I had already read, and briefly commented in this note, a few “essays” (that’s how the guy calls his – pretty long, that’s why – posts) written by Paul Graham. In “How to Start a Start-Up“, Paul Graham reflects on his experience as an entrepreneur in the software industry, an industry I believe is the most competitive worldwide, and provides some really excellent advice. I totally agree on many of his calls: don’t spend you cash in fancy offices and..chairs (a sign that you think you made it when the first dollar of revenues is still yet to come), get the necessary people on board, try to leave your ego on the side for once, get the product out of the pipeline fast, make it evolve quickly, listen to your customers and let them help you reshape and brush-up your product, go for cheap and simple, don’t target public administration tenders, etc. See for yourself by just reading this great paper, I mean it.

Excellent advice but also insightful comments on what geeks think about business people. Have a look at that extract from Paul Graham’s article:

“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. This doesn’t work well. 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. Even other hackers have a hard time doing that. For business people it’s roulette.

Do the founders of a startup have to include business people? That depends. 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. But they all said no, so I had to do it myself. And what I discovered was that business was no great mystery. It’s not something like physics or medicine that requires extensive study. You just try to get people to pay you for stuff.“

This state of mind is pretty well common amongst techies. That’s precisely what urged me to decide to go for a highly technological graduate major next year: try to gain some credit when talking to engineers. Being able to interact with different sorts of professionals is a key skill to have when planning to either start-up something or work on big and ambitious innovative corporate projects.

To wind up, and if I can repeat myself, reading Paul Graham’s essay on starting up is a no brainer. Paul Graham seems to be now helping entrepreneurial teams deal with the issues he had himself faced, since he now is a seed-capital VC at Y-Combinator, a Silicon Valley and Cambridge-based boutique for early-stage, technology-intensive start-ups.

For those like me who haven’t yet had the time to read The Google Story, I recommend you to take a look at John Heileman’s well documented article about the historical evolution of the brains behind Google Inc., from the founders and managers to the VCs. John Heileman is an American journalist who published two books on Microsoft and the birth of the Silicon Valley.