Michael Staton & Web Start-ups
Last night, a few friends and I had dinner with Michael Staton, a founder of Inigral. Michael has been in Abilene this week visiting ACU. ACU will be piloting Inigral’s Schools on Facebook. In our conversation, an interesting topic was brought up about the make up of a successful start-up. In my past, so far mostly unsuccessful, I have learned a few guidelines that I will follow on my next venture. Here are the first two: 1) All co-founders must have some sort of programming ability 2) All co-founders must be personally interested in the utility the project will bring; the opposite of being interested because it is a good idea, because it could make a lot of money or because it could lead into bigger and better things, etc. etc.
To me, having all co-founders with the ability to crank out some code is a very valuable asset, especially for the early stages of a start-up. The ability to work on the idea intensely and get out something as quickly as possible is very important for a web start-up. The web moves fast and more likely than not someone has either implemented or working on your idea in some capacity. Getting early feedback from potential users is also helpful and smart to seek out. To investors, a prototype with some alpha users could never be a bad thing. Michael only half way agreed with my first guideline, and rightly so. He explained that there will always be things that, as a developer, I will not want to mess with: payroll, accounting, HR, and the list goes on. These things will always be there, but in my mind it seems reasonable to believe that I can find a business-minded person, a great HR-minded person and a great you-name-it who happened to take the time to pick up some coding skills. Michael stressed to the other two at the table (non-developers) at how picking up a language would be the smartest thing they could do right now. He told them to find the right book on the desired language and lock yourself in a room until you get through it. Hopefully the guys at the table were listening. The business developer with coding skills will most likely never get to the level of the behind-the-scenes code monkey, in terms of software development, but having at least a knowledge of how things work will help in many places in business development. When a potential partner approaches my bus. dev. guy who has a sense of how development works, he/she can sift through the buzz words and bull crap he/she might hear. When we need to hire a new developer, my code-experienced HR person can handle the entire interview him/herself with minimal interruptions to the hard-core developers. The ability to throw some working code on the page goes a long ways.
Secondly, all co-founders need to have a genuine interest and users of the final product or application. I think this quality in a start-up team helps significantly with follow-through and the hard times. The reasons a group wants to start a company is one of the first things I like to know about when talking to start-ups. I think is an important indicator to speak to their future success. When someone tells me making a ton of money is their primary goal with their start-up, it is an instant red flag to me. Money is a big influence on most people in most situations, but it will only get you so far. For those of you that have made that website, under-priced with scope-creep off the page, for an acquaintance that you thought would be easy and some nice cash on the side, you know what I mean when the “how much I’m making” wears off. On the other hand if I were working on a cause I believed in, plus getting paid (in cash or equity), my personal feelings towards the project are easily positive and I want to see the project through to the end even more. Michael Staton has a passion, he wants to solve big higher education problems by being creative with the social web. He has been working hard at Inigral for several months now and has just recently found out how they will do exactly that; solve higher education problems. Had Michael thought co-founding Inigral would be simply a way to make a name and a fortune, I have a feeling he would have been done a long time ago. Now don’t get me wrong, I hope making a name for himself and a fortune along the way are by-products of Michael’s efforts, but let it be known he has a much higher chance of being successful at Inigral in the long term because he has genuine interest in the cause he is working for.