Synopsis "Successful Silicon Startups: Business for Porcupines (in English)"
What would it be like to own your own company? You can, you know. You just start one yourself. This is a readable book on how to do it. Most books on startup businesses read as if they were written by a technical writer who had not quite mastered ordinary English and who had lots and lots of numbers in his head. This book, you can actually read, and it will enable you to make your dreams a reality. It covers everything: how to start the business, how to finance it, how to run it, how to motivate and supervise employees, and how to bring it to the IPO. Excerpt from the chapter "50 Ways to Leave Your Lover: Quitting Your Previous Job Ethically" Most professionals are of the opinion that you should leave your previous high-tech employment prior to writing a Business Plan or doing anything else that will advance your new company. The temptation is to work for one company while you start another in your spare time. This temptation is based on the fact that you probably like to eat. People have done it. People have also gotten sued, and lost their companies, when the previous employer sees the new high-tech start up, does a little calculation as to how long it would take to get it to that particular stage of development in the company, and decides that your old company resources were improperly used to advance the interests of the new start up. If you have just started up, and you already have a prototype product, it is not brain surgery to conclude that you were working on the prototype while you were previously employed. For this reason, from the beginning, make sure that you don't use you work computer to advance your startup-not the design, not the mailing list, not the emails. When you go, they'll go through your hard drive, resurrect the emails you thought were erased-or get them from their server-and document the company time and company resources, including the computer, you used. Don't use the company phone, either, because in some of these phone systems, the source of incoming and the destination of outgoing calls are logged, so they can see how much time you spent talking on company time to the people who become your new startup partners. Buy your own computer; don't be cheap and just use the laptop they give you at work. Get your own internet account and your own email account, and don't allow anyone to send you personal stuff or emails related to the new startup at your email address at work. Litigation is part of the Business Plan of a lot of companies right now. Lawyers try to trip up and ruin competitors. Since I am a lawyer, I think that that is a wonderful thing, but you may not agree when you find that a lot of your company's resources, and perhaps a lot of your resources personally are being sucked up by a lawsuit. You want to leave your previous employer on good terms. This means you have to stay clean. Do not take anything from the previous employer. Don't take your notes, discs, or anything else. Do not use any of the previous employer's resources. Excerpt from the chapter: The Business Plan, Part 1: Dream Big, Then Make It Real "Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men's blood."--Daniel Hudson Burnham ...If your Business Plan has these three things, your chances of getting VC funding will be very much greater than most of the other people trying to get them to cough up the necessary. But you have to do more than that: you have to dream big, and show that the dream can become real. People emotionally want to get involved in something big, something great, something nobody else is doing, because people want to be important, and they want to be a part of important things.
