Re: Bye-bye Ada ?

["Marin David Condic" <mcondic.auntie.spam@acm.org>]

Richard Riehle <richard@adaworks.com> wrote in message
news:3E41E35B.8E52C580@adaworks.com...
> Marin David Condic wrote:
>
> Wrong.  The last thing you want is outside money.   Stay away from Venture
> Capitalists.  They will destroy your product, your will, your self-esteem,
> and everything you loved about what you were doing.
>

Had a bad experience with a venture capitalist? :-)

Well, obviously, the Golden Rule applies: "He who has the gold makes the
rules" Once you take someone's money for something, they're going to want to
control what you do with it. (This is especially true of the government - so
it doesn't get better for the DoD contractors.) This may or may not be a bad
thing, depending on what one's objective are. And in the end, businesses
tend to have to go find investors of one form or another, so you're always
going to have that potential.

But consider that one might go build a prototype program for something as a
"Concept Demonstrator" and you show that to potential investors. If they
like the idea, they're not going to give a rip about what language it was
written in nor how you go about building it. They're only interest is going
to be how to get it to market quickly and how to get it to sell well so they
can start making truckloads of money. In this respect they can be helpful to
your average geek who has no experience with those issues.

They may want to take your product or your company down a path you don't
want to go and they'll have the leverage to do that, so if your objective in
life is to sell *this* product and run *this* company, yes, they can ruin
your plans. OTOH, if the thing was at all successful, you'll almost
certainly walk away from it with a big chunk of money in your hands and then
you can go out and get another good idea, fund it yourself and go have fun
running *that* company with *that* product. So a venture capitalist or two
might be a useful thing, depending on one's goals and perspective.




> Software has the benefit of being a low resource product.  One or two
> people can build a product in a short time.   This is one place where some
> of the Agile Development ideas can benefit a couple of people with a
> great idea.   If you have a corporate sponsor who will let you share in
> the harvest, good.  But find a sponsor who has the same vision you have
> of the final product.
>
Software certainly has a plus side for startup ventures. A handful of guys
with PCs can go out and build something with little more than sweat equity.
But that same benefit is also a trouble spot. Software is mostly development
labor rather than manufacturing, so a) those who can afford lots of labor
can build bigger, better products more quickly and b) almost anybody can
play the game so if your great idea starts to sell well, you'll have lots of
competition. (Or as Micro$oft is finding out, some group of geeks who don't
like you very much may just write one and *give* it away in order to spite
you. :-)

As for corporate sponsorship - that gets to be as problematic as venture
capitalists. It would take a pretty stupid corporation to fund the
development of some product on a cost-plus basis and then not demand some
kind of data rights to whatever was ultimately produced. (I do know of one
case where this was done - but that's it - one case. And yes, they were/are
stupid.) Depending on the product, you might find someone to totally pay for
the development (in which case there are probably *very* few other customers
and the original company is going to own you as a subsidiary) or you might
find someone who will partially fund it or supply other resources (domain
knowledge, technical support, equipment, etc.) in exchange for something
from you. If you want to get, you've got to give, eh?


> A good model to emulate is that of the founder's of Quicken products.
Check
> out how they built their company.   Even Bill Gates story includes some
> positive lessons, if one overlooks  the devious methods he sometimes
> employs to get results.
>
Don't know anything about it, but obviously Quicken is a big player in
off-the-shelf accounting software. They must have done *something* right.
However, personally, I would not want to go into the "off-the-shelf" market
because you're going up against established players with lots more money
than you have. Maybe you can beat them, but you'd better have one heck of a
good idea how to make that mousetrap better than they do.

>
> Some of the most successful enterpreneurs I have known were people
> who lacked the formal education to realize that they could not succeed.
> Sometimes, we let our own knowledge get in the way of being what
> we could be.
>
People spend more time shooting themselves in the foot than they do getting
trampled by life. Toss a good idea at most folks and they'll *immediately*
start dreaming up the million and one ways that it absolutely cannot work.
If they spent the same energy thinking up ways to get it to work, they might
discover lots more possibilities and have lots more success. Not that you
don't have to consider what the pitfalls might be - but approaching them
with an attitude of "This is a good idea - how do we shepard it around the
pitfalls?" will get one a lot farther in life. Most of it is mental
attitude.

MDC
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Marin David Condic
I work for: http://www.belcan.com/
My project is: http://www.jast.mil/

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