mde

I appreciate the call-out of an important omission from the article. I've learned that having a bizdev on the team is truly critical. That whacked me on the side of the head when I started thinking about Twitter's strategizing (http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/01/13/twitter-decides-to-hire...), and thinking about the shaping of various features that customers are not getting a chance to weigh in on. I've tried to wear the bizdev hat myself but it is all-consuming. Now I have a full-time bizdev partner and it's making a world of difference in focus/direction. The XP practice of "on-site customer" is really enabled by having bizdev pull the customers close early on.

Another valuable role I've discovered is that of the incubator (I'm not YC; doing OTBC in PDX). It's another secondary role similar to Lawyer, but can be very supportive in making sure you're focused on doing all the business stuff that hackers can easily lose sight of. I'm presently being shown the value of having a solid business plan, perfecting multi-length elevator pitches, and refining the more formal investor and sales pitches. This is all possible thanks to experienced entrepreneurial coaches who really want to see you succeed.

Lastly, the "consort" is a non-obvious role -- someone who can give validation to your thinking, and exchange predicament stories with you. You may find him through the incubator, or at a hacking event, or wherever. My main consort is an extremely capable hacker and our regular discussions are gold.

So with the core team containing the right hacking, creative, and outreach balance, you can make progress. But I want to stress that the supporting people (Lawyer, Consort, Coach, et al) provide a lot of necessary elements.

Another good idea resource from PG: http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

That serves as a helpful litmus test. Not falling somewhere onto that map doesn't invalidate your idea, but the 30 items cover a lot of ground.

Enjoy this phase! Idea generation can be a lot of fun. Get some books to stimulate. I've gotten a lot of mileage from "A Whack On The Side Of The Head" and "Creativity" (Csikszentmihalyi). Watch some TED talks. Go to your local unconferences and meet people and see what they're working on. Team up on those connections.

Share your ideas as they come. Record everything that comes to mind. Get feedback. Iterate.

Meanwhile, you can be educating yourself on the business side of things: starting a business, people/listening skills, presenting, marketing, etc. You're already here; that's a pretty good start. But books like "The Art Of The Start", "Founders At Work", and the Seth Godin variety are worth their weight in gold.

That's probably a rather common situation for someone getting ready to take the plunge. I'd quit my job right now if I had 50K to get off the ground. You could probably live off that for a whole year, working full time on your idea(s).

I've also got a few ideas, ranging from simple to grandiose. My plan is to start with the simplest (fastest to create, simplest revenue model, smallest potential) as a moonlighting effort. I hope that it can generate enough to keep me alive to buy time to start pursuing the grandiose ideas. YMMV.

I have that down as reason #17 for leaving your corporate job. Seriously, though -- having your prize projects locked inside corporate walls is a huge problem, a real innovation-stifler. After many attempts to get a couple of my old projects open sourced, and then watching them deteriorate to non-use as they were passed on to others, I've all but given up on starting new projects at $JOB. Glad to see Google is still open to letting some things into the wild.

I hope MIT's next innovation will be getting the prototypical engineer's handwriting OCR'd.

That article was kind of tedious to wade through. In general, I'm in the camp of "design patterns are language band-aids". PG seems to be one of the quotables on this topic. I was recently trying to elucidate this in my own thinking, given that the languages I've used over the last few years have kept my GoF on the shelf. Here's the best discussion I'd found on the subject: http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AreDesignPatternsMissingLanguageFeatu...

That's great! Everyone loves this comment since so many of us are banking on it (or have lived it). It just brought to mind my reading of some interviews in "Creativty" (http://www.amazon.com/Creativity-Flow-Psychology-Discovery-I...). There was more than one great mind who attributed his success to having a wonderfully supportive/responsible wife. He apologized for his sexist remark, but admitted that he would never have had his successes if it weren't for his wonderful companion who freed him from so much responsibility. (Sorry for fabricating some of this from the top of my head; I can't locate the interview right now.)

You guys are being kind of tough on his blog. I really only see one ad (though the motion is distracting).

I just spent some time reading through some of his other articles. The guy has some great ideas: freeing mental RAM, read a book a week, putting ideas into action, action days, making goals visible, etc. I just subscribed and am hopeful that his future posts will be as insightful as what I've just been reading.

I'm finally starting to find LinkedIn kind of useful (http://micahelliott.blogspot.com/2008/04/sponteneous-recomme...), when the various features are used holistically, and profiles near completeness.

Some others (facebook) I just sign up and experiment to learn how the user interactions and features play out. In general, I'm not too interested in being a part of their microcosms. But if massive amounts of users like to spend time using them, we should probably understand how and why.

Hmm, does that mean everyone who want to share their email should put it in their "about"? I just did so -- someone correct me if there's a better way to share.

That's a good question. I looked into this recently too, but haven't decided yet whether to go with "Amazon FPS" or "Google Checkout". Search on those terms and you'll get some relevant comparison hits. I'd love to hear about other services, if any look viable. Shared experiences would also be welcome.

It would have been nice to also see the numbers for Bazaar, which seems to be #3 on the list of mainstream DVCSs. I adopted hg for $HOME a few months ago, and it's working great. This was after having used SVN for a few years for the same task. I might have chosen bzr for it's amazing attention to usability, but at the time it had some performance issues with 'log'. Although Git has quite a following, I just couldn't adopt it given its enourmous command set (140+ commands), and manual heuristics for when to repack.