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Congratulations for reading this far. Most people won’t, because there is nothing less flashy than the idea of writing things down. But I’m going to tell you why documentation is the major difference between a large successful business and a small struggling one.

In my telephone answering service, Centratel, we handle emergency after-hours calls for nearly a thousand accounts across the United States: doctors, veterinarians, HVAC companies, funeral homes, hi-tech companies, etc. The answering service business is a private 9-1-1 operation, and can be a breeding ground for chaos. For 15 years, I endured 100-hour workweeks, failing health and minimal income before I got a clue that my business problems had nothing to do with inherent challenges within the industry, my lack of a college business degree, a shortage of “good” employees, or finding proper financing.

It was literally a midnight awakening that made me a believer in documentation. This change of perspective saved my business and maybe even my life. In the process of discovering this new vantage point, I was super-energized by the realization that 99 percent of my competitors don’t do the work of thorough documentation. Why? Very simple: It’s too hard. That’s it! It’s just too hard! Of course, that is good news for me because I overcame that “too hard” hurdle and did what I had to do. Now, I work two hours a week and make more in a month than I used to make in a year. (Tim Ferriss, eat your heart out!)

So if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t walk away from a problem, doesn’t finger-point, and is not afraid of hard work, read on for my 10 reasons why documentation will set your founder’s mind free: Continue »

You’re overwhelmingly busy. You’re probably frantic. You’re doing the deal. Vetting new hires. Finishing the “patch” to get out the release. Landing the funding. But you can’t do everything. In fact, you can’t even do two things at once.

Take a moment, each morning, to list your top three priorities. At the end of each day, check that you’ve addressed your #1 task to very best of your abilities. Next, that you’ve meted out the remainder of your time according to your ranked priorities (more time on #2, than on #3, etc.). If you only get to #1, but you address this task as well as you can, it will be enough. But if you’ve expended your energy in other ways, chances are you’ve wasted time — and this is the one thing you cannot get back.

Lost wealth may be replaced by industry, lost knowledge by study, lost health by temperance or medicine, but lost time is gone forever.

Samuel Smiles

So spend it well founders.

“If you want to make good use of your time, you’ve got to know what’s most important and then give it all you’ve got.”

Lee Iacocca

“It’s not enough to be busy, so are the ants. The question is, what are we busy about?”

Henry David Thoreau

“The key is in not spending time, but in investing it.”

Stephen R. Covey

For more on how to invest your time well, take 10 minutes to reread Chris Michel’s terrific F|R essay called Outcomes vs. Activity. Chris was the founder of Military.com, and more recently, of <a href=” Affinity Labs “>Affinity Labs. Both were both bought by Monster.com. Continue »

Editor’s Note: with the recent launch of GigaOm’s, Ostatic, which promotes Open Source by matching users to the right OS tools and resources, we offer this essay on the virtues and vices of OS dogma, by Found|READ contributor Chris Lyman. Chris is founder and CEO of VoIP startup, Fonality, which uses OS. A list of Chris’ earlier F|R pieces is below. Also check out his blog, the Janitor/CEO.

This Open Source world for me has been a mixed bath. I have always felt that making money and ethics were not mutually exclusive. In my early 20s I had the “Microsoft is bad and Bill Gates must die” mentality. But, my Orwellian rant faded over time and I began to have a more balanced perspective on the world, and the technology which fuels it. Perhaps this is the pragmatism which piggybacks aging. Perhaps this is a byproduct of having to pay rent. Either way, I slowly came to see a world where proprietary and 100% free software had their place. I found solace in betwixt – the world of “Open Source”.

Most people don’t actually know the roots of “Open Source”. This term was consciously crafted in a hotel room in the 90s by a huddled council of six wise men. They removed the term “free” — an intentional “fork” from the absolute free path of the Free Software Foundation (FSF) — not to make it less free, but rather, to bake in some of the fundamental tenants of capitalism, and to steer clear of the moral bent of the FSF. Call them pragmatic, call them sell-outs. They foresaw a model that could both defend the free and allow for profit. Continue »

Whatever you do today, please read Om’s current post, Relax, Chill and maybe Blog, responding to the New York Times on the Web’s 24/7 culture. Om addresses the detriments of drinking too much coffee, spending too much time in front of your computer screen, or on an airplane, and generally — never “hitting the beach.” Did you know: “if you don’t sleep your heart works longer hours and has to pump more blood and is under stress.” Om knows this now.

