Five Reasons to Startup

Ladies and Gents,

Good Morning! It’s the 13th of December, 2008 — the sun’s out, and its turning out to be a beautiful winter morning. It just makes you feel inspired. Hopefully, inspired enough to chuck the job before the job chucks you out. There is no better time to be thinking about starting up your own business. Here’s why:

1. The economy is going to force you to come up with a business that makes money from day one. That’s fantastic. Suddenly, only businesses that create real value and charge real money are the only ones that are going to see the light of day. I can’t tell you how satisfying it is to work in a mileu where you aren’t surrounded by people who are threatening to change the world with a product or service that’s available for free.

2. Suddenly, execution is going to matter more than the idea. Wait, execution always matters more. But, somehow, this statement just isn’t as truthy when you have VC’s throwing money at you just so you wake up in the morning and get to work before noon.

3. People, great people, out there waiting to be hired. All you need to do is show them a business model that generates a steady stream of revenue. And the best bit, they won’t charge the premium they commanded three months ago. ‘Coz the premium just went crash, boom, bang along with the rest of the economy.

4. The opportunity to be an Ambani, Rockefeller, or dash (put your favorite mogul/business tycoon in there). Almost every great business has its roots in bad times NOT times of plenty. Because real businessmen (and women) take real risks.

5. Great businesses take time to build, start now, survive the next eighteen months, and when the economy swings up again, you’ll be ready. You’ll have learnt important lessons, and made important mistakes. You’ll have the skills needed to take on the lily livered set who’ll decide to chuck their jobs when the going’s good to start a business that makes no money, and promises to change the world.

I’m at Startup Saturday today in New Delhi, talking about how to hire people, keep them happy, and never ever have an HR department, because they’re a complete waste of money.

UPDATE: This is turning out to be a fairly popular post, so I’ve made it a sticky post on top of the blog, and got rid of ‘today’s saturday’ from the title. After all, today’s Monday If you’re interested in checking out the slide deck, head over to the Speaking page. More comprehensive post coming up.

Recovered from the site’s WordPress archive, where it was published on 2008-12-12.