Today we had the pleasure of listening to Jeff Goodwin in Entrepreneurship class. Jeff has worked for Boeing, IBM, CISCO, as well as bootstrapped a successful start-up company that was sold to CISCO. He has his bachelors in Business from WSU, but has worked mostly with assembly level coding for IP in the Device drivers/VPN/Firewall realm (including about 3 million other lines of intellectual property). Though not the most prominent or memorable public speaker of the bunch this quarter, he did spout a few incredibly insightful gems during his talk. I'll list them and then elaborate:
1. You can start a business on your own with $5000 (he's done it twice)
2. You must not get too emotionally attached to your company.
3. The reward of purchasing smaller companies is the culture that they have created. Rarely can a large corporation execute these types of ventures in-house.
4. The closer you get to the customer, and the more you can understand their experience/problems, the more value your business will have.
The first point was simply an eye opener, as very few of our guest speakers have really elaborated on how much it actually costs to build a start-up software company. This is helpful, as it really is easy to come up with that kind of initial investment.
The second point was just a very valid point, and we have heard it time and time again during the course of this quarter. You can build a business for the long-haul, but if you want to really make money, you must have an exit strategy. That means that you can't get too emotionally invested, but you must also maintain a balance between that and being very committed and intellectually invested. This seems like a very hard thing to do, as everything that I have ever been a part of are things that I get very emotionally invested in. I could potentially see it being very hard to let go of a company that I built from the ground up.
The third point was something that I had heard before, but Jeff iterated it in a way that I hadn't really heard before. It's interesting to me that large companies can't logically or logistically create an environment where a small-business environment exists to create something that is innovative like Jeff's company did. Once a company has become a "corporation" they can supposedly no longer create that kind of product, and it is much more cost effective and good for the corporation's culture to simply "eat" a start-up that is doing something well.
Lastly, a point that was made glaringly clear in my TCSS 360 class, that you must get very close to the customer and really understand what the "hurt" is in their day to day. This is something that I will hopefully take with me into any software development that I do. Whether it be something that I am putting spare time into, or for my future job, I now know that I must always focus on the customers' needs. This was not something that I was really aware of prior to attending the university. I always assumed that programming was based on ideas spawned in the minds of the programmers and that it was typically an "ah-ha" moment that created most of the programs out there. Yet it really is the user that is key. They are the ones that matter, because even if you do have a great idea for a program, if no one wants to use it, then it really is almost worthless.
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