Startup CEO New Years Resolutions

I asked the CEO’s of the companies that I work with,  ”What are your company related new years resolutions?”. Each had a different spin, but they mostly fell into a few themes of:

• Great people
• Improve the product
• Stay Lean
• Grow fast
• Internalize culture and values

Lisa Marino of RockYou,  a leading developer of social games and advertising solutions for social media, is focused on building a great team with more gaming DNA to improve the quality of the games it publishes:

Make RockYou the place talent wants to be.

Many of the companies had resolutions focused on their product management and development. From the social gaming companies, Will Harbin of Casual Collective, which publishers the popular game Backyard Monsters, said simply:

Mo’ money, mo’ fun

As games like CityVille have shown,  mo’ fun usually leads to mo’ money! [And congrats to Alex Le, cofounder of a prior investment, Serious Business, whose first game since the Zynga acquisition is CityVille.]

Scott Albro of Focus, a knowledge sharing community for business people, has fully embraced the idea of constant iteration for 2011, taking the best practices of social media to the business media world.

Plan big, increment small. Meaning: set big, audacious goals for the year, but understand how the little things you do every day link together so you can achieve those big goals.

Encourage more product suggestions from our engineering team. Our engineers often come up with great ideas, and they are the most productive when they work on these ideas. in 2011, I’d like to encourage a culture where this happens as much as possible.

Shawn Gupta of OhLife, a personal journaling tool over email, has similar sentiments in using metrics to drive product innovation:

Make metrics a core part of our product development. It will be a lot easier for us to make improvements to our product when we have data-driven discussions and decisions.

Although the industry is in much better shape than the dark days of 2008 and 2009, many CEOs have fully embraced the continue to internalize the lean startup principles that came out of those years. Joe Greenstein of Flixster, the leading movies app on all social and mobile platforms, wants to take big risks with small dollars.

Stay hungry, stay foolish.

Focus on self-awareness, the core trait of leaders, both people and firms.

We will measure our traction in three ways:

1. Knowing we are becoming self-aware as a team. Measure of success: 360 degree reviews done smartly (meaning efficiently and not dreaded by all involved).

2. Marketing who we are, not who we may want to be one day. Measure of success: more than doubling our customer base without doubling our cost per acquisition.

3. Developing products based on knowledge of our strengths and curating products based on knowledge of our weaknesses. Measure of success: sales growth and gross margin return on investment.

Brian Lee of Shoedazzle, a personalized fashion etailer for women, is also focused on one of their core values, great customer service:

Treat every client like they are part of your family.

Read more at Lightspeed Venture Partners