Welcome to Techguy’s Cambrian House and Entrepreneurship Blog

I’ve been a bit overwhelmed lately with all the various things I have going on. I think I need to cut out some of my projects, but I’m not exactly sure what. Plus, today is my last day of classes until Fall and so I think that should give me a little more time to work on other things. Although, we’ll see what my wife thinks about that. Either way, I’m glad to not have to think about classes for a while longer.

In better news, things are really going well for my Marketing Mob idea. It’s got a bit of momentum and I think that it could really develop into something pretty powerful. I’ve always thought a mob of marketers could do a lot of good and spread the wealth amongst them. Right now I’m recruiting marketers to join the marketing mob and trying to work through the details of how to manage the various marketing resources and projects. The hardest part is definitely making sure that people with marketing resources get paid properly and that whatever revenue is generated is distributed fairly. It’s a major challenge, but new things usually are challenging. If we can get it right, then we’ll be in a blue ocean where we can revolutionize a company’s ability to market their product.

I hope all you bloggers, marketers, advertisers, public relations people will all check out the Marketing Mob and see how you can make money with the rest of us.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about people that overwork the simplest thing. You know the type of person I’m talking about. They are adept at taking a question that requires a simple list of pros and cons and makes a 10 page report on the subject and everything revolving around the subject. If you don’t know someone like this, then count yourself blessed. Unfortunately, I know far too many. Not that I have a problem with these people personally. Also, they are usually very thorough. I mean VERY thorough. Although please don’t get me started on those people that are like this and still don’t even get to the answer. That’s just so ridiculous that I try not to think about those people.

My real problem with people who overwork a question is that they think because they’ve worked so hard they deserve more credit and praise for their work. I’m sorry, but if you just spent 2 days doing a 1 hour project, then you should be fired and not praised. Unfortunately, most people that overwork a project don’t realize that they spent way too much time spinning their wheels. All they see is the long hours, hard work and time spent on that project. They don’t see that they could have come up with the same result in an hours work. Therefore, they feel unappreciated when their extra effort isn’t awarded and praised. I’m sorry, but there’s just something wrong with this picture.

If you have ever worked on a project and complained to yourself that you shouldn’t have spent that much time on a project. Then, you are probably not who I’m talking about. I’m talking about people who create a mountain out of a mole hill. The funny part is that if they read this post, they still wouldn’t get it. They’d be too busy creating a 5 page report on why this post doesn’t apply to them.

It looks like Cambrian House is really turning some heads lately at the Web 2.0 conference. They really do have a compelling story that just got even more compelling with their community owned initiative. Now, just by participating in Cambrian House you are able to own a piece of Cambrian House. A pretty neat concept that I’m sure I’ll talk more about in the future.

Turns out that a number of media sources are excited about Cambrian House too. Cambrian House has been nominated for The Next Web Award in the social category with the likes of Plaxo, XING, meebo, Twitter, Cyworld, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hyves, Friendster, Windows Live Spaces, ebuddy, Dogster and LinkedIn. Pretty nice company if I do say so myself. Here’s the direct link If you want to just go and vote for Cambrian House.

I’m excited to hear what else has happened at Web 2.0 in regards to Cambrian House. They have a cool tiki hut for their booth. That would certainly turn some eyebrows. However, if they don’t tell a good story then people will just be there for the drinks.

I found out today that Robin Hood Fund just received an Official Honoree in the Activism category of the Webby Awards. I think it’s great that the website is getting awards. I of course think it’s a great site not just because I had a wish granted for a trip to Hawaii, but also because it’s a terribly fun and viral concept. It’s going to be a lot of fun to see what happens with the website next. It’s definitely got a thriving community that grows organically. I’m glad to be apart of the site.

I’ve been wondering how popular an entrepreneurship blog could become. Seriously, how many people are there out there that are interested in entrepreneurship? I’m trying to think of the top blogs and I think that most of them are about technology, politics and religion. At least that’s my take on it. Sure, the technology one often hits on some business topics and in particular new technology startups, but that’s not so much entrepreneurship.

I look at one of my favorite blogs, TechCrunch and I think about how well it is doing. It talks about business and usually about startup companies. However, it’s not really about entrepreneurship. There is usually a deep seeded business component, but anybody that just loves to see new technology could be interested in TechCrunch.

Don’t worry, I’m not really discouraged. I find entrepreneurship fascinating and I love pontificating about it and anything else I want to talk about. I’m just trying to give myself a reasonable goal of how many visitors I should get to this blog. Right now, it’s not nearly enough.

Maybe tonight I’ll start by switching up my theme. This has been the default for a bunch of my sites and done very well for me. However, it doesn’t really match the target audience for this blog. We’ll see what we can find.

There are a ton of great entrepreneurship videos out there. The real question is how to find the various entrepreneurship videos out there. Well, Magnify Networks is trying to solve that problem and many other similar video aggregation problems.

Well, it turns out someone beat me to it. There is a channel on magnify that is for videos about entrepreneurship. One channel has 509 videos so far. I think an aggregation service like this is going to be very powerful. We’ll see how well they can execute it. The real question will be how well they can deliver the aggregated videos.

