When I was in college, we were required to take a business class (Business 101) that mandated a finished business plan as part of the project.
It had to be long, in-depth, and include everything you mentioned.
I was incredibly surprised when I entered the tech and startup workforce that these were generally absent.
I had misunderstood the class and instructor and thought that you couldn't even start a business without one.
Then, when I started raising money for my own venture, I thought for sure a complete business plan was a prerequisite.
Nope. A few graphs, preferably hockey-shaped, and a good story were all that was necessary.
My venture failed, of course. But if I were to do it again, I would do myself the favor of having a complete plan. It would definitely save a lot of headaches and guessing in the moment.
There is some great irony that you can have a flashy app with good user growth, and get a chunk of cash from a vc firm. But if you want to get a loan from a Bank to open a restaurant you best have a business plan.
Thank you for your post. Very informative. Why is it too early for AI? It’s clearly an emergent cultural evolutionary byproduct that’s been many years in the making and quite mature. Perhaps your own bias is limiting you to imagine what AI is truly capable of?
I wrote the book in markdown, stuck it in a SQLite DB and wrote a parser to put all the data in static JSON so it loads very fast.
I also created a new personal homepage to update my presence on the web as a published author and experienced leader and technologist:
https://davidbyrondrake.com
Book was released less than a month ago—growing it organically like a startup has been fascinating in terms of marketing, sharing, building, and measuring success.
Have been utilizing my acting skills again with readings from the book on my Instagram and TikTok.
Defending focus is way harder than adding features.
When you're building, adding yet another feature can sometimes shave off all the edges that made you successful in the first place.
Same with messaging. The more you try to sound universal, the less anyone hears you.
Strong opinions that are honestly held and communicated are such great signs of respect. It's refreshing to see: "This is who we are. If it's not for you, that's okay."
This is a well-done library that’s fun to work with. I put together a proof of concept org chart generator[0] with it a while back when working on another project. Very easy to use and well-documented.
Betty White holds such a highly regarded “Hollywood Star” place for me. It was fascinating to see her brought to life through her very ordinary belongings. Fun read.
Perhaps there were spares in case anyone lost theirs? I don't know enough about the military to say whether that's likely, but as sensible chaps it seems a reasonable assumption.
Nice to see the library brought back in some kind of way for tech companies.
15 years ago, most tech companies had a library of sorts because it was required. Sure, there were manuals online, but they didn't offer the depth available in books at the time.
Stack Overflow either didn't exist or was in its infancy, so your options were to either find an O'Reilly book on the subject[0], hop in a Freenode channel on IRC and talk to folks who were in the weeds (or even the maintainers themselves), or you had to use mailing lists.
[0] - okay, not all of the books were O'Reilly but a huge number of them around that time period were
I think you're off by about 5 years but otherwise correct. :)
I remember our startup didn't have a library, but we had one dude who had an entire shelf of O'Reilly books that the company bought for him, so it was sort of our defacto library. When he got laid off, it was like vultures circling a kill to get his books into the IT pen so we would have them.
When I got laid off the company let me take some of them home, and that is what started my home collection of O'Reilly books, and that was in 2001. By 2009 we didn't really use books anymore -- it was all on the internet.
It was a life-changing machine.
Ordered, I believe, from the depths of a Computer Shopper magazine.
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