wireless startup & investment money

Here's an interesting comment I heard at a recent wireless roundtable sponsored by the Alliance of Angels: if you're creating a wireless application and you're off to raise capital, Dan Shapiro of Ontela observed that, in order to work with carriers, you should seek VC financing.

The days of independent developers getting their products to market on the backs of carriers seem to be behind us. Dan Wright of mporia agreed, noting that it took them about a year and a half to get a carrier involved.

On the other hand, if you are not planning to work with a carrier - that is if you plan to go "off-deck" and deliver directly to the end-user - then you may be able to forge ahead with angel financing.

observations from serial entrepreneur

Okay, I'm a bad blogger. I kept a journal when I was backpacking in Africa - same thing. I just trailed off...not that nothing happened - I just never seem to make the time to blog. There just aren't enough hours in a day to do a startup - doubling the team size only doubled the workload. Resolution: blog regularly. Fortunately, I can wait until New Year's to put the resolution in action :)

Anyway, some good thoughts about human resources from serial entrepreneur, Michael O'Donnell, the founder of iCopyright and many others. He calls it the 1:3 Rule. Basically, you can divide your employees into thirds. A third of them are the stars and performers; they do two-thirds of the work. Another third are coasters - they do their share of the work: a third and no more. The last third are the slackers. They contribute nothing.

Startups can't afford the slackers or even too many coasters like big companies can.

So far, nothing really profound. Now here's the point that I thought was interesting.

Mike noted that stars tend to slide down at least to slacker levels if not worse. To counter this he posts an ad on Craigslist for the star's position every six months. The result? The star rises back to star quality!

The verdict is still out for me as to whether this is something I would adopt but it is definitely something to keep in mind.