Comments on: Paul Graham Strikes Again

By: Michael Meiser

Michael Meiser — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:50:08 +0000

Just as long as you don’t starve to death.

By: Michael Meiser

Michael Meiser — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 20:48:43 +0000

I say it’s all about leverage… leveraging your professional carreer into your startup… Like blogging…we blog for various reasons like visibility, credibility… connection to peers… to elevate the conversation… abstract ideas.. but just because we don’t necissarily produce direct revenue doesn’t mean that it can’t have one of the best ROI’s of anything you might invest on.

So too with startups… there can be huge benifits… it just depends on aligning your goals and thinking about residual benifits… Hell the whole open source community functions on the residuals… it’s a huge economy before monetization even takes place… I call it “the economy beyond money”.

As for VC funding… I strongly agree that even at the level of several millions of dollars the most important thing a startup gets is the advice and expertise of an expert startup developer, the VC and their various resources. We put far to much emphsis on money in the early stages and not enough value on social capital… We need to a new system for accounting that’s beyond money… Anyone got one?

Peace, Mike

By: wac

wac — Tue, 22 Nov 2005 01:51:11 +0000

What Mr. Graham may be pointing out here is there are a lot of venture capitalists centered in the cities mentioned. That isn’t necessarily the case elsewhere, and many (dare I say most?) small tech companies need some seed money to get off the ground. It likely has more to do with the availability of cash, rather than the tech skills of the people there.

Of course, I didn’t RTFA so I may be putting words in his mouth.

By: adam

adam — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 23:05:33 +0000

Tricky thing, this startup biz. Best to keep the day job, I think. Bootstrap it during downtime. Depends of course on your timeframe.
Email me dude. Let’s chat.