Why to Not Not Start a Startup

Paul,

I wish you would provide another funding route for the old hackers who didn't strike gold in 1999 but who don't have the option to work for next to nothing for a summer (even if we're willing to quit our jobs for the opportunity).

Paul - I think you missed one point.

You really have to find the right technologies that motivate and enable you. For you, it was lisp. For me, it seems to be python right now. For years I worked with java, and it simply didn't seem to fit well with me. For some reason, python seems to be the perfect fit, and I have a new sense of desire to code.

I see the big divide between those who do and those who don't differently. Most people choose a life pursuing happiness, a few choose lives of meaning. The person who chooses a life of meaning wants to get rich, but they secretly don't do it for the money. they simply can't not do their dreams. To most, it's foolishness. It's not that the person choosing a life of meaning doesn't want to be happy, or can't be, it's just that their happiness is largely irrelevant. I also disagree with the crap about age. PG filters everything through this fine mesh, then claims the result is representative of the whole. I realized sometime around age 40 that to those who see startups as foolishness, there IS NO GOOD AGE. I kept wondering how I could go instantly from being too young to being too old. According to most, there is no good age. It's always a bad idea. What PG is experiencing is this. Much of the corporate World, and the homes of families in which people grow up, it is heavily permission-based. In the Midwest for example, anyone behind a tech startup is considered out of line because they didn't ask permission, they didn't spend twenty years climbing a permission ladder. If they succeed, they are thought to have broken the rules. Younger people are more rebellious - we don't need no stinking permission - and can succeed if they don't first spend years working for a bunch of mindless droids. Yet, it is still far superior to have broken through all this and risen above it all, to have endured the worst and still plow ahead in relentless pursuit of meaningful dreams to build something great. Meanwhile, there's PG with his clipboard going up and down a check list. I plain know better.

Most failures and successes are based on the business' operations....too much marketing/sales will drive a start-up to failure. Too much work setting up operations causes the business to really never start. My advice to my clients is if you are not a person who can balance both sides of business you need to get another person to take on the part you are not strong at...most of the time it is Operations....

Scot Duke Virtual Operations Consulting http://innovativebusinessgolf.com