Biz Principles

Bob Wyman has spoken about the rumor originally posted on TechCrunch. He describes their issue as a problem with a minority of PubSub's shareholders which points to their problem: one man, one vote. So the moral of this story is to stick with the policy of one share, one vote.

So that I remember, I'm pulling the Wunderman Consumers Communications Bill Of Rights:

1. Tell me clearly who you are, and why you are contacting me.
2. Tell me clearly what you are, or are not, going to do with the information I give you.
3. Don't pretend that you know me personally. You don't know me; you know some things about me.
4. Don't assume that we have a relationship.
5. Don't assume that I want to have a relationship with you.

I was just emailed a link to some photos that I took the other night with someone else's camera. They were posted onto Snapfish, a service of HP. All I wanted was the raw images that I took, so I went looking for them. The best quality image, ie: the raw image, was under Snapfish's "Get Hi-res photo" link. The subsequent page told me that I would have to pay for the hi-res image. That's the equivalent of asking a friend that has loaned you his car to pay to get it back, which is basically theft.

And that brings us tonight's business principle: Do not charge the customer for what he has provided.

Business models built on the opposite of that princple are unfriendly. They will most likely cause first time customers from using your service again and telling their friends how greedy the service is.

I just checked Paul Graham's site and noticed he has a couple of announcements for some speaking engagements. The first is called "Hiring is Obsolete". His thesis for the talk is "...I foresee an alternative path for the most ambitious: instead of going to work for Microsoft, start a startup and make Microsoft buy it to get you." The second talk called "How To Sell a Startup" is about just that—how to sell a startup. Both are obviously within Paul's knowledge, but I have to ask: What if you want to start a Microsoft?

Obviously you can't sell your startup to Microsoft, or any other Dopefish corporation, to become a Microsoft. So how would you make a startup into a Microsoft? By hiring people to take over your initial product so you can move onto the next product.

That means hiring, and not selling out.

So the "become a dopefish" game is completely backwards from the "get ate by a dopefish" game. Instead of looking for the highest bidder to sell your company to, you should be looking for those smart people with bad startup ideas, or know better than to listen to Paul Graham on every aspect of life. They're the ones who'll take over all aspects of the business so you can branch out and grow, hopefully like a patch of kudzu.

So I'll call this:

Biz Principle #2: Hire! Don't sell out.

Peter Saint-Andre made a post mentioning how the Erie Canal was built with government money and subsequently resulted in more wealth being created. This is causing him to question some of his "anarcho-capatilist" assumptions. A realization is missing in his post though, and I'll call this my business principle number one:

Biz Principle #1: If you're embarking on a huge project, you take whatever money you can get to finance the project.

Basically what that says is that if you want to say send a man to the moon, you get your funds from any person or entity that has pockets deep enough to see it through to completion. Your goal is the realization of the project, not some idealistic stance about where your money is coming from so long as you have it with as few strings attached as possible.

I sent PSA a little message after I read the post. I mentioned that he should watch HBO's Deadwood and watch a semi-fictional town organize. The episode that was on today, "Requiem for a Gleet", had a quote that some how seems completely appropriate to this post:

If money had to be clean before it was recirculated we'd still be living in caves.