Evan Williams Ten Rules for Startups came to me yesterday. Wisdom!
- Be Narrow
- Be Different
- Be Casual
- Be Picky
- Be User-Centric
- Be Self-Centered
- Be Greedy
- Be Tiny
- Be Agile
- Be Balanced
- (bonus!): Be Wary
By Evan’s scale, iotum is doing pretty well. We’re not about casual content creation, so we fail on number 3. We score well on all the others. I’d add one more too:
12. Be Parsimonious (ok, cheap!). Cash is king. We buy office equipment and furniture from bankruptcy sales. We buy from EBay for most other stuff. We ran our company with a single Vonage line for 18 months. We drive to meetings (when possible) rather than fly. Better yet, we use Live Meeting, rather than have the meeting. We make extensive use of hotwire.com to book hotels. We became travel agents ourselves in order to get the agent discount when booking travel. There are a million ways to save money, and every one helps.
We took a seed investment in June 2004, and stretched it to June 2005 when the original budget had it running out in February 2005. That’s how cheap we are.
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry make Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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