Martin Stiksel, one of the founders of social music site Last.fm, spoke to the BBC about his startup and how entrepreneurs are constantly challenged to persevere through times thick and thin.
Last.fm sold to CBS Interactive for $280 million in May, but Stiksel remembers leaner days.
Back in 2002, he said, no-one was interested in investing in online music sites. The echoes from the dotcom crash were still being felt and money was hard to come by.
“There were many bleak moments in the history of Last FM,” he said. “We were cooking our programmers lunch and letting them camp on our roof terrace. It’s all we could do because we could not pay them.”
“We’ve got a good team, a very diverse team that just never lost the faith in the product,” he said.
“A lot of people have good ideas at the right time but they don’t continue, they don’t pull it all the way through,” said Mr Stiksel. “That was the recipe for success with Last FM, we just never gave up.”
The other key ingredient, he said, was cash. “Try to raise some finance, don’t spend your own money, spend someone else’s and just continue, never give up.
[via Found | Read]
