┬а The Small Business Planner includes information and resources that will help you at any stage of the business lifecycle.
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We hope that you found the site useful in obtaining information on California’s filing processes.It is essential to understand that the Internet doesnтАЩt work like more traditional forms of media.
The Internet has changed the way that businesses and consumers interact.
In order to help you understand this new paradigm here are a few of the key concepts essential to success on the Internet - especially in the blogosphere.
ItтАЩs not just about having an open mind; itтАЩs about having an open strategy.
Once you put something out there for the world to consume assume that they will consume it but not just in the format you offered.
It doesnтАЩt matter if itтАЩs audio video text software hardware or any other serviceтАФtheyтАЩll want to use it in ways that you canтАЩt even imagine.
Which problem would you rather deal with: people stealing your intellectual property or people ignoring it altogether.
ItтАЩs a tough call but if you empower your audience instead of offending them with restrictions you stand a better chance of succeeding.
You canтАЩt have a share of the market if your product isnтАЩt on the minds of the people in that market.
If your brand has been mentioned seven times inside your own social circle itтАЩs well on its way to being adopted by the market.
Pay attention to your mind-share in the marketplace but remember you canтАЩt quantify everything: Brand is virtually untrackable.
I canтАЩt tell you how many times IтАЩve listened to a PR agent prattle on about how they have an amazing campaign in the works.
I cut these people off mid-explanation and grill them on the meaning behind their catchphrases and what they hope to gain at the end of the day.
YouтАЩd be surprised to learn that most marketing and PR professionals donтАЩt have a clue about how the Internet works.
Just because you install some forum software doesnтАЩt mean people are going to be beating down the doors to get through.
ItтАЩs good to have a structure for a community If itтАЩs gaining little traction however itтАЩs probably not a software problem.
If people arenтАЩt interested in what you have to offer maybe what you have to offer isnтАЩt all that interesting.
DonтАЩt stop issuing official documents that explain whatтАЩs happening inside your company.
IтАЩm warning you though these things are on their way out as far as the global conversation is concerned.
YouтАЩre simply shouting at brick walls with one-way distributions.
The world doesnтАЩt work for you or your companyтАФtheyтАЩll see it differently than you do.
Make your name(s) known and be as accessible as you can afford to be.
When problems arise your biggest supporters will appreciate being able to connect with another person instead of getting lost in a voice mail maze.
Your users will be comforted to know that another human being is going to help rectify their issue.
Who hasnтАЩt felt the frustration of тАЬtalkingтАЭ to a machine when all you needed was to ask a simple question.
It wonтАЩt take long for people to see through any kind of double-speak.
If you did something wrong admit it before people call you on it.
The worst thing you can do is sweep something under the rug in the hopes that nobody will ever notice.
Dude itтАЩs the InternetтАФsomeone will eventually realize what youтАЩve done.
Your brand stands to suffer if you donтАЩt admit your own mistakes.
DonтАЩt just throw money at a problem it only makes a more expensive problem.
Worse yet is pitching resources into a marketing PR or branding exercise for a product that sucks.
DonтАЩt rely on staged focus groupsтАФtalk to your most passionate users and your strongest advocates.
Read what people are saying across the World Wide Web (if theyтАЩre saying anything about you in the first place).
It isnтАЩt only a way for your company to communicate with consumers but a way for them to communicate with you.
If you remember nothing else from this collection of tips remember this: The Internet isnтАЩt just a bunch of cables and wiresтАФitтАЩs an interconnected network of people.
business startup start business Do You Have any Thoughts.
It is essential to understand that the Internet doesnтАЩt work like more traditional forms of media.
┬а There are some great ideas on how a businesses should use the Internet to engage their customers through the power of conversation.
It would be stupid (in my opinion) to not send press releases to local newsmedia and instead hope for the conversation to play itself out.
You are a fantastic tech writer and you have nailed this very well.
Very cluetrainy and love the emphasis on the core values and desired concrete results.
An astonishing product will naturally get buzz and viral effects based on how it serves its user base how it gratifies customer needs or corporate objectives.
To keep hammering away at establishing oneself as an authority as you are doing is the real secret.
The priority is to keep doing something something that is difficult and meets a need keep doing it keep promoting it improving it sharing it with others.
GIve away tons of free stuff advice music mp3s whatever.
That is another huge reality in the Share Economy of Web 2.
It wonтАЩt take long for people to see through any kind of double-speak.
If you did something wrong admit it before people call you on it.
Good things to really understand if you are interested in leveraging the Internet for your business.
I canтАЩt tell you how many times IтАЩve listened to a PR agent prattle on about how they have an amazing campaign in the works.
I cut these people off mid-explanation and grill them on the meaning behind their catchphrases and what they hope to gain at the end of the day.
YouтАЩd be surprised to learn that most marketing and PR professionals donтАЩt have a clue about how the Internet works.
this point already renders you an idiot and therefore the whole article.
so it happened that you only met the unskilled pr pros.
now THAT surely means virals are just a buzzword and has no meaning no use no nothing at all.
stop patting on your own shoulder and shaking your own hand.
Start with very little maybe a service you can perform and offer it for something else - maybe equipment furniture services or even money.
