SecondMarket: Don't build a Homer-mobile

Founder and CEO Barry Silbert's lessons learned: Find the right partners; roll the dice

If you've spoken to enough entrepreneurs, you'll begin to realize that a good number of them iterate drastically over their original product. In fact, it's often the case that the "right" product and "right" business model is vastly different from the original product or assumptions. For Barry Silbert, founder and CEO of SecondMarket, a leading trading platform for illiquid shares, his entrepreneurial journey was no different.  

"One of the biggest mistakes we made early on was the first platform we built," he said, in this segment of Lessons Learned. "What we built was a Homer-mobile." Barry was referring to Homer Simpson's dream car, outfitted with unnecessary bells and whistles. The lesson? "Build from a base, from a core user base," said Barry.

It takes an entrepreneur to move forward, charge ahead and iterate. And, that's exactly what he did. In fact, SecondMarket shut down one platform and moved to another. "It was that dramatic.”

Other pieces of advice from Barry include:

1) Don't do it alone. Find someone with complementary skills.

2) Find investors who can be mentors. Barry refers to Larry Lenihan of FirstMark Capital as just that. FirstMark is one of the investors in SecondMarket's Series A round.

3) Roll the dice and take risks. "It's OK to make mistakes – entrepreneurs are risk-takers at heart," said Barry.
While entrepreneurs will always be dread failure, it's inevitable. Not all the decisions will be the right ones. It's moving on from those mistakes that count.