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Starting your Startup The challenge is to find great people and then to inspire and empower them. The skills that it takes to start a company are not the same skills that it takes to keep a company going. In the beginning, you need to inspire a small team of people to meet deadlines and to deliver results. You need to bring in lots of good people, to give them responsibility- and then to leave them above. --- Esthor Dyson- Chairwoman, Edventuree Holdings Inc.; New York www.edventure.com Money is just money, who invests is more important than how much is invested. Networks are the steel of the future. You have to assume that you’re in business for the long haul. That belief will drive you to build value. Regis Mckenna Chairman, The Mckenna Group: Palo Alto,CA Don’t start a business unless you have enough money to invest in the business yourself and enough money to live on for a year. You’re not going to be profitable for at least that long. 1. Make your idea your idea-legally. Get the paperwork done for patents and trademarks. 2. Know your market by digging the information from the market and make partnership with universities to do market research. - Mellisa Bradley- BHC Inc, Neww York Finding a business partner is like finding a life partner; you should try to find someone whose talents complement yours. A good team has both a visionary who keeps raising the bar and a good operations person who keeps things running smoothly. ---Ronald Grzywinski & Mary Houghton- CCEO Shorebank Corp. Chicago,IL There’s something metaphysical about taking a concept, making it a reality, and creating a great enterprise. The management of any startup is the administration of the unforseen. Before you even get started, there has to be absolute enthusiasm about the idea behind the business. --- Lou Dobbs- CEO –Space.com –New yorkk First, have a differentiated product or service-one that can capture mind share. It doesn’t do any good to be profitable in the first year if you’re not going to be around later. You’re running a marathon- so remember to focus on whether your company can stay in the race. Once you are established, you have to go beyond business as usual. You need to keep creating new initiatives for people to latch onto. --- Andrea Williams – MD E*Offering Corrp; San fransisco A startup is the ultimate test of yourself as a professional. Why do people climb Everest? Because it represents the “ultimate test” You have to be willing to die in order to climb. --- CEO Starmedia Inc. – new York Stop just talking you are intended to do, start doing it!!! Listen to your customers constantly. Give them what they want- and a little more. You have to take risks. And when you take risks, you may not be everyone’s best friend. ----Julie Wainwright—CEO Pets.com—San ffransisco Love what you do. Don’t do something because you hear that it’s a great way to make money. Start as small as possible. To achieve 100% success, you need to grow organically. --- Richard Foos- President Rhino recorrds LA Profits for a company are like blood for a human being. You may not live for your blood, but you certainly don’t live without it. --- Jeff Bezos If you want to empower people, invest in them. When you give people a loan, or you donate money to them, they’re indebted to you. But when you invest in people, you demonstrate that you believe in them. -- E. David Ellington, San Fransisco, CCA Killer Ideas Selling your ideas to others is not going to work. Nobody is going to take your brainchild and make a man out of it. That’s your job!!!!!! You cannot stop a winner from winning and you cannot stop a loser from losing. You cannot win unless you begin. A winner never quits and quitter never wins. Unless you do something different today, how can your tomorrow be different? All about creativity 1. Look at more stuff, and think about it harder. That’s play’s advice to folks who are serious about getting more creative. 2. You can’t come up with new ideas if you approach each problem in the same way. Making yourself seemingly unrelated ideas. For instance, coaches give clients lists of random quotes from kindergartners and ask them to relate those sayings to their business problem. 3. One way is to lose your fear of looking foolish and to come up with great ideas is to offer the worst possible idea you can think of, and then riff off of it. 4. You were at your most creative as a child, because you had no offer. You took more risks. No one judged your performance and said you were “BAD” at playing – Andy Stefanovich 5. We call what we do ‘ Observational Creativity’- We look at things, notice stuff about them, and turn those observations into new ideas. - Geof Hammond Programming Stuff 1. Every good work of software starts by scratching a developer's personal itch. Perhaps this should have been obvious (it's long been proverbial that ``Necessity is the mother of invention'') but too often software developers spend their days grinding away for pay at programs they neither need nor love. But not in the Linux world -- which may explain why the average quality of software originated in the Linux community is so high. 2.Good programmers know what to write. Great ones know what to rewrite (and reuse). 3. ``Plan to throw one away; you will, anyhow.'' (Fred Brooks, ``The Mythical Man-Month'', Chapter 11) Or, to put it another way, you often don't really understand the problem until after the first time you implement a solution. The second time, maybe you know enough to do it right. So if you want to get it right, be ready to start over at least once. 4. If you have the right attitude, interesting problems will find you. 5.When you lose interest in a program, your last duty to it is to hand it off to a competent successor. 6. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging. Linus was treating his users as co-developers in the most effective possible way: 7. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers. 8. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterized quickly and the fix obvious to someone. Or, less formally, ``Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.'' I dub this: ``Linus's Law''. Marked For Greatness? An enterpreneur needs to have an emotional maturity and toughness. Business is not life threatening. It's ego threatening. And the people who are willing to risk their ego are emotionally tough. A key point: Leaders mostly get tested on emotional toughness. You can farm out intellectual problems to your team, your advisory board, or your board of directors. But you can't subcontract emotional toughness. To succeed as a leader, you have to be a learning machine. You have to let the environment and your team inform you. At the same time, you also need to have a balance between being open to ideas and pushing forward in the face of skepticism. The best entrepreneurs have a strong vision but allow that vision to be affected by other great points of view. Are you Courageous? Do you have the courage to change course, to stay committed to the outcome, and to do things differently than you anticipated doing them? Are you wiiling to fail? Most true entrepreneurs believe ,"We are going to win, and if we don't, I don't care.". It could be ugly. They could fail miserably. But failure is so uninteresting to them that they don't really care if it's pretty or ugly. Becuz......Fighter hamesha jitata hai.... |