Reinvest or use whatever you get and refine/ improve your product or service.
And these days there are hundreds of free web applications for entrepreneurs and freelancers to help you get started.
If you remember nothing else from this collection of tips remember this: The Internet isnтАЩt just a bunch of cables and wiresтАФitтАЩs an interconnected network of people.
The great part is that every year he hosts a small get together called Christophe 3.
Die man kent het web door en door en is het type web-entrepreneur waaraan velen zich spiegelen.
DonтАЩt stop issuing official documents that explain whatтАЩs happening inside your company.
IтАЩm warning you though these things are on their way out as far as the global conversation is concerned.
Peter Merholz has a review of the book on his blog too.
Chris Pirillo gets down with how to start a business online - and he has some very good advice too.
I agree with pretty much everything he says in the post but the highlight is clearly how he defends something I do too - having an open strategy.
mobi How to Start Business ~ Chris Pirillo Codswallop ┬” The Freelancer.
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How do we build this community is a key concern for the companies I work with and is something we discuss constantly when planning for iRent2u.
business/ The article starts here: The Internet is a pretty amazing tool for businessтАФso long as you know how to use it.
It is essential to understand that the Internet doesnтАЩt work like more traditional forms of media.
Once you put something out there for the world to consume assume that they will consume it but not just in the format you offered.
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You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people to make something customers actually want and to spend as little money as possible.
Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these.
And that’s kind of exciting when you think about it because all three are doable.
And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich that implies getting rich is doable too.
If there is one message I’d like to get across about startups that’s it.
There is no magically difficult step that requires brilliance to solve.
The Idea In particular you don’t need a brilliant idea to start a startup around.
The way a startup makes money is to offer people better technology than they have now.
But what people have now is often so bad that it doesn’t take brilliance to do better.
Google’s plan for example was simply to create a search site that didn’t suck.
They had three new ideas: index more of the Web use links to rank search results and have clean simple web pages with unintrusive keyword-based ads.
Above all they were determined to make a site that was good to use.
No doubt there are great technical tricks within Google but the overall plan was straightforward.
And while they probably have bigger ambitions now this alone brings them a billion dollars a year.
I can think of several heuristics for generating ideas for startups but most reduce to this: look at something people are trying to do and figure out how to do it in a way that doesn’t suck.
For example dating sites currently suck far worse than search did before Google.
They seem to have approached the problem by thinking about how to do database matches instead of how dating works in the real world.
An undergrad could build something better as a class project.
Online dating is a valuable business now and it might be worth a hundred times as much if it worked.
A lot of would-be startup founders think the key to the whole process is the initial idea and from that point all you have to do is execute.
If you go to VC firms with a brilliant idea that you’ll tell them about if they sign a nondisclosure agreement most will tell you to get lost.
The market price is less than the inconvenience of signing an NDA.
Another sign of how little the initial idea is worth is the number of startups that change their plan en route.
Microsoft’s original plan was to make money selling programming languages of all things.
Their current business model didn’t occur to them until IBM dropped it in their lap five years later.
Ideas for startups are worth something certainly but the trouble is they’re not transferrable.
They’re not something you could hand to someone else to execute.
Their value is mainly as starting points: as questions for the people who had them to continue thinking about.
What matters is not ideas but the people who have them.
Good people can fix bad ideas but good ideas can’t save bad people.
One of the best tricks I learned during our startup was a rule for deciding who to hire.
It might be hard to translate that into another language but I think everyone in the US knows what it means.
It means someone who takes their work a little too seriously; someone who does what they do so well that they pass right through professional and cross over into obsessive.
Almost everyone who worked for us was an animal at what they did.
The woman in charge of sales was so tenacious that I used to feel sorry for potential customers on the phone with her.
You could sense them squirming on the hook but you knew there would be no rest for them till they’d signed up.
If you think about people you know you’ll find the animal test is easy to apply.
Call the person’s image to mind and imagine the sentence “so-and-so is an animal.
You don’t need or perhaps even want this quality in big companies but you need it in a startup.
And finally since a few good hackers have unbearable personalities could we stand to have them around.
We could bear any amount of nerdiness if someone was truly smart.
What we couldn’t stand were people with a lot of attitude.
But most of those weren’t truly smart so our third test was largely a restatement of the first.
When nerds are unbearable it’s usually because they’re trying too hard to seem smart.
But the smarter they are the less pressure they feel to act smart.
So as a rule you can recognize genuinely smart people by their ability to say things like “I don’t know ” “Maybe you’re right ” and “I don’t understand x well enough.
” This technique doesn’t always work because people can be influenced by their environment.
In the MIT CS department there seems to be a tradition of acting like a brusque know-it-all.
I’m told it derives ultimately from Marvin Minsky in the same way the classic airline pilot manner is said to derive from Chuck Yeager.
Even genuinely smart people start to act this way there so you have to make allowances.
It helped us to have Robert Morris who is one of the readiest to say “I don’t know” of anyone I’ve met.
No one dared put on attitude around Robert because he was obviously smarter than they were and yet had zero attitude himself.
Like most startups ours began with a group of friends and it was through personal contacts that we got most of the people we hired.
