The first think I thought when I saw this quote was that there's a wall full of unicycles at the YCombinator/AnyBots office, and lots of people that ride them effectively.
From http://tlb.org/eunicycle.html:"Some time ago I built a self-balancing two-wheeled scooter. Since then I realized that two wheels are redundant, and only a single wheel is needed to make a ridable vehicle."
"A startup is like a bicycle." I think only a business person would come up with such an analogy. Remember, it implies there is somebody else sitting in the seat.
And the VC is riding you? Certainly not your customers, in the early stage, since you may not have any. And each of the founders we know is already a bicycle wheel, not the rider. Must be the VC, right? Remember, business people and large software companies see programmers as cogs or wheels, important only as part of a system. If you play along with their analogies, you are just asking for trouble.
How about a different analogy, which favors us, the software guys? A startup is like... Fill in your own reply.
I found some by Paul Graham, of all people, when I typed in "a startup is like" into Google:
"A startup is like walking on your hands. A startup is like a pass/fail course. A startup is like a small boat in the open sea. A startup is like a mosquito. A startup is like a hang-glider launch.
No.
A startup is like being a mosquito trying to fly a hanglider-boat while waking on your hands and not failing school."
Can somebody top that (and throw in a marketing aspect?)
A startup is like being a mosquito trying to fly a hanglider-boat while waking on your hands... simultaneously trying to negotiate the wind to keep you up in the air and convince your teachers to get in your boat rather than fail you.
"Marketing and innovation are the two chief functions of business. You get paid for creating a customer, which is marketing. And you get paid for creating a new dimension of performance, which is innovation. Everything else is a cost center." - Peter Drucker