He writes:

Those were my issues, and I think those are some of the issues of folks who are bloggers, start-up founders, journalists, corporate lawyers, cab drivers, Wall Street analysts, and presidential candidates. Now those are issues many people in Silicon Valley deal with on a day-in-day-out basis but refuse to acknowledge. Do yourself a favor: get yourself checked out by a doctor.

And take time to hit the beach. I just bought two cups of coffee — both for me, because I’m writing today. Now I’m going to pour one of them out, and go for a walk.

This week’s short list of stories, posts and other founder-resources you shouldn’t miss.

1.) From VC John Doerr, check out this slide outlining the difference between mercenaries and missionaries of entrepreneurship.

Missionaries are good (passion). Mercenaries are not (paranoia). The slide is from a presentation Doerr gave at Stanford on April 2, 2002 (!). We got it courtesy of our friends at VentureHacks, who do a great job of finding needles in haystacks.

Also watch the video of Doerr’s talk:

2.) Valuation: Bad economy? Yeah. Selling opportunity? Maybe. Check out Inc. magazine’s flagship company valuation guide, The Most Valuable Companies in America : “Investors are loaded with cash. Boomers are looking to buy. Foreign firms are eager to invest. What does that add up to? A seller’s market for your business.” It describes the main buyers (serial entrepreneurs is one to pay attention to!) and has slides on cheap vs. expensive shops. We note that besides software, the hottest businesses are “anything aimed at the aging U.S. population.” (F|R has written about this previously.)

3) Understanding Venture Capital. It’s a hard nut to crack. But this paper form Havard Working Knowledge attempts to decode the often seemingly arbitrary valuations of vc-backed startups by “explor[ing] mechanisms for limiting the asymmetric information that potentially plagues the acquisition of young venture capital-backed companies.” As you seek funding for your own company, this ought to help you understand how startups are VC-funded and why; how they’re bought and sold, and why. One of our key takeaways: it is strictly because the notion of value is relative/subjective that relationships are so important in this business; for deals to work well it is critical that perceptions of value between two parties are compatible, which usually (but not always) means interests must be aligned. Hence Harvard’s emphasis on the “bridge-building alternative [because] the personal relationship between the two firms is critical to conveying value-relevant information about both the target and the acquiring firm.” Just ask Jerry Yang at Yahoo!.

Editor’s Note: Matt Rogers, the founder of Aroxo, is a regular contributor to Found|READ, and a very thoughtful guy. I often visit his blog, Digging my own ditch , to see what he’s up to — he let’s us publish — and today I ran across this: How search engine spam created Web 2.0 and drove the social revolution. In it, Matt ponders how small, even sometimes seemingly arbitrary decisions, can have great impacts on your business. He relates this notion to the selection of “two little words” (marketing), all the way through the evolution of Google’s search results presentation method (architecture). It’s worth reading, not just to remind you that small things count, but also this: that probably one of the greatest sources of your stress — the “law of unintended consequences” — affects every founder, and that this is a good thing, because it is sometimes responsible for truly epic, if surprising, innovations (Web2.0).

A friend of mine mentioned something to me recently. He commented that a site he works with recently changed the text on their registration button from “Register here” to “Register for free” and, as a result, registrations shot up.

That really blew me away.

Clearly pretty small decisions can have an enormous and disproportionate impact.

This got me thinking and something else occurred to me, namely how a similarly small decision caused by search engine spam created the Web 2.0 phenomenon. Continue »

I don’t think of myself as a serial entrepreneur since the terminology is most commonly used to describe someone who has had multiple successes (which I haven’t). But I also cannot pretend to be a first-timer — without having to explain the tread marks on my forehead.

So I am a hybrid. As such, I do have a few lessons that I can share which I have been writing up as a book, entitled “Survival Guide for Bootstrapping Entrepreneurs”. I have finished five of the planned ten chapters and I have posted them online on my blog, StartupForLess.org.

10. Why Startups Fail and Why Gigamon Should’ve Too

9. How to Turn Your VC into Your Worst Enemy

8. What I Learned From My Dad Who Taught Me How To Ride A Bicycle

7. Make Money Then Make Meaning

6. Team Building versus Bread Making

Given that Tuesday was the deadline for applying YCombinator summer funding, I imagine right now there must be at least a few hundred aspiring entrepreneurs (founders and cofounders) waiting to jump in with both feet. At the risk of being presumptuous, I’ve distilled my lessons-learned into the following three points and offer them to the contestants of the YC contest with my best wishes.

Remember: There are no losers in entrepreneurship except those who stop trying.