This is a crucial difference between startups and big companies.
Being friends with someone for even a couple days will tell you more than companies could ever learn in interviews.
It’s not what people learn in classes at MIT and Stanford that has made technology companies spring up around them.
They could sing campfire songs in the classes so long as admissions worked the same.
If you start a startup there’s a good chance it will be with people you know from college or grad school.
So in theory you ought to try to make friends with as many smart people as you can in school right.
Don’t make a conscious effort to schmooze; that doesn’t work well with hackers.
What you should do in college is work on your own projects.
Hackers should do this even if they don’t plan to start startups because it’s the only real way to learn how to program.
In some cases you may collaborate with other students and this is the best way to get to know good hackers.
But once again I wouldn’t aim too directly at either target.
Don’t force things; just work on stuff you like with people you like.
One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear.
Even Bill Gates who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight had to have a co-founder.
But you don’t want so many founders that the company starts to look like a group photo.
Partly because you don’t need a lot of people at first but mainly because the more founders you have the worse disagreements you’ll have.
When there are just two or three founders you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish.
If there are seven or eight disagreements can linger and harden into factions.
In a technology startup which most startups are the founders should include technical people.
During the Internet Bubble there were a number of startups founded by business people who then went looking for hackers to create their product for them.
Business people are bad at deciding what to do with technology because they don’t know what the options are or which kinds of problems are hard and which are easy.
And when business people try to hire hackers they can’t tell which ones are good.
Do the founders of a startup have to include business people.
We thought so when we started ours and we asked several people who were said to know about this mysterious thing called “business” if they would be the president.
And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery.
It’s not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study.
I think the reason I made such a mystery of business was that I was disgusted by the idea of doing it.
I wanted to work in the pure intellectual world of software not deal with customers’ mundane problems.
People who don’t want to get dragged into some kind of work often develop a protective incompetence at it.
By seeming unable even to cut a grapefruit in half (let alone go to the store and buy one) he forced other people to do such things for him leaving all his time free for math.
Erdos was an extreme case but most husbands use the same trick to some degree.
Once I was forced to discard my protective incompetence I found that business was neither so hard nor so boring as I feared.
There are esoteric areas of business that are quite hard like tax law or the pricing of derivatives but you don’t need to know about those in a startup.
All you need to know about business to run a startup are commonsense things people knew before there were business schools or even universities.
If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA you’ll learn something important about business school.
You don’t even hit an MBA till number 22 Phil Knight the CEO of Nike.
What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds.
Bill Gates Steve Jobs Larry Ellison Michael Dell Jeff Bezos Gordon Moore.
The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology not business.
So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
Some believe only business people can do this- that hackers can implement software but not design it.
There’s nothing about knowing how to program that prevents hackers from understanding users or about not knowing how to program that magically enables business people to understand them.
If you can’t understand users however you should either learn how or find a co-founder who can.
That is the single most important issue for technology startups and the rock that sinks more of them than anything else.
What Customers Want It’s not just startups that have to worry about this.
I think most businesses that fail do it because they don’t give customers what they want.
A large percentage fail about a quarter in the first year.
But can you think of one restaurant that had really good food and went out of business.
Restaurants with great food seem to prosper no matter what.
A restaurant with great food can be expensive crowded noisy dingy out of the way and even have bad service and people will keep coming.
It’s true that a restaurant with mediocre food can sometimes attract customers through gimmicks.
But can you think of one that had a massively popular product and still failed.
In nearly every failed startup the real problem was that customers didn’t want the product.
For most the cause of death is listed as “ran out of funding ” but that’s only the immediate cause.
Probably because the product was a dog or never seemed likely to be done or both.
When I was trying to think of the things every startup needed to do I almost included a fourth: get a version 1 out as soon as you can.
But I decided not to because that’s implicit in making something customers want.
The only way to make something customers want is to get a prototype in front of them and refine it based on their reactions.
The other approach is what I call the “Hail Mary” strategy.
This was not uncommon during the Bubble especially in companies run by business types who thought of software development as something terrifying that therefore had to be carefully planned.
As a Lisp hacker I come from the tradition of rapid prototyping.
I would not claim (at least not here) that this is the right way to write every program but it’s certainly the right way to write software for a startup.
In a startup your initial plans are almost certain to be wrong in some way and your first priority should be to figure out where.
At first we expected our customers to be Web consultants.
But it turned out they didn’t like us because our software was easy to use and we hosted the site.
We also thought we’d be able to sign up a lot of catalog companies because selling online was a natural extension of their existing business.
The middle managers we talked to at catalog companies saw the Web not as an opportunity but as something that meant more work for them.
We did get a few of the more adventurous catalog companies.
Among them was Frederick’s of Hollywood which gave us valuable experience dealing with heavy loads on our servers.
But most of our users were small individual merchants who saw the Web as an opportunity to build a business.
Instead of concentrating on the features Web consultants and catalog companies would want we worked to make the software easy to use.
It’s worth trying very very hard to make technology easy to use.
Hackers are so used to computers that they have no idea how horrifying software seems to normal people.
