Thanks to Gillian Shaw for this great article about some of the lessons learned at Grow Conf 2010!

If you attended, please comment and add your own additions.

What gave you that “ah ha” moment?

10 Lessons Learned at GROW 2010

By GILLIAN SHAW

The biggest and costliest mistake the online shopping giant Zappos made during the company’s meteoric rise was hiring too quickly and firing too slowly.

While that may seem an unlikely admission from the man who wrote Delivering Happiness: A Path to Profits, Passion and Purpose, it’s advice Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh says could saved his company millions – $100 million in fact.

Hsieh was among U.S. entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who converged on Vancouver recently for GROW 2010, a conference that gave them the chance to kick the tires of Canadian techno-startups and share lessons they have learned with Canadian entrepreneurs.

“We hire people whose personal values match those of the company,” Hsieh said in a question-and-answer session led by Kara Swisher.

The problem though, said Hsieh was that the company was hiring too quickly during its rapid growth and was slow to fire people to correct those mistakes.

Zappos, which was acquired by Amazon for US$1.2 billion last year, built its success and reputation around great customer service. It’s so embedded into company culture that when a new hire – an executive who had already had his move paid for – declined to take part in an orientation that included a stint in customer service, Hsieh said his employment came to an end. That had to be a pricey mistake for Zappos.

It doesn’t matter as much what your company’s culture and core values are; what is important is that you stick to them, said Hsieh. You can’t keep making compromises.

Hsieh, who lives in Las Vegas was here with a number of deal makers from Silicon Valley and his thoughts added to a long list of lessons learned that emerged from the conference sessions.

Here’s a 10-point tips list from others who shared the GROW 2010 conference stage:

1. Make a web site, a widget or an application; solve a problem; sell stuff to people; add Web. 2.0 technology – a succinct summary by Dave McClure, 500 Startups.

2. How to get the attention of venture capitalists? A common connection is best. If you know someone (or several people) connected to the venture capitalist you’re seeking to meet, get them to drop a line introducing you. And when sending an intro note, link to your product – let the people you’re seeking to meet play with the product.

3. Have a strong team.

4. Don’t build a product or companies that requires you to change human behaviour. If you want to see evidence of just how difficult it is to change behaviours, stand at the self check-in kiosks at YVR and see how many people are using them compared to the number of people lining up to check in with a real person at the counter. {This and the rest of these points are from Leonard Brody, an entrepreneur, author, venture capitalist and co-founder of Now Public, a Canadian among the Silicon Valley insiders at the conference)

5. Entrepreneurs need to be comfortable living in the space between truth and fiction – part of the fake it till you make it strategy. You’d better be comfortable BS-ing, as in ‘our office is under renovation we have to meet elsewhere’ when really there is no office. Brody recalled giving a furniture store equity in a startup in exchange for borrowing furniture for meetings.They’d run downstairs to the store, cut the tags off the furniture, run it upstairs to arrange it for the meeting and return it, retagging the furniture when the guests left.

6. You need to connect your life goal to the kind of business you’re building. Think about the life you want to lead: Do you want kids? Do you want to spend your life in airports? Are you doing this to put a roof over your head?

7. You’re not raising money to fund a startup, you’re finding business partners. You need to look at it like a marriage. When things go wrong or right are these people you want to be in the trenches with?

8. If you look at most of the great success stories from Skype to Facebook to Google they are second or third movers. The successful companies aren’t pioneering the ideas, they are executing them better.

9. Stop chasing the billion dollar company. “It’s like chasing a unicorn, it does not in general terms exist,” says Brody. Less than one per cent of entrepreneurs will build a $1 billion company. It makes far more sense to fund and grow middle market companies.

10. 50 per cent of the time people will tell you you are an idiot (Brody was somewhat more colourful but this is a family newspaper and all that). They may be right but even at the peak of your career you’ll hear it.

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