41–47 of 47 posts
Start a strtup in case you want to make business, to have fun. Investors are not your bosses. Their goal is the same: make your company perform better. Don't be afraid of them :)
I had a franchise that I got in 1990. I remember when I called a mentor/friend in the business the first time that I got the flu. I asked him "How do I or who do I call in sick to?" . My mentor's response was - "just contact everyone you were going to do business with today", which was about 60 people. An impossible task. I went to work sick. Not the best job situation, but the reality if you are a sole operator.
It is a good opportunity to write a simple scheduling app to automate such a task if you need it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a good opportunity to write a simple scheduling app to automate such a task if you need it.
I don't think you understood the real message of the advice...
My father is a physician in private practice. He rarely takes time off for being sick but it is possible to do either in an emergency or just being very sick. His front desk people could cancel his appointments.
This is not cost free, and it is a lot harder than just calling in sick. After all if you have fixed expenses, such as salaried employees, they collect their money whether or not you work.
So it is very different. Automating some of the processes can cut down on the expenses but it is still a major thing and not really comparable.
The key difference is choice. If any of the things the author mentioned control me, it's because I allow them to. Whereas it might even be partly accurate to say that the definition of having a boss is that don't have that choice.
You always have a choice; it's the same choice you have with investors and clients, the option to stop (either by quitting or getting fired). Mentally, you might not see a job that way, but it's the same basic choice. If you have a single investor, or a single client, it's the same as a boss. Running the company might let you diversify towards multiple clients or multiple investors, but then you've just traded one bo…
The key difference is choice. If any of the things the author mentioned control me, it's because I allow them to. Whereas it might even be partly accurate to say that the definition of having a boss is that don't have that choice.
That's adorable that you think that you have more choices if you're a business owner.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't think you understood the real message of the advice...
The point is that people who are established likely can hire someone to make those calls. There is no reason you can't automate it. The new people who are getting established end up usually finding it is not worth it. My father is a physician in private practice. He rarely takes time off for being sick but it is possible to do either in an emergency or just being very sick. His front desk people could cancel his appo…
The lesson wasn't about this particular set of circumstances. Of course it would be trivial to automate this specific use case. The point is that as a business owner, as the person onto who everything comes down in the end, you sometimes just have to suck it up and do what no salaried person would do. The lesson was: as an employee you can just call somebody and make your sickness their problem (I'm not suggesting that people with cancer can make that somebody else's problem, please no autistic readings of an abstract point). As the boss, the final person responsible, you have nobody to offload things like this to. You just have to find a solution and often that solution is in muscling through the obstacle.
He makes some excellent points—that self-employed or start-up CEOs do have many stakeholders. That said, the second sentence in this statement is false: "First, if you have investors, you are working for them. They are providing the capital for your business and you have a fiduciary responsibility to return their investment with profit." Yes, you have a responsibility to investors to do everything reasonable to give…
There seems to be a persistent myth that for-profit businesses are legally required to maximize profit, which is really not the case. It's perfectly possible for a company to have non-profit-maximizing strategies, especially in the short term. The founder might have some personal ethics regarding how a business ought to be run, or they might want to project a certain brand image, or they might be interested in mainta…
Short of a grossly malfeasant breach of loyalty or bad faith—or declaring dividends when the corporation meets the legal definition of insolvency—there usually aren't many claims for shareholders to bring.