Stephen Hawking’s editor told him that every equation he included in his book would cut sales in half.
When you work on making technology easier to use you’re riding that curve up instead of down.
A 10% improvement in ease of use doesn’t just increase your sales 10%.
Trade shows didn’t pay as a way of getting new customers but they were worth it as market research.
We didn’t just give canned presentations at trade shows.
We used to show people how to build real working stores.
Which meant we got to watch as they used our software and talk to them about what they needed.
No matter what kind of startup you start it will probably be a stretch for you the founders to understand what users want.
The only kind of software you can build without studying users is the sort for which you are the typical user.
But this is just the kind that tends to be open source: operating systems programming languages editors and so on.
So if you’re developing technology for money you’re probably not going to be developing it for people like you.
Indeed you can use this as a way to generate ideas for startups: what do people who are not like you want from technology.
When most people think of startups they think of companies like Apple or Google.
Everyone knows these because they’re big consumer brands.
But for every startup like that there are twenty more that operate in niche markets or live quietly down in the infrastructure.
So if you start a successful startup odds are you’ll start one of those.
Another way to say that is if you try to start the kind of startup that has to be a big consumer brand the odds against succeeding are steeper.
Since startups make money by offering people something better than they had before the best opportunities are where things suck most.
And it would be hard to find a place where things suck more than in corporate IT departments.
You would not believe the amount of money companies spend on software and the crap they get in return.
If you want ideas for startups one of the most valuable things you could do is find a middle-sized non-technology company and spend a couple weeks just watching what they do with computers.
Most good hackers have no more idea of the horrors perpetrated in these places than rich Americans do of what goes on in Brazilian slums.
Start by writing software for smaller companies because it’s easier to sell to them.
It’s worth so much to sell stuff to big companies that the people selling them the crap they currently use spend a lot of time and money to do it.
And while you can outhack Oracle with one frontal lobe tied behind your back you can’t outsell an Oracle salesman.
So if you want to win through better technology aim at smaller customers.
It’s easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper.
So the products that start as cheap simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till like water rising in a room they squash the “high-end” products against the ceiling.
Sun did this to mainframes and Intel is doing it to Sun.
Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker.
Mass-market digital cameras are doing it to the expensive models made for professionals.
Avid did it to the manufacturers of specialized video editing systems and now Apple is doing it to Avid.
If you build the simple inexpensive option you’ll not only find it easier to sell at first but you’ll also be in the best position to conquer the rest of the market.
If you have the cheapest easiest product you’ll own the low end.
And if you don’t you’re in the crosshairs of whoever does.
Raising Money To make all this happen you’re going to need money.
Some startups have been self-funding- Microsoft for example- but most aren’t.
To be self-funding you have to start as a consulting company and it’s hard to switch from that to a product company.
The way to get rich from a startup is to maximize the company’s chances of succeeding not to maximize the amount of stock you retain.
So if you can trade stock for something that improves your odds it’s probably a smart move.
To most hackers getting investors seems like a terrifying and mysterious process.
The first thing you’ll need is a few tens of thousands of dollars to pay your expenses while you develop a prototype.
Because so little money is involved raising seed capital is comparatively easy- at least in the sense of getting a quick yes or no.
Usually you get seed money from individual rich people called “angels.
” Often they’re people who themselves got rich from technology.
At the seed stage investors don’t expect you to have an elaborate business plan.
It’s not unusual to get a check within a week based on a half-page agreement.
We started Viaweb with $10 000 of seed money from our friend Julian.
He’s a former CEO and also a corporate lawyer so he gave us a lot of valuable advice about business and also did all the legal work of getting us set up as a company.
Plus he introduced us to one of the two angel investors who supplied our next round of funding.
Some angels especially those with technology backgrounds may be satisfied with a demo and a verbal description of what you plan to do.
But many will want a copy of your business plan if only to remind themselves what they invested in.
Our angels asked for one and looking back I’m amazed how much worry it caused me.
“Business plan” has that word “business” in it so I figured it had to be something I’d have to read a book about business plans to write.
At this stage all most investors expect is a brief description of what you plan to do and how you’re going to make money from it and the resumes of the founders.
If you just sit down and write out what you’ve been saying to one another that should be fine.
It shouldn’t take more than a couple hours and you’ll probably find that writing it all down gives you more ideas about what to do.
For the angel to have someone to make the check out to you’re going to have to have some kind of company.
The problem is for the company to exist you have to decide who the founders are and how much stock they each have.
If there are two founders with the same qualifications who are both equally committed to the business that’s easy.
But if you have a number of people who are expected to contribute in varying degrees arranging the proportions of stock can be hard.
I do have a rule of thumb for recognizing when you have though.
When everyone feels they’re getting a slightly bad deal that they’re doing more than they should for the amount of stock they have the stock is optimally apportioned.
There is more to setting up a company than incorporating it of course: insurance business license unemployment compensation various things with the IRS.
I’m not even sure what the list is because we ah skipped all that.
When we got real funding near the end of 1996 we hired a great CFO who fixed everything retroactively.
It turns out that no one comes and arrests you if you don’t do everything you’re supposed to when starting a company.
And a good thing too or a lot of startups would never get started.
