Category: Startup

…comes the 5-year story of Atomic Bird, makers of Macaroni, Mondomouse and Chimey.

The next day three people bought copies. I was unbelievably amazed. The day after that I sold five. I soon learned that it’s actually possible to make a decent living selling software over the internet for a few bucks a copy.

Tom doesn’t give away how long it took for his sales to get high enough that he could live off them but Gus Mueller (Flying Meat told us previously it takes 3 years to become an independent software developer.

Congratulations to Tom of Atomic Bird!

[Update: But wait, there’s more from Tom with After Launching, Then What?]

Paul Graham comes back to clarify about why startups should move to Silicon Valley but I’m not convinced now as I wasn’t convinced then.

His reasoning is entirely about funding. If you need seed funding so you can dick off work for six months and build the next FaceBayLinkSpace, then you’re more likely to get it in Silicon Valley than Belfast. To be honest, Belfast (and by extension, most of the UK) is about forty years behind Silicon Valley in terms of Venture Capital and Business Angels. Not that you need to move to Silicon Valley to chew through VC money with PR stunts and as Paul says – if you’ve got a commitment for funding and you can stay where you are, take it!

But if you’re happy to grow organically rather than worry about hiring 80 people in the next six months and you intend to bootstrap your way to success, then you can do that anywhere, especially in the software business. Even when you have a physical product, your out-of-the-way location can provide you with some cachet. Anyone want to buy some real Irish dirt? I have scads of it in my back yard. You want it mixed with shamrock seeds? No problem. Just put it in a pot, add water and boom, you’ve got your own little tiny fraction of Ireland. I accept Paypal and credit cards. Oh, and cash.

But yes, the posterboy for moving to Silicon Valley is Facebook. Rather than 10 billion dollars, there’s some daft speculation that it might be worth 100 billion dollars and Zuckerberg is unlikely to play that down. And yes, Boston VCs turned them down while Silicon Valley VCs took the chance. Hard to break it to you, but there’s about a hundred social networking sites and VCs funded a lot of them. Their decisions are half-chance, just like everyone else. Is Facebook bigger than everyone else because they moved to Silicon Valley? I doubt it. Really, I doubt it.

So don’t book your tickets for Silicon Valley. There’s a mass hysteria about it being the only place for success. It’s a load of self-fulfilling bollocks. Success will be because you’ve worked hard, you’ve got a good idea and you execute it well.

The BBC News site has an article on Entrepreneurship and failure.

Almost four in ten would-be entrepreneurs are too scared of failure to do anything about their business idea, a report suggests.

…a third of those who wanted to set up a firm worried about the impact of the venture on their love life.

Other concerns among those who had considered starting a business included the fear of becoming more aggressive (33%), of adding pressure to family life (25%) and of getting less sleep (32%).

I guess the fear of failure has a lot to do with the difference between someone who sits and thinks of ideas and someone who does something about them. That spirit is what sets entrepreneurs apart.

I don’t think any government steps will realistically increase the number of entrepreneurs we have though it would be nice to see more support from the government for the entrepreneurs we have.

I think I get less sleep and find now that around 10 am I get a real whoosh of “Holy Crap I’m tired” but it passes with a coffee and a short walk. I think it does add pressure to family life and affect your love life – especially when things are not going so well.

You know that Monkeysphere post I made? Well, turns out there’s this thing called Dunbar’s Number (Wikipedia link) which basically says humans can only maintain social relationships with about 150 people which is directly related to the size of the neocortex.

It’s interesting to apply that to modern social networking across the internet, via instant messenger services, social sites like Facebook and status-update sites like Twitter and Jaiku.

Usually maintaining these large groups is highly dependent on physical closeness. This is how tribes and villages formed. When this was extended to towns and cities, individuals would relate to their family and neighbourhoods. It was

But communication technology bridges the gap and so we have large groups forming outside of the usual intense environment and economic pressures.

During human society development, language replaced grooming as a way of expending less energy for maintaining the relationships (imagine if you had to groom 150 people) and I guess email/sms/facebook is the logical extension here. We’re expending less physical and emotional energy and more electricity to maintain friend lists of 250+ people.

The links above maintain that 150 is a theoretical maximum for stable community groups but spend time defining smaller groups. Some people work well in groups of 5-6. We can maintain team cohesion with around 12 people. More than this and a group becomes a mob. The dynamics of group cohesion and “working together” are fascinating especially when you apply these to other subjects like how to build a team in a corporate environment, how to maintain a clan in World of Warcraft and how many people to bring to your bachelor party or hen night.

Damien Mulley continues the meme with a thought-provoking post on social objects and how we’re moving to a broadcast medium for our life. It’s not that we’re losing our privacy, we’re throwing it out the door. We already wear our allegiances on our T-shirts, we broadcast our brands to the world, we join groups on social networking sites publicly and without restraint. We actually don’t seem to want privacy…

I’m going to read the news now so expect some vitriol about something-or-other in a while.

