[Kireal]

How do I start up? Can anyone recommend a good guide or book to help clarify whats important? Also its not really a small time site either its going to be big, thing is where do I go for quality design and software developing for the site because its going to be very different. I just need to know some sources of where to go to get started. Any help would be appreciated. Thanks in advance.

[akula]

great questions...

1) "How do I start up? Can anyone recommend a good guide or book to help clarify whats important?"

Unfortunately, with the benefit of hindsight, I can tell you that, there's no one-stop-shop, 5 minute crash course on the subject of entrepreneurship.

The way I learnt it was by doing workshops, enrolling in entrepreneurship subjects, raiding the library, starting my own ventures, failing, working for other entrepreneurs, following entrepreneur blogs, going to industry events, and networking with people.

This multi dimensional approach is how I learn entrepreneurship, because most of the information that you need to know is either confidential, time sensitive or tacit in nature (i.e. you won't find it in books).

If, however, you are looking for a good book on entrepreneurship - having indexed most of material on this subject for my library, I can recommend you David A. Silver, and the old portable MBA in entrepreneurship by William Bygrave. Guy Kawasaki's The Art of the start is also good. Notice an important point: all of these books on entrepreneurship are written by investors and academics. Entrepreneurs them selves, are a vastly inferior source of information on the subject - as far as textbooks go (for a lot of reasons). Disregard books written by entrepreneurs - they are fundumentally flawed and won't get you the results that you're looking for.

Overall: If you’re keen to learn, post your questions and I’ll answer them for you.

for example: Following the standard role based model for entrepreneurship education, I can tell you that having an investment thesis should be at the top of your priorities list. Everything else, for now, is unimportant.

After that, having identified a community who shares your investment thesis, then next thing to do is to collect customer surveys, and pitch the results of these surveys to your community in order to aggregate resources.

After that, there's a whole bunch of other things you gotta do.

Notice, if you don't have an investment thesis, your results will be equal to, or worse than the average results for a founder - in other words, you'll be broke, tired and frustrated.

2) where do I go for quality design and software developing for the site because its going to be very different

There's plenty of designers on this forum who'll take the job. Just post a request and you're done

[Kireal]

akula i really appreciate your response. this isnt my first thought at becoming an entrepreneur, ive had it in my blood (not to say that im an expert, because im far from that, i still have so much learning to do). its just that im wondering how to get this started online. and im more than keen to learn, anything you throw at me i will soak up and appreciate. some other questions i had were:

1. What exactly is an "investment thesis"? Is that like a business plan or..?

2. As far as software for a site goes, is that similiar to webdesign?

[akula]

Originally Posted by Kireal

akula i really appreciate your response. this isnt my first thought at becoming an entrepreneur, ive had it in my blood (not to say that im an expert, because im far from that, i still have so much learning to do). its just that im wondering how to get this started online. and im more than keen to learn, anything you throw at me i will soak up and appreciate. some other questions i had were:

1. What exactly is an "investment thesis"? Is that like a business plan or..?

2. As far as software for a site goes, is that similiar to webdesign?

Ok....let me answer these questions. Rather than just throwing a whole bunch of buzz words at you, the approach I'll use is to put things in context so the answers are meaningful and you know why I advise you the way I do.

1) Investment Thesis No, an investment thesis is not a business plan, because both the documents have diffrent purposes, with an investment thesis serving the more important purpose.

It works like this...

Successful ventures are the product of successful entrepreneurial ecosystems. An ecosystem, is a social network where the first generation of entrepreneurs start a successful company, and reinvest the newly created wealth into a second generation of entrepreneurs associated with the company.

You can see this happening with companies like MSF, Google, Amazon, PayPal, Ebay and many many others, where the founders, early employees, suppliers and many others who benefited from the success of these ventures, go on to start and fund other - often similar - ventures.

The point: When starting a company, you need to tap into an entrepreneurial ecosystem. The way to do it, is to have an investment thesis that matches the investment thesis of other players in the ecosystem. For example, if you want to start a consumer facing, web services company like YouTube, before you start, you will need to find a community of people who agree with you that starting consumer facing web services companies is a good idea.

To make your own investment thesis, you'll need to adopt the investment thesis of other entrepreneurs. Practically, it works like this: find a group of successful entrepreneurs who are starting companies which have something in common. Contact these people and say, "hey guys, I really like the space you're investing your self in. I have some ideas that I'd like to share with you about this space because it's also on my radar".

That's what an investment thesis is: it's a way of thinking that matches the way of thinking of other people in your chosen entrepreneurial ecosystem. Once you have this thesis, you can aggregate resources. For example - because you think alike, you can get a job with these entrepreneurs, earn some startup capital, and use their office space to get your company off the ground.

2) As far as software for a site goes, is that similar to web design? Not really. When people talk about software, they generally mean a content management system, and database programming. If you wanna run a web services start-up, you'll need a killer infrastructure that doesn't crash, get hacked or is littered with bugs.

This is not a topic you should be interested in right now...

[akula]

ok....I can't continue to give you all these random tid bits of information

Do you want me to give you a proper overview of how to start your company using a predictable system for venture commercialisation?

It'll tell you exactly what you you need to do, when, why, and how

[akula]

just an example to show what I mean by entrepreneurial ecosystem

http://venturebeat.com/2006/11/08/yo...alley-society/

there's a lot of these networks out there, and if you wanna start companies, the first thing to do is tap into these things

otherwise, you're not gonna get off the ground

[akula]

example of an investment thesis

take Paul Margolis from Longworth Venture Partners

he is interested in entreprise 2.0 opportunities

http://www.longworthblog.com/2006/11...rprise-20-app/

when starting a company it's important to find people like Paul and other players in the ecosystem (a few are mentioned in the article) to bounce ideas about opportunities relevant to the shared investment thesis

[The Special One]

Get a job in a factory.

[Kireal]

grow up man

[vishenda]

cool Akula, learned a lot, thanks!