] While you’re at it you should ask what else they’ve signed.
One of the worst things that can happen to a startup is to run into intellectual property problems.
We did and it came closer to killing us than any competitor ever did.
In theory that could have meant someone else owned big chunks of our software.
So the acquisition came to a screeching halt while we tried to sort this out.
The problem was since we’d been about to be acquired we’d allowed ourselves to run low on cash.
But it’s hard to raise money with an IP cloud over your head because investors can’t judge how serious it is.
The founders thereupon proposed to walk away from the company after giving the investors a brief tutorial on how to administer the servers themselves.
And while this was happening the acquirers used the delay as an excuse to welch on the deal.
So we were happy in the end though the experience probably took several years off my life.
Before you consummate a startup ask everyone about their previous IP history.
But when you look at it from the rich people’s point of view the picture is more encouraging.
If you really think you have a chance of succeeding you’re doing them a favor by letting them invest.
Mixed with any annoyance they might feel about being approached will be the thought: are these guys the next Google.
They get the same kind of stock and get diluted the same amount in future rounds.
When you offer x percent of your company for y dollars you’re implicitly claiming a certain value for the whole company.
Venture investments are usually described in terms of that number.
If you give an investor new shares equal to 5% of those already outstanding in return for $100 000 then you’ve done the deal at a pre-money valuation of $2 million.
How do you decide what the value of the company should be.
Julian thought we ought to value the company at several million dollars.
I thought it was preposterous to claim that a couple thousand lines of code which was all we had at the time were worth several million dollars.
Eventually we settled on one millon because Julian said no one would invest in a company with a valuation any lower.
It was also the value of our ideas which turned out to be right and of all the future work we’d do which turned out to be a lot.
The next round of funding is the one in which you might deal with actual venture capital firms.
But don’t wait till you’ve burned through your last round of funding to start approaching them.
You don’t want to be running out of money while you’re trying to negotiate with them.
Getting money from an actual VC firm is a bigger deal than getting money from angels.
The amounts of money involved are larger millions usually.
So the deals take longer dilute you more and impose more onerous conditions.
Sometimes the VCs want to install a new CEO of their own choosing.
Usually the claim is that you need someone mature and experienced with a business background.
And yet Bill Gates was young and inexperienced and had no business background and he seems to have done ok.
Steve Jobs got booted out of his own company by someone mature and experienced with a business background who then proceeded to ruin the company.
So I think people who are mature and experienced with a business background may be overrated.
We used to call these guys “newscasters ” because they had neat hair and spoke in deep confident voices and generally didn’t know much more than they read on the teleprompter.
We talked to a number of VCs but eventually we ended up financing our startup entirely with angel money.
The main reason was that we feared a brand-name VC firm would stick us with a newscaster as part of the deal.
That might have been ok if he was content to limit himself to talking to the press but what if he wanted to have a say in running the company.
That would have led to disaster because our software was so complex.
The strategic decisions were mostly decisions about technology and we didn’t need any help with those.
In those days you could go public as a dogfood portal so as a company with a real product and real revenues we might have done well.
But I feared it would have meant taking on a newscaster- someone who as they say “can talk Wall Street’s language.
They didn’t talk Wall Street’s language when they did their IPO and Wall Street didn’t buy.
Wall Street learns new languages fast when money is involved.
You have more leverage negotiating with VCs than you realize.
I know a number of VCs now and when you talk to them you realize that it’s a seller’s market.
Even now there is too much money chasing too few good deals.
At the top are famous ones like Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins but beneath those are a huge number you’ve never heard of.
What they all have in common is that a dollar from them is worth one dollar.
Most VCs will tell you that they don’t just provide money but connections and advice.
If you’re talking to Vinod Khosla or John Doerr or Mike Moritz this is true.
But such advice and connections can come very expensive.
And as you go down the food chain the VCs get rapidly dumber.
A few steps down from the top you’re basically talking to bankers who’ve picked up a few new vocabulary words from reading Wired.
) So I’d advise you to be skeptical about claims of experience and connections.
I’d be inclined to go with whoever offered the most money the soonest with the least strings attached.
And you should because some of them may one day be funding your competitors.
I think the best plan is not to be overtly secretive but not to tell them everything either.
After all as most VCs say they’re more interested in the people than the ideas.
The main reason they want to talk about your idea is to judge you not the idea.
So as long as you seem like you know what you’re doing you can probably keep a few things back from them.
The most efficient way to reach VCs especially if you only want them to know about you and don’t want their money is at the conferences that are occasionally organized for startups to present to them.
Not Spending It When and if you get an infusion of real money from investors what should you do with it.
In nearly every startup that fails the proximate cause is running out of money.
But even a proximate cause of death is worth trying hard to avoid.
During the Bubble many startups tried to “get big fast.
But it was easy for the meaning to slide over into hiring a lot of people fast.
Of the two versions the one where you get a lot of customers fast is of course preferable.
The idea is to get there first and get all the users leaving none for competitors.
But I think in most businesses the advantages of being first to market are not so overwhelmingly great.
When they appeared it seemed as if search was a mature market dominated by big players who’d spent millions to build their brands: Yahoo Lycos Excite Infoseek Altavista Inktomi.
