Month: June 2007

Traders, Guns, and Money

I’m wrapping up a truly enjoyable read, Traders, Guns, & Money. The book talks about the going abouts in the world of financial derivatives and it’s a fun read. I’ve even managed to actually learn a thing or two about what all the greek symbols in Financial engineering actually mean. In other words, it’s pretty accessible as well.

In light of that book, I chuckled when reading this quote today by Richard Marin, Chief Executive of Bear Stearns Asset Management:

“We have brought in additional resources with expertise in these asset classes to facilitate the orderly deleveraging process,” said he, speaking of an ailing fund with $1.2 billion in debt.

Orderly deleveraging?!? It’s way up there with collateral damage and corporate restructuring as far as rhetoric is concerned, ain’t it?

Startups are hard

I’ve had 2 real experiences with startups, but I’ve written 3 or 4 business plans. All these experiences were failures. Which is totally ok, because you pick yourself up, dust yourself off, and start again. Still, after all these failures I understand why serial entrepreneurs typically succeed more and get funding easier. If you’ve succeeded once, you’ve already proved to an investor that you can handle all the stress and even if you’re just a geek, if you’ve founded a startup and you’ve succeeded, then you probably have way better people skills than 99% of the other geeks out there.

I’m just thinking about that after reading Marc Andreesen’s latest post: The Pmarca Guide to Startups, part 1: Why not to do a startup. Marc has been lucky enough to succeed repeatedly. I haven’t. Nevertheless let me tell you that a lot of the things he mentions ring absolutely true: Startups are a Bitch with a capital ‘B’!

Frankly, although I still very much have the entrepreneurial bug, I don’t know if I’ll ever launch another startup again. It’s brutal, and it’s hard, and it’s painful. The day after we closed the doors on didgets, the startup I helped cofound back in 2000, I found myself in the ER with an anxiety attack. Thanks, but no thanks.

If I were to do it again in the future, I’ll be doing it by myself, organically, in my home office. I would definitely stay within the realm of what I’m familiar with. What inefficiencies have I seen over and over, and how can I facilitate the processes?

Do I regret having given blood, sweat, and tears to my dead startups? No, not really… I’ll take the Pepsi Challenge on a Stanford or Berkeley MBA any day of the week.