“The infrastructure makes it possible for people to work where they want, when they want, how they want,”

– Daniel Pink “Free Agent Nation”

Back in March, Mike Elgan wrote a piece about being a Digital Bedouin. How laptop computers were powerful enough for you to ditch your desktop. How the time was right to start using mobile broadband. And to embrace Skype to enable you to be on the phone from everywhere if need be.

It’s still surprising the number of companies which don’t work this way. For example, outfitting your senior people with Blackberry devices and smartphones is not going to make them extra-productive overnight. It just means you can email them when they’re at the zoo with their kids.

I’m going to be back doing the Bedouin thing in the next couple of months. Keep in touch.

Paul Graham writes on the future of web startups:

If the seed funding business turns out to be international, that could make it hard to start new silicon valleys. If startups are mobile, the best local talent will go to the real Silicon Valley, and all they’ll get at the local one will be the people who didn’t have the energy to move.

Silicon Valley is like Holywood. The cafés are filled with possible-maybe-future CEOs of aspiring web starups. But as Paul Graham says in his essay, competition for the market is going to get hotter and hotter and unlike his assertion that customer desires are infinite, there will aways be winners and losers in this market. Like Holywood, there will be some who become superstars and some who won’t.

His view is a very US-centric view. Why does everything have to be in Silicon Valley? If seed funding is indeed international then why do we have to travel half a world away to avail of it? Why is there this need to have the Silicon Valley hallmark?

He’s right about colleges having to change. This won’t be due to some senior college administrators with a burst of foresight. This will be entirely due to undergrads choosing some courses over others. When they find that there are more people applying for Business-Information-Technology than straight Information Technology or straight Business, then they’ll start to tailor their course offerings to suit. As it is the colleges still have to find out some way to provide courses that are not hamstrung by the need to start in September and end in June. When that happens, welcome to the 21st Century.

Colleges will remain important. But more as meeting places for like-minded students who to want to take the opportunity to learn. Colleges in the UK have a lot more to change to provide a modern learning experience.

I’ve had the opportunity to move to the US a couple of times. Once, sponsored by Nortel, was a chance to move to California to learn the whole Bay Networks product range. Another time was during the time I was setting up my first business. I’ve politely declined both times and my reasons remain the same.

It’s not about the energy, Paul, it’s about knowing what you want. I want to run my businesses in my home country. I only want to live here in Northern Ireland. Faced with the coppery tang of Silicon Valley air compared to the rural views of Ireland? Not a hard decision.

The point about web startups is that you don’t NEED to be in Silicon Valley. You can be there if you want to.

When I was in school, we had sessions with our Careers teacher. She was nice enough but if you had an idea about being specialised in any field then she was out of her depth. I guess she had a book that may have been Dick and Dora’s Guide to Careers. You know – teacher, fireman, policeman, vet, doctor, farmer. I wanted to be a scientist at the time and she entertained me with ideas of maybe being a doctor, or a lab technician in a school. The disparity of those choices was not lost on me at the time.

Not once was enterpreneurship mooted as a career option. It just wasn’t considered in late 80s careers workshops in Northern Irish grammar schools.

Looking back I can see why my careers teacher hadn’t considered it. For one thing, the barrier to entry was huge. There were very few computers and those there were were immensely expensive or really just used for games. I hadn’t studied Computer Science in school and it probably wasn’t a bad thing as the CS lab was very primitive. Outside of computing, there was a primitive service industry but to a sociology teacher who was forced to take the careers classes for surly fourth and fifth formers, it was just too risky.

Another reason was her own experience. She’d had none and probably had never entertained the idea of going it out on her own. Things were a little different for me. Ever since I was about 4 years old, my Dad had run his own business. He owned a record store at one point, a tyre-fitting business at another, a tyre-exhaust-and-other-car-bits-and-bobs business and finally a pub. Did his life give me a taste for running my own business? Possibly though my mother maintains I was always a headstrong and determined child who liked things his own way. (Gee, mum, couldn’t you just abbreviate that to “brat”?) I know when I was in Nortel I planned to stay 5 years and then go out as an independent IT guy but that was much much later.

A lot of these barriers to entry are no longer present. A year ago Rich Segal wrote an article on how to make a corporate butt pucker. He began by refuting the most basic paradigm of the corporate:

Now, son, we have tons invested, the best people, a lock on the market, a pile of customers and we just don’t waste time worrying about somebody that can’t out spend us or have all of our people or systems. As long as we just keep pressing on, we will be fine.

and demonstrated how a web-app could be built in a short amount of time by someone in their bedroom using free, trial or cheap software. His demo is contrived and misses some of the hard parts like what to build and how does it really work but it illustrates the change in thinking. The barriers to entry are shifting. I still don’t know many young entrepreneurs but I do know a lot more young self-employed persons doing contract/servicing work especially in the designer or coder space.

Google is doing a lot of good work in this space with their Summer of Code program. Paul Graham, similarly, with Y-Combinator, is helping younger people get focussed on starting a technology business.