But as the founders of Google knew brand is worth next to nothing in the search business.
You can come along at any point and make something better and users will gradually seep over to you.
As if to emphasize the point Google never did any advertising.
They’re like dealers; they sell the stuff but they know better than to use it themselves.
The competitors Google buried would have done better to spend those millions improving their software.
Unless you’re in a market where products are as undifferentiated as cigarettes or vodka or laundry detergent spending a lot on brand advertising is a sign of breakage.
The dating sites are running big ad campaigns right now which is all the more evidence they’re ripe for the picking.
(Fee fie fo fum I smell a company run by marketing guys.
We were compelled by circumstances to grow slowly and in retrospect it was a good thing.
The founders all learned to do every job in the company.
As well as writing software I had to do sales and customer support.
I was persistent but I didn’t have the smoothness of a good salesman.
My message to potential customers was: you’d be stupid not to sell online and if you sell online you’d be stupid to use anyone else’s software.
Both statements were true but that’s not the way to convince people.
Imagine talking to a customer support person who not only knew everything about the product but would apologize abjectly if there was a bug and then fix it immediately while you were on the phone with them.
And we loved them because when you’re growing slow by word of mouth your first batch of users are the ones who were smart enough to find you by themselves.
There is nothing more valuable in the early stages of a startup than smart users.
If you listen to them they’ll tell you exactly how to make a winning product.
And not only will they give you this advice for free they’ll pay you.
Since this was the era of “get big fast ” I worried about how small and obscure we were.
Once you get big (in users or employees) it gets hard to change your product.
That year was effectively a laboratory for improving our software.
By the end of it we were so far ahead of our competitors that they never had a hope of catching up.
And since all the hackers had spent many hours talking to users we understood online commerce way better than anyone else.
There is nothing more important than understanding your business.
You might think that anyone in a business must ex officio understand it.
Google’s secret weapon was simply that they understood search.
I was working for Yahoo when Google appeared and Yahoo didn’t understand search.
I know because I once tried to convince the powers that be that we had to make search better and I got in reply what was then the party line about it: that Yahoo was no longer a mere “search engine.
Well a small fraction of page views they may be but they are an important fraction because they are the page views that Web sessions start with.
Google understands a few other things most Web companies still don’t.
The most important is that you should put users before advertisers even though the advertisers are paying and users aren’t.
One of my favorite bumper stickers reads “if the people lead the leaders will follow.
” Paraphrased for the Web this becomes “get all the users and the advertisers will follow.
” More generally design your product to please users first and then think about how to make money from it.
If you don’t put users first you leave a gap for competitors who do.
To make something users love you have to understand them.
” The slower you burn through your funding the more time you have to learn.
The other reason to spend money slowly is to encourage a culture of cheapness.
David Filo’s title was “Chief Yahoo ” but he was proud that his unofficial title was “Cheap Yahoo.
” Soon after we arrived at Yahoo we got an email from Filo who had been crawling around our directory hierarchy asking if it was really necessary to store so much of our data on expensive RAID drives.
Yahoo’s market cap then was already in the billions and they were still worrying about wasting a few gigs of disk space.
When you get a couple million dollars from a VC firm you tend to feel rich.
It’s money investors have given you in the hope you’ll be able to generate revenues.
So despite those millions in the bank you’re still poor.
For most startups the model should be grad student not law firm.
For us the test of whether a startup understood this was whether they had Aeron chairs.
The Aeron came out during the Bubble and was very popular with startups.
Especially the type all too common then that was like a bunch of kids playing house with money supplied by VCs.
We had office chairs so cheap that the arms all fell off.
This was slightly embarrassing at the time but in retrospect the grad-studenty atmosphere of our office was another of those things we did right without knowing it.
Our offices were in a wooden triple-decker in Harvard Square.
It had been an apartment until about the 1970s and there was still a claw-footed bathtub in the bathroom.
It must once have been inhabited by someone fairly eccentric because a lot of the chinks in the walls were stuffed with aluminum foil as if to protect against cosmic rays.
When eminent visitors came to see us we were a bit sheepish about the low production values.
But in fact that place was the perfect space for a startup.
We felt like our role was to be impudent underdogs instead of corporate stuffed shirts and that is exactly the spirit you want.
An apartment is also the right kind of place for developing software.
Cube farms suck for that as you’ve probably discovered if you’ve tried it.
Ever notice how much easier it is to hack at home than at work.
When you’re looking for space for a startup don’t feel that it has to look professional.
Professional means doing good work not elevators and glass walls.
I’d advise most startups to avoid corporate space at first and just rent an apartment.
You want to live at the office in a startup so why not have a place designed to be lived in as your office.
Besides being cheaper and better to work in apartments tend to be in better locations than office buildings.
The key to productivity is for people to come back to work after dinner.
Those hours after the phone stops ringing are by far the best for getting work done.
Great things happen when a group of employees go out to dinner together talk over ideas and then come back to their offices to implement them.
So you want to be in a place where there are a lot of restaurants around not some dreary office park that’s a wasteland after 6:00 PM.
