How to Start a Two-Bit Operation: Small Business Tips

So far, the hardest part of the whole journey was also the big step of deciding to leave the safety and security of HP. HP was my first full-time job out of Berkeley and so it had that feeling of the “first love”. Of course there were ups and downs during my tenure, starting with [...]

They say success in business isn’t always about having the best idea, the best people or even the most money. Sometimes it just takes some good timing, good luck or good fortune. Well, the cookie has never steered me wrong before so I hope it’s right this time too. Here’s what my tasty [...]

There’s a good article on ‘the art of bootstrapping’ a startup on Guy Kawasaki’s blog that hits right on with what we’re trying to do. The basic premise is that when it’s hard to get venture capital funding (for whatever reason) entrepreneurs need to ‘bootstrap’ their venture to get it going. This basically [...]

After we had created our weighted matrix of decision-making criteria, it was time to put it to work. We took all the ideas we had brainstormed and layed them out in adjacent columns. One by one, we assigned a score for each criteria to each idea. One of the most difficult aspects [...]

The next thing we did was brainstorm the criteria we would use to evaluate each venture idea. The purpose of this exercise is to judge the ideas in an objective manner based on the common goals we had previously agreed upon. After agreeing on the general criteria, we decided on a weight for [...]