Comment What is a "software shop" ? (Score 1) 176
Sounds like thats a consultancy company.
I've only ever founded product companies.
Here's how we did it.
- Socialize, find other people around you that have complementary skills and who also are interested in doing their own company (our first company had an general business person, a PhD and an engineer)
- brainstorm, find gap in the market, find new product idea.
- make big decision to quit current job
- form company to hold IP and who owns what - this requires an initial set of capital - $20k. No IP - then what is your value ?
- Develop prototype. I (engineer) started working on prototype full time (using my savings to pay expenses), business person started building product contacts/approaching customers...
- As prototype develops consider external funding (VC) (until now we were self funded, CEO funded lawyers, I funded my own time - compensated in additional stock). Additional part-time developers were brought for stock. There should be people you know (and trust) - they will be the seed of the engineering organization. We had 2-3 - more and I would spend too much time managing.
- Once we had funding, bring on existing developers full time, start looking for additional engineers.
- Release initial product (4months after funding - 15 months after initial line of code written)
Key take away - a start-up is hard, you need to work with people you trust. If you're an engineer by inclination, stay in engineering, your start-up is not the time to be experimenting with new roles, you'll have enough to do just making sure your piece works since you're in charge... Remember that you're responsible for others giving up their secure jobs and committing to work for your idea, treat them with respect and share the wealth unequally but fairly (yes, unequally you've taken additional risk, they haven't).
Second followed a similar route
The actual tools are just details, you should be spending all your time working out how do we make this successful - not should we force highly motivated developers to use EMACS...or vi or
Its not important unless your product is EMACS....