Once a company shifts over into the model where everyone drives home to the suburbs for dinner however late you’ve lost something extraordinarily valuable.
These are the only places I know that have the right kind of vibe.
The most important way to not spend money is by not hiring people.
I may be an extremist but I think hiring people is the worst thing a company can do.
To start with people are a recurring expense which is the worst kind.
They also tend to cause you to grow out of your space and perhaps even move to the sort of uncool office building that will make your software worse.
But worst of all they slow you down: instead of sticking your head in someone’s office and checking out an idea with them eight people have to have a meeting about it.
During the Bubble a lot of startups had the opposite policy.
They wanted to get “staffed up” as soon as possible as if you couldn’t get anything done unless there was someone with the corresponding job title.
Don’t hire people to fill the gaps in some a priori org chart.
The only reason to hire someone is to do something you’d like to do but can’t.
If hiring unnecessary people is expensive and slows you down why do nearly all companies do it.
I think the main reason is that people like the idea of having a lot of people working for them.
If you ever end up running a company you’ll find the most common question people ask is how many employees you have.
It’s not just random people who ask this; even reporters do.
And they’re going to be a lot more impressed if the answer is a thousand than if it’s ten.
If two companies have the same revenues it’s the one with fewer employees that’s more impressive.
When people used to ask me how many people our startup had and I answered “twenty ” I could see them thinking that we didn’t count for much.
I used to want to add “but our main competitor whose ass we regularly kick has a hundred and forty so can we have credit for the larger of the two numbers.
” As with office space the number of your employees is a choice between seeming impressive and being impressive.
Any of you who were nerds in high school know about this choice.
More people are the right sort of person to start a startup than realize it.
There could be ten times more startups than there are and that would probably be a good thing.
I was I now realize exactly the right sort of person to start a startup.
The company I’d been consulting for seemed to be running into trouble and there were not a lot of other companies using Lisp.
Since I couldn’t bear the thought of programming in another language (this was 1995 remember when “another language” meant C++) the only option seemed to be to start a new company using Lisp.
I realize this sounds far-fetched but if you’re a Lisp hacker you’ll know what I mean.
And if the idea of starting a startup frightened me so much that I only did it out of necessity there must be a lot of people who would be good at it but who are too intimidated to try.
Someone who is a good hacker between about 23 and 38 and who wants to solve the money problem in one shot instead of getting paid gradually over a conventional working life.
At a first rate university this might include the top half of computer science majors.
Though of course you don’t have to be a CS major to be a hacker; I was a philosophy major in college.
It’s hard to tell whether you’re a good hacker especially when you’re young.
Fortunately the process of starting startups tends to select them automatically.
What drives people to start startups is (or should be) looking at existing technology and thinking don’t these guys realize they should be doing x y and z.
I put the lower bound at 23 not because there’s something that doesn’t happen to your brain till then but because you need to see what it’s like in an existing business before you try running your own.
I spent a year working for a software company to pay off my college loans.
It was the worst year of my adult life but I learned without realizing it at the time a lot of valuable lessons about the software business.
Perhaps even more valuable: it’s hard to repeat a brilliant performance but it’s straightforward to avoid errors.
VCs won’t trust you and will try to reduce you to a mascot as a condition of funding.
Customers will worry you’re going to flake out and leave them stranded.
Some people could probably start a company at 18 if they wanted to.
Bill Gates was 19 when he and Paul Allen started Microsoft.
(Paul Allen was 22 though and that probably made a difference.
So if you’re thinking I don’t care what he says I’m going to start a company now you may be the sort of person who could get away with it.
One reason I put it there is that I don’t think many people have the physical stamina much past that age.
I used to work till 2:00 or 3:00 AM every night seven days a week.
If you try something that blows up and leaves you broke at 26 big deal; a lot of 26 year olds are broke.
By 38 you can’t take so many risks- especially if you have kids.
What it amounts to economically is compressing your working life into the smallest possible space.
Instead of working at an ordinary rate for 40 years you work like hell for four.
And maybe end up with nothing- though in that case it probably won’t take four years.
During this time you’ll do little but work because when you’re not working your competitors will be.
My only leisure activities were running which I needed to do to keep working anyway and about fifteen minutes of reading a night.
I had a girlfriend for a total of two months during that three year period.
Every couple weeks I would take a few hours off to visit a used bookshop or go to a friend’s house for dinner.
Working was often fun because the people I worked with were some of my best friends.
The best I can say for the other 90% is that some of it is funnier in hindsight than it seemed then.
Like the time the power went off in Cambridge for about six hours and we made the mistake of trying to start a gasoline powered generator inside our offices.
I don’t think the amount of bullshit you have to deal with in a startup is more than you’d endure in an ordinary working life.
It’s probably less in fact; it just seems like a lot because it’s compressed into a short period.
That’s the way to think about it if you’re trying to decide whether to start one.
If you’re the sort of person who would like to solve the money problem once and for all instead of working for a salary for 40 years then a startup makes sense.
For a lot of people the conflict is between startups and graduate school.
Grad students are just the age and just the sort of people to start software startups.
You may worry that if you do you’ll blow your chances of an academic career.
