who disappear when a company dies, while those who communicate openly can get backing for their next one.
• Start now, because later is harder. By 30 or 40 people have families and mortgages, which makes the risk feel bigger. He tells younger people to build while living cheaply at their parents' house, since they have almost nothing to lose.
• Top founders persist and inspire others. The best entrepreneurs do not give up and can attract other strong people to work with them. In venture capital he says the job rewards curiosity and humility as much as hard work.

From a Capcom deal to losing to Facebook

1. He started programming in 1994 and graduated in 1999, founding a company when the word startup did not exist.
2. His mother was disappointed he skipped a job, but nine months later Capcom published one of his games. At 21 he made more money than his parents made in two years.
3. His first company sold hundreds of thousands of copies of its games.
4. His second company was one of the first social networks, launched in 2004 with millions of users and strong engineers.
5. Only one company could win that market and Facebook did, while everyone else died. He blames a brand new industry and his own cockiness after his first success.