I recently had an email land in my inbox that was so insightful I had to ask the author if I could publish it on this blog. I guess you could call him a guest blogger. This was written by Ray, or most of us really know him as Doymarn. I first got to know Doymarn in the first idea warz tournament. He has an idea called Virtual Business Units that left its mark on idea warz tournaments. I’m just glad he lost in the semis and I never had to meet him head to head. However, from that experience I found a deep respect for Ray. When you read the following post, I think you’ll see why.

I have no dissension on the new design goal of CH… it’s a great idea but the execution is not so impressive.

I personally think that the initial emphasis on development and implementation should have taken place rather at the business facilitation end of the spectrum rather than the technical end… this is where there is a greater need of service facilitation and one where there is a lack cohesive tools and services elsewhere to use, other than the expensive use of auditing and legal bodies… unless there is and I just don’t know about them?

The seamless plug-in of a project into a clearly defined business model capsule where regulatory setups, logos, trade mark registrations, relationship agreements and all the administration tasks are handled ,will then allow the business to fly as soon as the project is ready for market.

I am not suggesting for one minute that we shouldn’t have source code depositories and project management tools but they are available in various shapes and forms outside of CH to use in the meantime.

If I look at what is needed to start a business and generally the skills that developers (and others) lack in general then that is without a doubt business administration, accounting, legal and marketing.

These tasks are very important for the success of a business but most of them are boring tedious tasks that do not attract the majority of people… In fact, they generally act as a deterrent to go into business for many people.

CH in my view should have spent time designing and implementing a business service that handles all the administration and accounting needs for a project including the regulatory, tax and legal stuff that so far little attention seems to have been given to. These tasks would be much more cost effective on a co-op basis and these tasks centrally administered would not hinder the startup and product development which could take place in parallel, as said already, using outside industry tools readily available.

Co-operative marketing is the other main area that I think should be given more attention, we all know it’s expensive and unpredictable but a co-operative platform should be given more thought as to how to pool resources so that each new project can use it as springboard and the cost savings here could be substantial.

Once these areas are well covered, then I think the attention should revert back to the definitive technology platform for the projects to be developed on in-house.

I love how Ray throws a completely different perspective on the direction of a business. I love the idea of a set of business services. I’ve often wondered if and when I should start up an LLC or corporation for my ideas. Is it considered a sole proprietorship or does it fall under Cambrian House? I think it’s a really interesting question that hasn’t really been answered. Unfortunately, I’m afraid that a group of programmers won’t be able to accomplish this.

The second part of Ray’s proposal is a co-operative marketing. I’ve been harping on this idea for a while. What an incredible value add Cambrian House could offer its projects! Any idea in their system could instantly have access to a group of crowd owned marketing resources. I’ve called it the Cambrian House marketing mob.

Thinking back to the various business plans I’ve written, the largest costs are business overhead, labor and marketing. Cambrian House is moving in the right direction to link up various labor resources. Like Ray, I agree that they could do a lot more to facilitate business and marketing resources.

I’ve decided to start making a series of posts about the popular 18 Mistakes that Kill Startups. My plan is to take the list and talk about how this list applies to crowdsourcing and in particular a few the ideas I’m developing using the Cambrian House platform.

Here’s Mistake #1

1. Single Founder

Have you ever noticed how few successful startups were founded by just one person? Even companies you think of as having one founder, like Oracle, usually turn out to have more. It seems unlikely this is a coincidence.

What’s wrong with having one founder? To start with, it’s a vote of no confidence. It probably means the founder couldn’t talk any of his friends into starting the company with him. That’s pretty alarming, because his friends are the ones who know him best.

But even if the founder’s friends were all wrong and the company is a good bet, he’s still at a disadvantage. Starting a startup is too hard for one person. Even if you could do all the work yourself, you need colleagues to brainstorm with, to talk you out of stupid decisions, and to cheer you up when things go wrong.

The last one might be the most important. The low points in a startup are so low that few could bear them alone. When you have multiple founders, esprit de corps binds them together in a way that seems to violate conservation laws. Each thinks “I can’t let my friends down.” This is one of the most powerful forces in human nature, and it’s missing when there’s just one founder.

This mistake really hit home for me. I have this really great idea. I won $20,000 in startup money for the idea. I guess to me that says that someone else thinks it’s a good idea. However, I still haven’t found the right person to help me build this idea. I guess you could say that I have Single Founder syndrome. I don’t want to be a single founder of an idea. I want to have someone else to share the burden and success of building a great business. I’ll keep looking for the right person.

The cool part about submitting ideas to Cambrian House is that you instantly have a crowd of people that are ready to comment and possibly participate as a “founder” of an idea. If you want to get some honest feedback on an idea, then all you need to do is submit it to Cambrian House. People pretty much will tell you exactly what they think of your idea. The power of a crowd looking at your idea is pretty powerful. The Cambrian House crowd pretty much knows if that idea has been done before or not. They are pretty savvy with their feedback on revenue models and ability to execute. It’s a really great place to throw out ideas and get feedback from the crowd.

However, the best part of Cambrian House is that by submitting your ideas, you might just find a future founder of your idea. I know. I’m currently working out a deal with a member of Cambrian House to develop one of my ideas. I’ll let you know more details when it happens.

Most importantly, Cambrian House completely changes the startup model. It has the potential for a company to say it has 100 founders. Talk about game changing.