[akula]

Keeping in mind that unsolicited advise is the most useless thing in the world (next to evolvingentrepreneur's spam), I would like to reflect on a particular issue important to the business of making businesses.

The buzz word of the month is: syndication (quiet you! put the feed reader away - not that kind of syndication).

Ever since the advent of joint stock corporations, high finance and big business in general, people have found that pooling their capital is a critical factor for making entrepreneurship work.

All of this lingo, of course, would be useless if it wasn't for one important fact. Pooling money together, as a process, has rarely been driven by the prospect of being able to buy something a single investor would not otherwise be able to afford. On the contrary, syndicated (pooled) investments have always been driven by the prospect of sharing risk, rather than maximising returns. Indeed, it's being able to keep the money which is more important than making it. Granted, it is also good news, that since the 1950s there's been plenty of evidence to prove that sharing risk is also very conducive to maximising returns (but that's just a bonus).

Practically, how syndication works, whether it's in the context of multiple shareholders, or financing rounds in venture capital, it has always been better for entrepreneurs to put multiple eggs in multiple baskets rather than betting the ranch on the single roll of the infamous entrepreneurial dice.

To that end, it continues to amaze me how entrepreneurs consistently fail to both solicit and receive business plans from other entrepreneurs, and how entrepreneurs consistently fail to develop internal due diligence guidelines to evaluate and execute business opportunities.

In 2006, I hope the world will move closer to devising a general theory of entrepreneurship and realise the benefits of syndication , its mechanics and in how pooled investment relates to company founders.