Some startup CEOs’ New Years resolutions

I asked my CEOs what their New Years Resolutions were. Here is what they resolved:

Jonathan Kibera of specialty ecommerce company Mercantila was alliterative in his focus on revenue:

Simplicity: Reduce the # of components necessary to generate revenue.
Stability: Be consistently excellent at each of these components.
Scale: Drive as much business as possible.

Lance Tokuda of social apps developer Rockyou is equally focused on revenue and mindful of the economy:

Optimize for revenue generation over growth to preserve cash in a weak advertising market.

Scott Albro of B2B media company Tippit knows what to worry about and what to not waste angst on:

Focus on what we can control and make sure, every day, that what we can control is more powerful than what we can’t.

Ed Baker of mobile virality company Demigo will be focused on execution in 2009:

Set realistic deadlines and meet them. While I will continue to encourage and work with the team to set aggressive milestones for each of our weekly releases, we need to do a better job of making sure we always meet these deadlines, and don’t let them slip.

Joe Greenstein of social movie site and app developer Flixster is making sure that his team feels the love:

Make sure everyone at flixster knows how much they matter. The further we get into this business, the more it is clear to me how directly responsible the talent and commitment of our team is not only for the successes we have had thus far, but for our hopes for the future and for the quality of the experience along the way. In a difficult economy especially, my 2009 new year’s resolution is to make sure everyone at Flixster knows that this is our company, to succeed or fail by our efforts and to be shaped along the way by our collective vision.

Amy Jo Kim of casual game publisher Shufflebrain (Photograb) is letting users guide product development as much as the company’s own vision.

My resolution is to listen to — and learn from — what the market is telling us, and mine the unexpected opportunities that are coming our way.

Siqi Chen of social game publisher Serious Business (Friends For Sale) will be putting in place the infrastructure to support the same key philosophical commitment:

In the new year, I resolve to get better at making data driven (characterize, hypothesize, predict, and test) decisions. This is an obvious point to most entrepreneurs these days, but the past year has really shown us that it isn’t as simple as just deciding to be data driven one day. Building the technology infrastructure and the engineering culture that makes this possible at scale are non-trivial projects. We’ve gotten a lot better at this in the short history of our company, but we’ve still got a long way to go, and we intend to continue to improve on this in 2009.

And finally David Scott of casual game maker Casual Collective sought more explicit communication and introspection:

Every Friday afternoon we will set aside time (away from our screens) to discuss all the things we achieved that week and list all we want to achieve in the following week. This will help keep everyone aware of what everyone else is doing, spark discussions and ideas that otherwise may not have happened, end the week with a better sense of achievement, and help us hit the ground running on Monday mornings. With such a small team we also need to better prioritize tasks.

And to lose weight of course 🙂

What are your new years resolutions for your company?