Apprentice Opportunity

Before starting our last company, I spent close to one year working in "start up boot camp" with a very successful entrepreneur on his third start up. The lessons learned were invaluable, and, I am convinced, had a great deal to do with the success of OneMade. Many of the lessons were very practical. Many were brilliant. Most of the lessons were counter-intuitive.

A fellow entrepreneur who I have huge respect for recently announced he was looking for an "apprentice to the CEO." Brilliant idea! Why not enable a person who wants to be an entrepreneur to work "live" with a start up? What better experience can a person have to help them improve the likelihood that they will be successful in the future on their own? I believed it enough to put myself through start up boot camp a number of years ago. So I should have put this into practice years ago. I have also had a number of people ask it they could play this role with me, so I decided it was time to see who might have an interest.

So here is the deal. If you are a person who aspires to be an entrepreneur and start your own business some day, and you want to join a start up now to gain experience, email your resume to me, and tell me more about why you think you should be "the one" to be in this role. These are some of the tasks that an early stage company, just taking down a pretty significant seed capital round, must manage:

• Developing a detailed business plan;
• Developing a detailed execution plan;
• Developing a detailed budgeting plan;
• Performing daily accounting, cash Management, and reporting;
• Developing a human capital strategy and plan;
• Developing a sales and marketing strategy & plan;
• Developing a distribution strategy and plan;
• Communicating with our investors and the venture capital community;
• Preparing for the next capital raising event;

• Plus a bloody lot more......

For someone seriously interested in being an entrepreneur, this is a valuable, and very live, opportunity to roll up your sleeves, get your hands dirty, and prove yourself. You will build direct relationships with venture capital firms as well as a very bright team of people who have all done this before.

Keep the following points in mind before making a decision on your interest:

• You will likely work like you have never worked before;
• Your work will have a direct impact on the success of our business, as well as the members of the team;
• The odds are ALWAYS stacked against us (and you by default) we are treading on the turf of giants who can squash us like a bug at any time;
• In order to succeed, we must first survive. Survival depends on many things, and execution of a plan based upon a strategy that is debated, and ultimately agreed upon, is critical to our chances of survival;
• This is not an internship. This is a long term commitment. We not know how long that is right now. It could be a year. It may be for a few years. Much of that will be up to our success, your long term interest, and the nature of the relationship that evolves with our team;
• We are located in upstate NY, in the Albany Capital District Area. If you do not want to be living in upstate NY, do not waste our time, or yours;
• We will be on the bleeding edge of Web 2.0, as well as participating in how the future of open source software (OSS), and software as a service (SAAS) evolves. Along with this opportunity comes inherent instability as business models are tested, refined, and defined. If you are uncomfortable in this zone, you may not sleep well at night!

if you are interested, e-mail me your resume and tell me why you are the one we should offer this opportunity to. Be creative! As we are on the way to closing on our seed capital in the next 30 days, you should be quite serious about getting involved pretty quickly. My email address is bphelan@gmail.com.

Let the Games Begin!

We signed a letter of intent today to accept our first $1,000,000 of seed capital for Flatburger, our software company. There is quite of bit of interest in the place we are attempting to carve out for ourselves in open source software ("OSS") and software as a service ("SAAS"). Anyone following technology trends understands that these areas represent some of the greatest growth opportunities in technology today as Web 2.0 begins to take shape.

My partner and I have committed a fair bit of capital to our effort to date. We have more than $300,000 committed to date and think it is time to accelerate our efforts.

Let the games begin!

Two Businesses

It has become clear to my partner and I that there are two businesses opportunities we are evolving today. One is a business focused on providing solutions to specific vertical markets to solve the product/price/performance equation. The other business is more horizontal in nature, addressing many of the needs of the open source community that is creating the software we are employing. We have developed a great deal of domain expertise as we work with the OSS, and understand many of its shortcomings. More needs to address...what a beautiful thing.

Addressing these two very distinct sets of needs requires focus. We cannot think that we can solve all of these with one team, as the needs are very different. So we have decided to divide and focus. We are forming two very distinct teams around each set of problems. Flatburger is focused on serving the needs of the open source software community, while ibelongnetworks.com is focused on serving the needs of certain vertical markets. iBelongNetworks will initially focus on the content, community, and collaboration needs of the non government organization ("NGO") space.

The Early Adopters

Critical lesson for any enterpreneur. Avoid temptation. Do not be seduced by your concepts and instincts. Do not start building a dream product based purely on what you think the market may want.

Even the most experienced of us believe we know the right answers. Only customers, with problems to solve, have the right answers. The answer you ARE looking for it whether your solution will solve their problem. Focus on solving problems. Solving problems is much less costly, from a marketing perspective, then selling solutions. You will eventually be selling solutions, but only when the marketplace has convinced you (by paying for it) that the solution you are selling solves a problem that is worthy of being solved.

