What’s the difference between founders and professional managers? While they differ in many ways from experience to risk tolerance, etc, you can boil them all down to one element – opportunity cost.
According to Wikipedia, opportunity cost is “the cost of any activity measured in terms of the value of the next best alternative forgone (that is not chosen)“. As a founder, you probably have no opportunity cost. It’s not that your time is not valuable. It’s not that you couldn’t get a job. But if you are truly on a path to building something of value, then it’s a personal mission and you would not dream of doing something else.
This morning I gave a talk to the Founderfuel teams on how to get investor ready and more importantly – how to get funded. Demo day is May 23rd, so everyone is gearing up for fundraising.
Here are the slides:
Startup life often boils down to a few key moments. From incorporation to first hires, securing investments, key partnerships and hopefully a big pay day down the road. What all these moments have in common is that they involve lawyers.
I have worked with some great lawyers over the years but I have never once enjoyed paying a legal bill, even reasonable ones. Since legal bills are unavoidable here are some tips for hacking them down to size:
What do Acquisio, Freshbooks, Hootsuite and Shopify all have in common? Well, for one, they are all kick ass, high growth Canadian startups. For another, they all started out as web agencies. i.e. service companies.
Each has a different story for how they transitioned from services to product. But each one had the benefit and luxury of starting from an existing, profitable business and taking the time that was needed to develop and validate their vision.