But it’s possible to be part of a startup and stay in grad school especially at first.
Two of our three original hackers were in grad school the whole time and both got their degrees.
There are few sources of energy so powerful as a procrastinating grad student.
If you do have to leave grad school in the worst case it won’t be for too long.
If a startup fails it will probably fail quickly enough that you can return to academic life.
And if it succeeds you may find you no longer have such a burning desire to be an assistant professor.
Starting a startup is not the great mystery it seems from outside.
It’s not something you have to know about “business” to do.
Build something users love and spend less than you make.
For example I would be reluctant to start a startup with a woman who had small children or was likely to have them soon.
But you’re not allowed to ask prospective employees if they plan to have kids soon.
Believe it or not under current US law you’re not even allowed to discriminate on the basis of intelligence.
Whereas when you’re starting a company you can discriminate on any basis you want about who you start it with.
Yes there are lots of opportunities to sell them technology.
Which helps explain why there are not more startups in Germany.
But this is a very misleading number because the money was the least important of the things Julian gave us.
There will be a few that are only pretending to in order to pick your brains.
But you can never tell for sure which these are so the best approach is to seem entirely open but to fail to mention a few critical technical secrets.
Thanks to Trevor Blackwell Sarah Harlin Jessica Livingston and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this essay and to Steve Melendez and Gregory Price for inviting me to speak.Sure I was able to do some of these while working 10 hours per day but I was frequently too tired or ill-prepared to get the full benefit until I started working for myself.
Some of those people you will naturally start to see more often by meeting outside of the original activity (grabbing a drink at a party you host etc).
I think everyone should pick at least one item from the active category and one from the mental category.
After college he traveled the world for several years managing international businesses in Europe the Middle East and South Africa.
He has an MBA from Wharton and an Honors Degree in History from McGill University in Montreal.
He has also consulted to several Fortune 500 companies around the world on business strategy.
Did you always know that you wanted to start companies and work for yourself or was there a specific moment that made you realize it.
I really want to get into the property market and have a little saved for a down payment.
However in my state (Australia) I have only been able to find 2 deals that has positive cash flow in the last 6 months.
It was subsequently sold at a higher price that made it negative cash flow.
The rest are negative where I would have to pay weekly repayments.
Your dilemma reminds me of what I was looking at 6 months ago.
I looked at a ton of houses before I finally found one that cash flowed.
I felt really lucky to find that one deal and I thought it would be equally hard to find another one.
But I was totally wrong because once I got a couple of good mentors and they showed me a few things I realized that on any given day in the city there were probably 20 or 30 good deals that would cash flow.
They would go fast and a few days later 20 more would be there.
Ask 10 different people how start your own business and you will get 10 different opinions.
One of the most important things I ever learned is this: only take advice from people who have already done what you are trying to accomplish.
Was your economics professor in college worth $10 million.
Is the person who wrote that article in Forbes magazine worth $10 million.
Robert Kiyosaki makes this point about who you should listen to in his book Rich Dad Poor Dad.
Be careful about who you take advice from or you could very easily end up just as unsuccessful as they are.
First lets take a snap shot of the two weeks prior to changing the sales page July 11th through July 25th.
5% Conversion Rate Most people will jump to an incorrect conclusion when seeings numbers such as these.
First I set up a saved search on my local MLS website (your city probably has one too).
In the search I told it to let me know about all 3 bedroom 2 bath houses that were less than $85 000 and more than 1 888 sq.
I was telling it to let me know about every house that was $45 per square foot or less meaning cheap and usually not in great shape.
I wanted to find a foreclosed house that was selling for 60 or 70 cents on the dollar so that I could fix it up.
The saved search notifies you each time a new home fitting that description is listed and yesterday it sent me list of about five homes.
For each of those five properties I wanted to answer three questions: How much could this home sell for if I fixed it up.
This has been a few months work that finally paid off especially as part of my 30 day marketing challenge.
Secondly a few days ago I redesigned the sales page for my book based on an extensive critique I had done (you can see the before pictures there).
But in investing debt is actually a good thing because it gives you an incredible power called leverage.
But if you put 20% down instead or slowly paid off the mortgage over the years until you had $20k in the property.
You get the same cash flow of $200/month but $2 400 on $20k is only a 12% return.
Any time you can borrow money at a lower interest rate and use it to get a higher rate of return you should stay in debt.
When I first played it I underestimated how complex it was (it seemed too easy).
To just travel the world focus on whatever you feel like and pick up a check each month from your investments or business.
(Typical examples include shop owners or businesses where you are the primary talent like consultants etc).
It typically exists along a spectrum and I like to find out where it is on the spectrum by asking this question: If you were to disappear to Tahiti how long would you continue to earn money.
The problem is that if you leave for much longer than that the business will start to deteriorate.
Owning real estate that you manage yourself - Could last six months probably without you doing anything but it may not be prudent to do so.
Owning real estate with a management company - Could disappear for a year or so and the checks would continue to come in.
You may need to be called once in a while for massive repairs lawsuits or insurance claims (fairly rare events).
Handing all your money to a financial planner - again several years.
How long could you disappear from you current (or ideal) job and continue to earn money.
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