Welcome to Techguy’s Cambrian House and Entrepreneurship Blog

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.

During my regular online reading I found a really interesting blog post by Jesse Rasch. Essentially Jesse talks about his alternative approach to startup investing. Here’s his summation:

Put most succinctly, my early stage investing activity is a hybrid of angel investing and venture capital. Maybe that makes me a Venture Angel, or an Angel Capitalist. In the final analysis, the label is not important. There are easier ways to engineer financial returns in the capital markets - for me, angel investing is equal parts passion and business. We see ourselves as a true partner to entrepreneurs. We actively help to build an entrepreneur’s business by leveraging our knowledge, experience, and network to create a successful company.

This is his list of differences (excuse the caps, I was too lazy to change them):

FLEXIBLE INVESTMENT PARAMETERS

A GUT FEELING

FIRST ROUND FOCUS

SIGNIFICANT BOOTSTRAPPING EXPERTISE

AN ENTREPRENEURIAL PERSPECTIVE

COLLABORATIVE FUNDRAISING

WE ARE NOT VC TASKMASTERS

A PARTNER YOU CAN COUNT ON

SELFISH PERSONAL INTEREST

THE BEST OF BOTH WORLDS

You really need to read the rest of the details. It’s a fundamentally different approach to investing in a startup. I would love to have him working and investing in one of my ideas like Jumble Lunch. Did you hear that Jesse?

Since I’m currently working in the health care industry, I’m pretty involved with the health care blogosphere including my EMR and HIPAA blog. In my participation, I didn’t really think I’d run across something that would pertain to entrepreneurship. Well, I was wrong. I recently found a very interesting article about finding the time to start a business. Of course it’s focused on a doctor’s office, but I think that many of the principles apply to starting any business.

One part I especially liked was the list of time you’ll need to start a business.

Thinking time - this is the time devoted to brainstorming, mindmapping, schmoozing with colleagues and friends to test out vague ideas, doodling, doing Internet or offline research, and daydreaming. You are setting out to answer the question of “What?”

Planning time - this time is spent mapping out business and product/service production processes, setting up systems, figuring out what to delegate, filling in spreadsheets, consulting a CPA or business attorney, designing and producing prototypes, pricing products or services, writing business plans, creating marketing plans, and having someone design logos and websites. This time you are answering “How?”

Doing time - no need to explain this one! During this time, you might be filing forms for your business name, approving a website design, purchasing supplies, organizing and setting up workspace, hiring staff, setting up your accounting systems, operationalizing your business and marketing plans, and actually delivering the goods.

Looking at that list makes me feel like I’m running out of time.

One of my best finds recently is a blog by the founder of Feedburner called Ask the Wizard. It’s a great blog because it focuses on teaching entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs good skills. I really love hearing successful people talk about their success and things they’ve learned that have made them successful. You can expect me to comment about this blog quite a bit in the future.

Isn’t blogging and the internet great? A simple college student in Las Vegas is able to “sit at the feet” of successful entrepreneurs and learn from their mistakes. None of this would have been possible even 15 years ago. The internet has provided massive amounts of information from experts all over the world. The real key will be filtering through the mass of information.

Yesterday a well done article on crowdsourcing hit the Digg front page. Since this blog deals a lot with crowdsourcing I was obviously interested. However, I became even more interested when the lead company in the article was Cambrian House.

The article classified crowdsourcing into 3 categories:
1. creation (like Wikipedia);
2. prediction (like Yahoo! Buzz); and
3. organization (like Google).

Cambrian House was stuck in the creation section. I think that is completely true and fits Cambrian House completely. However, Cambrian House isn’t just about creation. They have dipped their toes in both of the other sections too. Idea Warz is definitely about prediction. Idea Explorer fits into the organization category.

Regardless I think it can easily said that Cambrian House is all about crowdsourcing. It’s part of everything that they want to do and want to become. Will that change and evolve? I don’t know. However, there was some interesting discussion on the Cambrian House forum about companies that started as one thing and became something else over time.

There are a couple venture capital blogs that I really like. I thought I’d share them with you all.

The first venture capital blog is by a Florida Venture Capitalist named Dan Rua. I found him through one of the companies he’s invested in PayPerPost. I’ve blogged about why I wish I was Dan Rua before. I will forgive him for being a Florida Gators fan since his blog is a good read.

I recently found a blog that looks like it must have been one of the first venture capitalist blogs. I’m sure this blog is not news to most of you in the market since it has over 50,000 subscribers to its RSS feed. That’s a lot of people reading a blog. I wouldn’t want to argue with 50,000 blog readers.

I’ve always been really impressed with the various products that 37signals has put out. I first came across 37signals product called tada lists, which is essentially a really simple, fast and shareable to do lists. 37signals has really made an extra effort on making their applications simple but useful.

Recently a number of sources have suggested that I read 37signals book Getting Real. The best part is that Getting Real is freely available online. I wish that all books would do this same thing.