An extensive guide to starting up a software company by Paul Graham
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.
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Business strategy, Clusters, Consulting, Education, Entrepreneurship, SME, Silicon Valley, Software, USA, Venture Capital, innovation
Quite a lot of people think Graham has gone a bit over the top with his essays, especially last year when he wrote how coders were like painters… http://www.idlewords.com/2005/04/dabblers_and_blowhards.htm
Jeremy, regarding your startup ideas, here’s a list by CNN and couple of VCs.
http://money.cnn.com/2006/08/21/technology/100milliongiveaway.biz2/index.htm
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Thanks for both links Kari. I hadn’t heard of these before. Both are very relevant.
Jeremy
Jeremy we have to work together !
It is very funny because we have almost the same (I’ve said almost) programme of studies…
After an engineering school, I wanted to get other skills (not in “business” but marketing and communications) that’s why I start now in the business school of Toulouse !
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With great pleasure Cédric. I’m actually taking the reverse way: I’ve spent some years studying business, and I’m heading to an engineering school next year to learn about computer science, telecommunications and project management. It seems that we both share a same interest in the IT knowledge quest: come up yourself with a disruptive technology and bring that technology to the market yourself.
Jeremy
[...] Why online dating sucks Back to this story. Paul Graham actually beat me to it in 2005 (7th paragraph down; thanks Jeremy). Most dating-sites are just like inventing another mousetrap, they try to solve the same problems in the same ways. Paul goes a little into it: people -> database -> matches -> date. It’s, in other words, the set-up-by-a-3rd-party all over again. “Hey this person likes apple-pie. I LOVE apple-pie!” So they use simplistic variables to derive matches and it ends up becoming a huge game of roulette. [...]