[via Doc Searls] Paul Graham writes about his experience managing the first Summer Founders program. One of the many lessons for entrepreneurs to keep in mind:
Here’s a handy rule for startups: competitors are rarely as dangerous as they seem. Most will self-destruct before you can destroy them. And it certainly doesn’t matter how many of them there are, any more than it matters to the winner of a marathon how many runners are behind him.
[via Jon Udell] The New York Times writes:
Lots of people complain that office multitasking drives them nuts. But [Gloria] Mark is a scientist of “human-computer interactions” who studies how high-tech devices affect our behavior, so she was able to do more than complain: she set out to measure precisely how nuts we’ve all become. Beginning in 2004, she persuaded two West Coast high-tech firms to let her study their cubicle dwellers as they surfed the chaos of modern office life. One of her grad students, Victor Gonzalez, sat looking over the shoulder of various employees all day long, for a total of more than 1,000 hours. He noted how many times the employees were interrupted and how long each employee was able to work on any individual task.
When Mark crunched the data, a picture of 21st-century office work emerged that was, she says, “far worse than I could ever have imagined.” Each employee spent only 11 minutes on any given project before being interrupted and whisked off to do something else. What’s more, each 11-minute project was itself fragmented into even shorter three-minute tasks, like answering e-mail messages, reading a Web page or working on a spreadsheet. And each time a worker was distracted from a task, it would take, on average, 25 minutes to return to that task. To perform an office job today, it seems, your attention must skip like a stone across water all day long, touching down only periodically.
SiliconValleyWatcher makes an interesting point in the context of a podcast by Sam Whitmore: “Content harvested by machines and algorithms is cheap and gets cheaper all the time. People-generated content is expensive to produce and will become more valuable…It’s the age of the technology-enabled journalist/editor–the media engineer.”
InfoWorld has a special report: “With AJAX, Web-based apps now can have the rich features users expect of desktop thick-client software, thanks to asynchronous JavaScript and XML.”
Dave Winer writes: “Reading lists are OPML documents that point to RSS feeds, like most of the OPML documents you find, but instead of subscribing to each feed in the document, the reader or aggregator subscribes to the OPML document itself. When the author of the OPML document adds a feed, the aggregator automatically checks that feed in its next scan, and (key point) when a feed is removed, the aggregator no longer checks that feed. THe editor of the OPML file can update all the subscribers by updating the OPML file. Think of it as sort of a mutual fund for subscriptions.”
Cristian Vidmar offers more ideas.
Greg Gianforte, CEO, RightNow Technologies, has co-authored a book on the subject: Bootstrapping Your Business: Start And Grow a Successful Company With Almost No Money. This is what he wrote in an article on Sandhill.com in March 2005:
I define “Bootstrapping” as the act of starting a business with little or no external funding. Bootstrappers don’t write lengthy business plans, chase deep-pocketed investors, or indulge in overly academic market research exercises. Instead, they focus all of their considerable energy, brainpower, determination and skills on creating a business that can actually succeed in the real world.
In fact, I can offer at least eight solid reasons why Bootstrapping will consistently deliver better results than the “fund-and-burn” model that has become entrenched in Silicon Valley and elsewhere:
1. Bootstrapping ensures that you build your business on a legitimate, real-world value proposition. When you’re Bootstrapping, you’re forced to deal with customers and to fulfill their needs from Day One.
2. Bootstrappers initiate the critical sales learning process sooner, not later. Selling is the hardest job of all. You have to learn how to be absolutely great at selling your product or service, and then teach others how to be absolutely great at selling it too.
3. Bootstrappers don’t waste money; they make it. If you have $100,000 or $1 million in funding, what do you do? Leave it in the bank? Of course not. You go out and spend itor, to use the commonly accepted term, you “burn” itIn a Bootstrapping model, on the other hand, waste simply can’t occur because there is nothing to waste.
4. Bootstrapping accelerates time-to-market and time-to-profitability. If you go the Bootstrapping route, you can start your business immediately. Immediately!
5. Bootstrappers are less likely to make big, fatal financial mistakes. Because they don’t have huge amounts of cash, Bootstrappers can’t make the kinds of huge mistakes that often destroy venture-funded companies.
6. Bootstrappers are forced into unconventional thinking. Necessity truly is the mother of invention.
7. Bootstrappers have more freedom and flexibilityBootstrappers can change direction overnight if that’s what circumstances call for. This adaptability significantly increases their likelihood of near- and long-term success.
8. Bootstrappers wind up owning much, if not all, of what they create.
From my personal experience, I could add a ninth reason to this list: Bootstrapping is good, clean fun. When you Bootstrap a company, you’re far less likely to find yourself in situations where you have to make promises you can’t keep or where the temptations that go along with large sums of unearned cash present themselves. Instead, your entire focus is on creating value. You market, sell and serve your customers every day as if the business depended on itbecause it does.
Tomorrow: In India
Continue reading TECH TALK: Bootstrapping a Business: Greg Gianfortes Book
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