Month: August 2005

Allen Morgan:

As I’ve written in the last two posts, it not infrequently goes wrong because one of the founders doesn’t work out and leaves the company with an equity stake disproportionate to the value he added – to the economic detriment of the remaining founders.

There’s a flip side to this problem as well.

I call it the problem of the “forgotten founder,” and here’s how it works.

Technorati tags: law, startup, founders

Chris Penttila:

How to make a cold call
A cold call is not a time to make a sale. It’s [a time] to give something. The first question is, “Is it OK if I share with you what we do and why people use us? Then, we can decide whether it makes sense to go further.” Be as discerning of the prospect as they are of you. No one’s going to do business with a beggar.–Bill Caskey

Technorati tags: sales

Alameda Capital:

We assist select early stage start-ups in achieving success. This checklist is intended as a guide to entrepreneurs to help them refine their strategies and plans in order to attract investors, and ultimately achieve success.

Technorati tags: entrepreneurship, vc

Michael Cage:

Entrepreneurs have ideas, to be sure, but what makes them unique is not the ideas themselves… but the character to act on them in the face of success and failure… family and societal pressures… an educational system designed to “kill” the entrepreneurial instinct… and more.

Technorati tags: entrepreneurship

Dave Hodson:

I met several entreprenuers who are completely bootstrapping their startups with open source and teams that are remote (i.e. working from their houses). Some people seem a bit squeamish about admitting this, until I tell them that MessageCast (and Bloglines) did the same thing. We didn’t move into our office in Redwood City until we had been at it for more than 2 years. The new paradigm – embrace it.

Technorati tags: bootstrapping, entrepreneurship

Tom Evslin:

A startup is so hard, the odds of success are so small, that you need to have the best startup people possible. That means there’ll be a time when much of the team turns over – quite likely including you if you’re a founder type.

Technorati tags: startup, hiring

Ian Landsman:

I don’t think it’s really ever too early to start. The thing I’ve found is that you need to focus on the ‘business’ your starting and not entirely on the product. If all your talking about is a product that’s 6 months away, that’s boring. If, however, you talk about the process you’re going through and talk about the product in terms of the process then that’s interesting. You’ll be able to build your reader base that way and it’s great to have a reader base before the product is done because your readers can give you some great ideas. I know mine have.

Technorati tags: blogging, startup, software, microisv

Maria Sariego:

Do you dream of leaving your day job to start your own business, but freeze in your tracks when you try to turn that dream into reality?

You’re in good company, believe me. I went through several months of gripping fear just before I left corporate and made the leap into my business full-time. Some days I felt like a contestant on Fear Factor, traversing a 6″ beam 10 stories in the air — only without the tether to catch me if I fell. It was terrifying.

Technorati tags: fear, entrepreneurship

Steve Pavlina:

Now can anyone tell me what percentage of employees fail within the first five years?

If you work at a job and get laid off after 4.5 years, would you qualify for this statistic? What if you quit? Left for a better job? Retired? Got a transfer? A promotion?

If your job ends, does that mean you failed? And if a business “fails” to endure, does that mean the entrepreneur failed? Isn’t every business going to fail eventually?

Technorati tags: inspiration

Dave Taylor:

But here’s my tip for you: conferences aren’t about the sessions, the talks, or the demos, and it doesn’t really matter if you attend the vendor exhibition. Conferences are all about the breaks, the dinners, the bar at the conference hotel after the day’s done.

Why? Because the so-called educational aspect of a conference is something you can often receive by simply buying a book or a training DVD. That’s not enough to get me to travel to another city. To me, the most important aspect of attending a conference is the opportunity to meet people that I wouldn’t have otherwise ever met. It’s the random, the chaotic, the unexpected, unplanned discovery.

Technorati tags: conference, networking