We are fortunate enough to have found a client with a problem. They are THE leader in social change. Way out on the bleeding edge. They have a profound yet simple mission: to create a place to play within walking distance of every child in America. The power of this mission is staggering. It is the perfect metaphor for social change. Get people involved in a mission that is very simple and univerally understood. Help these people to be successful in accomplishing this very simple mission. Then help these people harness the energy of their success to take on more community involvement.

Their founder is committed and passionate about his mission. Bob and I believe in him. We have found an interesting opportunity. We have found an early adopter client with a problem to solve, and a passionate leader that we believe in. They are reinventing their organization. Their problem is finding ways to turn the internal knowledge they have built as an organization into an externally facing resource that empowers communities and social activists to create change in their own communities. By "externalizing" their knowledge, they have an opportunity to create incredible scale and empower people to help themselves.

We can help them accomplish their mission. The open source software we have begun with is an incredible communication platform for community involvement. We will be making a substantial investment to bring this software to a "best of breed" solution. However, we know that at the point of launch, we will be miles ahead of the marketplace from a cost/features/benefits standpoint while helping our client accomplish their mission.

The open source platform we are beginning with solves many of their inititial problems. It also provides them a way to empower people to employ the knowledge base created by them to amplify social change. We will be building this together. Our client has agreed to commit a certain amount financially to help underwrite the solution. It is a modest amount of the overall cost. More importantly, it is a client who has agreed to build this together so we might create an incredible solution. There is nothing better than having a real customer with real problems that we are working to solve.

Solving Customer Problems with Open Source Code

Important lesson for any start up. We have a very good idea what we are interested in (Open Source Software). While we have a great team to start with, and a team that has worked together for at least 6 years, we have no specific experience in the open source software space.

Our previous business was based upon drafting eBay's business model, and we built a system with incredible speed and massive scale with unique capabilities to serve our customers, the sellers or products.

This space is very different. Our team is used to building a solution from the ground up and having complete control over every aspect of our source code. It takes a while to get our team used to the idea of working with products where we do not have that complete control.

The beauty of the open source space is being able to solve problems for potential customers with a solution that is pretty close to what we might need. The challenge is assessing the quality of the code as well as the amount of investment required to close the gap between the open source solution and the customer need.

There is no question in our minds that open source is a great place to start when addressing client needs. I believe it raises the likelihood that you will be able to solve a client's needs. However, I would not assume the solution would come about at a lower cost. We have found ourselves investing significantly to bring an open source piece of functionality to a "ready for prime time" solution for a client need.

Founding Team

Bob Smith and I are quite fortunate. We have a number of OneMade (the name of our former company) team members who have been interested in joining us for "the next one." Only trouble is, it takes a while to figure out the next one. Last January, some team members started freeing up from their commitments to AOL and began joining us in one way or another. We have been going through the research and experimentation phase since January 2004, but now we know we are settling into a path. So the journey begins. The team members joining us are pretty awesome people!

Strapping Ourselves to the Mast

My partner (Bob Smith) and I have been at this for two years. After we sold our last company, OneMade, Inc. to America Online, we stayed as long as we had to stay, (1 year + 1 day) and then went back into the hunt for the next thing. Next things are illusive. There are plenty of next thing illusions....no problem finding those. The trick is finding those next things that have "legs." Legs, in our book, are also illusive. We are interested in those trends that will lead to a product that people find enough value in that they are willing to pay for.

Payment, in a technology / media world, is equally hard to predict. Other entrepreneurs are comfortable in the really early stages of a technology/media experiment. We applaud them. Bob and I are not one of those people. We wait to see what we think might be sustainable. It is just who we are. We applaud those entrepreneurs who have the foresight...we just try to avoid becoming the roadkill of these visions.

It is actually quite easy to start pursuing the "new thing." As entrepreneurs with a long term conscience, we know we are strapping ourselves to the mast of a ship that will be crashing into plenty of waves. We have done this before, and plenty of people wind up counting on you. This is one of the most important decisions an entrepeneur can make. Before you are fully committed, ask yourself these questions:

1) Are you prepared to invest the next 5 years (at least) of your life to this particular effort?

2) Are you passionate enough about the path you are on...that you are ready to stay on the path...with little or no compensation? Chances are, you will have the opportunity to earn little or no compensation for a long time.

3) Are you passionate enough about the path...that you can inspire others to join you on a long (not just the short) term journey? Remember that the people you convince to join you will become your extended family. Do you believe in what you are doing strongly enough that you would try to convince a family member to join you? While this might not be a good idea, I am sure you get the point.

4) Are you passionate enough about the path...that you are ready to place the compensation needs of your team members, the foot soldiers in your mission, before you, at all times?

5) Are you ready to measure success by the success of your team members?

6) Are you afraid of failure? Have you thought through the specific ways you can fail in your effort? Have you visualized what it will be like to close up your start up business and let your early believer team members know that they should start pursuing something else? If you start thinking through the dark side of this whole business of starting something up, you just might just develop an even thicker skin necessary to survive.

7) Have you developed a survival plan to react to the ways you might fail? Try to avoid getting yourself painted into a corner.

There is certainly more to this than what we have said here...but it is a good place to start.