Any new venture needs to start with common goals agreed upon by everyone partaking in the venture. These goals go farther than just “making money” or “going IPO”. Having common goals, especially in a partnership, helps make sure decisions are made within the right context. A good book on the subject is The Goal
The first thing we did during our multi-day working session was to have an open discussion about:
Goals – What do we hope to get out of this? What are expected results?
- Immediate cashflow generation?
- Long-term cash flow with low maintenance?
- Validation of business idea and competence?
- Learning and exposure to all business aspects?
- Technology-specific growth?
Commitment – How much time and for how long are we willing to work on this?
- Part-time? 10 hours/week? 20 hours/week?
- Full-time?
- How long?
Investment – How much money are we willing to put at stake?
- $5,000?
- $10,000?
- $20,000?
We first brainstormed all kinds of options for each cateogry and then each voted for our preference and talked out our reasoning. Coincidently, most of the ideas converged after some discussion – just another validation of the right working partner. Through this exercise we were able to start our working session with a common understanding of purpose and a truly open atmosphere.
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on Nov 3rd, 2006 at 5:33 pm
[...] After we launched the open beta of menuism about 4 weeks ago, we’ve been slowly changing gears and putting more thought and time into other aspects of the business. When we started this venture, one of our goals was to make this a “for experience” venture at the very least. As long as we learn, there’s no such thing as failure – we’ll just chalk it up to the MBA of hard knocks. The fun part of learning while you’re doing is that everything is much more interesting than in school when it’s hard to see applicability. [...]