Two months ago I started my own company for the first time, after "getting ready" for many years.

My preparation consisted of gaining a lot of hands-on experience in software development, management and product design and working as an early employee on two other startups.

Not surprisingly, I learned a ton during the last two months and of course I realized that there's a lot I don't know. I can proudly say I am way out of my comfort zone (as in "you can't see the comfort zone with a Hubble telescope from where I am at") , which is pretty much where I expected to be at this stage.

While there are many little things I realized and most of them I am still digesting, here are three quick observations:

Startup founders are "old" and married

If you follow techcrunch and watch movies, you kinda get the idea that there's a clearly defined "profile" of a startup founder: 20-something male college dropout, hacker, party hard, playboy kind of guy.

Not true.

Yeah, some are like that, but the "common" type is more like 30-something, married (or in a long steady relationship), with kids.

What's going on?

I figured out you have to do your 24/7 startup when you're young, before you have all these other responsibilities.

I missed the other way around: you can do your startup after you got all these other life-things figured out: find a girl, get an apartment, make a baby.

Perhaps it's also easier to do a startup after you've been through a few startups as an employee and have some cash stashed on the side from those other startups.

(Update 2011/7/4: Right after blogging this, I stumbled upon this: "People over 35 have recently launched 80% of startups" http://www.businessinsider.com/people-over-35-made-up-80-percent-of-entrepreneurship-activity-during-the-recession-2011-7)

Execution != Code + Product

I always firmly believed that ideas are 5% and execution is 95%.

I still think that. It's just that I got the 95% part wrong.

I thought that "execution" means great product design and great software development.

In fact, those are maybe 50%.

The rest of it? Sales.

Products that succeed? They are the ones that got the crazy distribution by getting people to use their service, other companies to partner with them etc.

On the outside, this often looks like "destiny" or "force majore". You built such a kick-ass product that people are just magically drawn to it.

Bullshit. Nothing happened by itself. Every successful product came to be because somebody, deliberately, carefully and thoughtfully kicked ass doing sales and did it better than the competition.

This isn't "sales" in the narrow meaning, but I am very comfortable calling it sales, as in "something you do to get people to use your product". This may be 1-step and direct as lemonade or long and widing like a road Paul McCartney likes to sing about, but it's sales all the way baby.

And if you think you kick ass as coder and product guy, please be aware: sales is by far the hardest part.

Traction > Team

Common knowledge in raising funding is that investors are mostly looking for 3 things:

1. Team
2. Market Size
3. Traction

Most advice talks about Team being the number one factor in the decision to invest in a company.

I get the feeling this is not true. These three are definitely the most important ones, but Traction beats Team.

I've seen quite a few cases where a mediocre team with great traction gets funded while a very strong team without traction doesn't.

This makes sense in a time of an investment bubble like now: many teams are first-time founders and shitloads of companies are started.

There aren't enough great "proven" teams out there for all the money looking to be invested.

Traction on the other hand? If you have it - proving is easy.

What are your non-common-knowledge startup realizations?