Any advice on starting a IT solutions company within the Financial industry?

[kirschel]

Little background info:

There our two of us starting this project although we are very early on.

Myself I am an FXTrader, working for barclays capital.

Whilst my friend is fresh out of university with a networking degree.

We are based over in England, and have 250 thousand pounds in cash.

Now we are looking to provide IT solutions within the financial market either in london or newyork.

What we are looking to do is stay away from CFD's and spreadbetting platforms, that is a very liquidated market here. We're looking for maybe more management systems, or even producing a brokerage that provides a service involving networking.

Sorry for the staggered english its v.late here. BTW I have some big fx and commodity lines that would hopefully follow me.

If anyone has any suggestions or wants to be involved and think they could be valuable please reply!

Thanks

Sebastien.

[akula]

welcome sebastien,
my name is daniel and i have a bit of experience with IT startups
from my experience it seems that you guys haven't yet decided on what opportunity to go after, or how to execute on your vision

these two things are not a trivial matter. in general, entrepreneurship is very hard. more importantly, it's a very inefficient way to make money. to use a stock market analogy, what you're considering doing is to leverage your self into one unlisted, illiquid security (your company), when you have the alternative to invest your 250k into a liquid portfolio of listed securities with similar exposure, such as a whole bunch of call options on tech stocks etc.

in other words, for someone in finance, you will appreciate the folly of betting the ranch on just one investment, particularly when you don't know the risk profile of this investment (i.e. the variance in future valuation), the expected upside (valuation at exit), the cost of holding this investment (i.e. to keep the investment you'll have to actively manage the company, at a cost to your current salary), or how long you're gonna be holding it for (which can be long enough to zero out any projected upside from exiting your investment).

so why do you want to leave your comfy job and get your self into this irrational mess? most of the entrepreneurs i know do their thing because they can't get jobs like yours, and if they could, most startup guys would not be doing what they're doing, unless they were being irrational (not that there's anything wrong with that)