Subject Matters

I was offline during few weeks busy with getting an engagement and participating at an industry event. I also spent some time for studying SugarCRM and Compiere, an open source enterprise applications for SME. I was very impressed of both but on different reasons. SugarCRM excited me by its full demo system available on-line. I had no opportunity to install Compiere, but detailed features and architecture descriptions makes very strong impression to the guy who is at the top of the notch ERP systems consulting. Compiere core was originally designed and written by Jorg Janke who appeared to stay closely to the origins of SAP solution and spent some time with development and localization of Oracle Applications.

Open source enterprise applications waked my old thoughts about own business. Recently I had a meeting with distributor who is too small in terms of staff and revenue but needs really advanced ERP features and proven architecture for a low cost. Sounded like no sense until I recalled Compiere with its Oracle 10g database, Java interface and advanced functionality. Why not? So now I am asking myself question is it wise enough to find some partners and a few young employees (who actually could be same persons) and jumpstart into business with Compiere implementation and customization while continue to work full time with my current employer. Tough question that needs careful investigation and analysis.

Hey you! Yes, you! What do you think about this? Welcome to the Comments section!

Brad Feld quotes Jeff Hawkins from his book “On Intelligence”: “One of the tricks of entrepreneurial success is that you must jump head first into a new field before it is one hundred percent clear you can be successful. Timing is important. If you jump too early, you struggle. If you wait until the uncertainty lifts, it’s too late.”

Paul Graham writes about “Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas”:

This summer, as an experiment, some friends and I are giving seed funding to a bunch of new startups. It’s an experiment because we’re prepared to fund younger founders than most investors would. That’s why we’re doing it during the summer– so even college students can participate.

We know from Google and Yahoo that grad students can start successful startups. And we know from experience that some undergrads are as capable as most grad students. The accepted age for startup founders has been creeping downward. We’re trying to find the lower bound.

The deadline has now passed, and we’re sifting through 227 applications. We expected to divide them into two categories, promising and unpromising. But we quickly saw that we needed a third: promising people with unpromising ideas.

Paul Graham published great essay called How to Start a Startup:

You need three things to create a successful startup: to start with good people, to make something customers actually want, and to spend as little money as possible. Most startups that fail do it because they fail at one of these. A startup that does all three will probably succeed.

And that’s kind of exciting, when you think about it, because all three are doable. Hard, but doable. And since a startup that succeeds ordinarily makes its founders rich, that implies getting rich is doable too. Hard, but doable.

It is full of practical advice of techy person who jumped into internet business. Especially I liked this paragraph:

Ideally you want between two and four founders. It would be hard to start with just one. One person would find the moral weight of starting a company hard to bear. Even Bill Gates, who seems to be able to bear a good deal of moral weight, had to have a co-founder. But you don’t want so many founders that the company starts to look like a group photo. Partly because you don’t need a lot of people at first, but mainly because the more founders you have, the worse disagreements you’ll have. When there are just two or three founders, you know you have to resolve disputes immediately or perish. If there are seven or eight, disagreements can linger and harden into factions. You don’t want mere voting; you need unanimity.

Tom Foremski writes at Silicon Valley Watcher:

There is a new kind of dotcom company that will emerge during Internet 2.0—this current and very distinct emerging phase of the Internet. I’m not sure what to call the new dotcom but I know what it is…

…The first rule of the newrules enterprise is that it is new, brand spanking new.

The second rule is it is staffed by a small group of executives that know the most efficient business processes for what the venture will produce.

The third rule is to stick as much open source/industry platform software and hardware onto the business processes as you can, creating a highly automated highly-efficient business venture with virtually free IT.

The fourth rule is to use as much web services IT as possible.

The fifth rule is you do not use venture capital–you and four others throw your credit cards into a bowl and work free for six-months to create the nucleus of the venture. It’s an atomic ventures world. It’s the $40k startup. When IT, and other infrastructure costs are so cheap and available to everyone then knowledge capital becomes the competitive differentiator—who is on your team.

The sixth rule is don’t put anybody on the payroll unless you absolutely have to.

The seventh rule is the venture does not go public, it stays private. It will have private investors/owners and those investors would be paid in dividends. By staying private newrules enterprises are a blackbox corporation. Competitors cannot peek inside because it is private and thus cannot benchmark their business model against it.

The eighth rule of the newrules enterprise is that there will be a lot of intellectual property that is not patented but is kept secret.

The ninth rule is don’t put anybody on the payroll unless you absolutely have to.

The tenth rule, and the most important, is that the newrules enterprise uses blogging techniques and technologies to market research/help produce and sell products and services that near-perfectly match the needs of their customer communities.