How to Be Startup CEO

That said, Ryan presents one possible model in this post, for how to structure and sequence things. I'm believe there are very probably other equally acceptable models, and maybe even some that are better (depending on the circumstances).

In our own case at Fogbeam, we are much further along on the "build your product" dimension, but haven't assembled an advisory board (although we do have advisors and people that we'll probably invite to join our advisory board eventually. So I guess what I really mean is that we don't have a formal advisory board) nor have we done anything about "find a place to work" unless you count "work from our respective homes and the occasional visit to Starbucks, Barnes & Noble, or Panera Bread". Certainly we don't feel the need to rent office space or anything yet.

OTOH, I can't endorse the bit about "keeping expenses to a minimum" enough. I know I keep quoting this, but I am heavily inspired by pg's "How Not To Die" essay[2] and believe in the idea of keeping expenses down to where you have a runway that is - essentially - infinite. Of course, the runway may be infinite but the "window of opportunity" may not be, and you have to be making forward progress somehow. But if you can find a way to move forward without spending much money, I say go that route.

FWIW, to illustrate with an example, here's how much we spend at Fogbeam:

salary: $0 - both co-founders are working for equity only (we both work day jobs to pay the bills)

development costs: $0 - both co-founders are developers, so we write code ourselves

rent: $0 - see above. We work from our homes and/or public locations, or the local hackerspace, etc.

Github: ~$50.00 / month, IIRC. We have a low-end paid Github account for our few private repos (most of our repos are public though, since we're an Open Source company!)

Hosting: ~120.00 / month. We maintain a couple of VPS's at Rackspace for miscellaneous services. We host our website, a SugarCRM instance, Bugzilla, a Mediawiki instance, FUCIT - our "competitive intelligence" tool - and one or two other things.

Hoovers: $89.00 / month - We had been using Hoovers for free through NCLive, but I just signed us up for a paid account so we can use some features we couldn't get from the free version.

LinkedIn: ?? I don't remember, but I maintain the low-end paid LI account. Let's call it $50.00 / month, I don't think it's much more than that, if any.

So basically, it costs us $300 / month right now, plus infrequent expenses like copying and printing, domain name renewal, and renewing our company registration with the Secretary of State. And I can keep paying $300.00 / month out of pocket essentially indefinitely, as long as I have a dayjob.

Now starting this summer, as we get more aggressive about trying to land our first few paying customers, costs will go up some. I just paid about $150.00 for a list of contacts from Hoovers (above and beyond the monthly subscription) and on-site meetings with customers will entail some travel expenses. But that's exactly why we're focusing on customers in North Carolina to start, so that we don't incur large travel costs jet-setting around the world. Realistically, we aren't trying to do business with companies in Abu Dhabi, or South Africa, or England, or probably anywhere outside the continental USA. And we're really more interested in sticking to NC, and maybe VA, SC, TN, GA, etc. for the short-term future. Again, keep costs and overhead low, until we can demonstrate some traction, then we can start looking at what happens next (do we try to raise venture money, etc.)

[1]: http://www.amazon.com/Zero-One-Million-Built-Company/dp/0071...

[2]: http://www.paulgraham.com/die.html

This kind of struck a chord with me. I've grown up in a relatively "unprivileged" (lower-middle class) family, and I think one of the main ideas I'm struggling to grasp as I build my business is that if I work hard to provide something people want, then I'm entitled to wealth in return.

Having lived a life where all I know is that everyone in my family has nearly always had financial difficulties, almost as if we're all undeserving of wealth for some unknown reason, it's hard for me to get into a mindset where I'm able to ask clients/customers for large amounts of money, amounts that might not even put a dent in most people's wallets.

I'm actually just realizing now that if I want to succeed, I'm going to have to break through this mental barrier.

Good old days...

I only can keep in mind movie "Other People's Money".

> The entrepreneur of post-industrial America, playing God with other people's money. The robber barons of old at least left something tangible in their wake- a coal mine, a railroad, banks. This man leaves nothing. He creates nothing. He builds nothing. He runs nothing. And in his wake lies nothing but a blizzard of paper to cover the pain. Oh, if he said, "I know how to run your business better than you," that would be something worth talking about. But he's not saying that.

Fundamentally I think there isn't much value in laying out every detail of running a company from zero to scale, since initially all that matters is doing as few things as possible and not even thinking about what kind of org chart or employee handbook you'll need later. A huge document like this kind of deters people at best, or at worst convinces them to worry about the wrong things at the wrong time.

I don't really feel like going through every single point, but e.g. the advice to do non-standard vesting is bad (4/1 is standard, and even if you think 6/3mo is better, it is worse by virtue of being non-standard), and the "advisory thing" is really not something you need at all. There's a lot of focus in the early part on stuff which is non-productive. (I stopped reading before the later stage).

A lot of advice needs to be highly specific to time and place. Someone starting a business in a place where most potential hires are familiar with startups is entirely different from doing so elsewhere.

This is listed under how to avoid funding, but it's really just borrowing from other founders, without the promise to repay.

Assuming I make $80/year as a developer, a few co-founders like me are covering the $250k mentioned.