Wednesday, May 15, 2002

David McCusker wrote on Oct 21, 2000: I post this only to get you folks stewing over this, so we can iteratively work on refinements and further considerations. We need to work out plans like this if we want to form more small companies, instead of all of us working for a handful of big and powerful industrial complexes. Here's a capsule description of how to get rich. This will probably work, but there's a part involved that will make you nervous, because you won't want to do it. The part you won't like is trusting someone else. You need to trust someone else, and trust them a lot. And they need to trust you in return. To get rich you need a handful of allies. For example, if around five or six of us here aimed to form a company, and we really backed each other up, then we'd be talking serious money. However, the part about really backing each other up is the hard part. You'd have to trust the other members of the group, even when outsiders are trying to turn one against the others. And this is what will happen. Divide and conquer is how the wolves get things done. If you don't divide, then you get rich. This isn't a joke. I'm quite serious. It's quite difficult to get rich by yourself, and rather hard to avoid getting rich if you work with other competent folks who won't hang you out to dry when things get confusing when the sharks come in close to see who will break with the pack. This is in the same general family of game theory problems as the prisoner's dilemma, but it differs in ways I don't care to describe. Here's how this works. If you put enough folks together with some spread in abilities, they can do some things that one person can't do easily at all. And if the group size is small enough, interpersonal coordination and division of labor works reasonably well. If the group shows promise of being able to do something interesting, then folks with money will back what looks like a good bet. But the negotiations with these folks can be killer. You must hold on tight and refuse to break down services into divisible pieces that can be bought and sold separately. You need to keep it together as a lump in all or nothing form. Because if you make it possible for anyone in the group to be peeled off, then you've all become weaker. That's basically it. Anyway, this is my recipe for a business model that I expect will make you rich. You're welcome to borrow it. Please do, because if you do, it will only make the rest of us stronger who form similar groups. Because even better than one tightly knit group is several with some loose federation of support. Now break up into small groups and start working out how you want to do this. Please take your time, since there's no hurry and you want to align yourselves carefully. You can slowly work yourself into this kind of arrangement by starting some distributed cooperation over some kind of project, which can be undertaken in non profit terms while you work someplace else. That way you won't violate your agreement with employers not to have other employment. After a while you know who you trust, and you have a better idea what kind of new enterprise you might like to start. But be very careful you have not created any intellectual prorperty necessary to new things that belongs to past employers. 4:35:18 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

Benjamin Franklin. "Drive thy business or it will drive thee." [Motivational Quotes of the Day] [Steve Pilgrim's Radio Weblog] 2:10:49 PM    trackback []     Articulate []

ActiveInfo needs to implement this bit of advice from Scott Johnson's Fuzzyblog. Not Leveraging the Company Tag Line in EVERYONE'S Email Signature Every company has (or should) some kind of corporate tag line that in 10 words or less expresses what the company does.  Examples are: Search Tools for Blogging Software for Enterprise Information Access I've always been amazed that companies don't simply require that every employee have this as part of their email signature.  Think about it for a second.  If you have 100 people in your company, each sending 5 outbound messages per day that's 5*100*5 (days per week) or 2,500 times you can expose people to that message per week.  As I said in another essay, marketing is all about persistence.  What this does is reinforce your message over and over and over.  I'll be the first one to comment that people don't always notice it but if they do then it helps and it's marketing that costs absolutely nothing.  How can you not take advantage of free marketing?  Also, never forget that emails get forwarded from person to person to person.  The person who ultimately gets any email that your company sends may never have seen your tag line before and lead to new business. NOTE: If you haven't seem my posting on why you MUST HAVE sales@company.com then read it. 10:21:48 AM    trackback []     Articulate []