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10 Ways To Be Your Own Boss – musings of a VC in NY

The folks at Behance and Cool Hunting asked me to talk at their 99% Conference a couple months ago. The 99% conference is aimed at creative professionals and is focused on Edison’s "99% perspiration."

And in the spirit of how to get your ideas to happen, they asked me to talk about entrepreneurship and the myriad ways you can "be your own boss." There are way more than 10 ways you can do that, but I only had twenty minutes so I focused on 10 of them. The point being that "You don’t have to be Twitter or Foursquare to be your own boss and do what you’re passionate about."

Here’s the talk

Fred Wilson

Full Video: http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2010/06/10-ways-to-be-your-own-boss.html

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On Fred Wilson’s 10 Ways to Start a Business

Read more: http://timberry.bplans.com/#ixzz0rslF2nIv

Hooray for Fred Wilson, a VC (Union Ventures) with a blog named A VC, for this brilliant 20-minute talk called 10 Ways to Be Your Own Boss, posted on his blog as online video. Fred calmly and carefully blows apart the way-too-common assumption that starting a business is about finding investors. He does this with a simple list of examples, each of which is a happy healthy business, most of which started and grew without outside investment.

He begins this talk with a couple of absolutely great quotes. The first, from a comment on Fred’s blog:

Read more: http://timberry.bplans.com/#ixzz0rsl9kjfK

1. The one-man show. He uses Matt Druge of the Drudge report guy as an example.

2. The two-man show with a partner.

3. The husband and wife team. You already have a partnership. Assuming your marriage works, you already have a partnership that works. Designer and programmer, marketer and programmer. I know this one very well. Palo Alto Software started like that.

4. The small office boutique. Fred says Union Ventures is one of those; six people. Small and happy.

5. A federation of small businesses. He mentions Allen & Co., a New York investment bank. A lot of independents sharing a name and overhead. This works for professional services, like architects, attorneys, consultants.

6. Projects: films, books, recordings … be an entrepreneur going from project to project to project. A good model for people with unique skills, if they can get work whenever they want.

7. A cool website, as a small business, He mentions the hype machine at hypem.com, which started as a one-person website, remains small, but also profitable. It works as a one-person business, with some freelance resources, managed via laptop from places around the world.

8. The small team bootstrapped startup. He shows redstamp.com, virtual cards that can be physical cards. This is a small-group quintessential startup, moving fast, flexible, having fun.

9. The eventually-got-funded startup that started out as a few people working for free. Get it going, get it funded, then make it right.

10. The startup that was spun out from another company. Twitter is an example. It was a piece of a business that got split apart.

Tim Berry

Full Story: http://timberry.bplans.com/2010/06/a-vc-10-ways-to-be-your-own-boss.html

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