Sunday, 24 February 2008

2005_05_01_archive



Sanity in the Chaos

I'd like to post on the merits of keeping lists. Now I'm not

ordinarily a list keeper and I'm not one of those people who derive

great satisfaction from crossing things off. But in the midst of

startup land where chaos rules due to the sheer number of things that

need to be accomplished and are being worked on daily, lists are

mandatory. We currently have 3 people working full time and 2 people

part time remote. We've been having one team meeting per week and

develop milestones for the next week. While we don't always accomplish

all milestones and some of these milestones shift, even in the

mid-week time frame, it's incredibly helpful to write them down

somewhere (we use Groove) for all to see.

As the Franklin-Covey guys say, "woosh!"

Posted by Tim Wolters at 8:43 AM 0 comments Links to this post

Startup Velocity

I had forgotten how fast you can move in a startup organization. Nix

that. I had forgotten the feeling of how fast you do move in a

startup. My new company, Collective Intellect has only been around for

4 weeks now. The idea is around providing a new set of indicators and

analysis into the financial service industry. This idea has been

brewing for some time but the accelerating force of leaving a paying

job and working on it whole heartedly is incredible. It's like you've

reached some terminal velocity and all of a sudden a magic wand is

waved and drag drops to near zero.

In the space of these four weeks with a very small team we've made

incredible progress.

* incorporated

* opened bank accounts

* spoken with numerous pundits in the financial industry

* validated the idea

* put together "the pitch"

* signed on industry expert advisors

* had several meetings with prospects

* spoken with about half a dozen venture capitalists

* spoken with about two dozen "angels"

* built out an entire subsystem for the product

* midway through a fairly intensive research effort

* mocked up the gui


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