> I wonder, is the days of doing a startup in your garage with a couple of > unemployed friends all gone?
Unfortunately yes. Unless your friend got some other way to get some money while your new venture gets some money from investors - then you'll be in trouble.. We have a very interesting situation today: Investors have money (well, whats left from it after they didn't learn that, contrary to some shit head analysts, there is no "new economy") and they are looking to invest money, but they are affraid, very very affraid, and they're so much affraid that they miss quite a lot of potential opportunities to make some money in the middle/long-term range. > With an investment of, say, 100,000 shekels, you can rent an appartment > for a year, buy a few crappy computers and even employ someone with minimum > wages (say, a secretary, to make the place appear to be a respectable > business). The "partners" in such a company would only get paid when some > business comes in - and hopefully enough business would come in to give the > partners minimum wages after a few months (if it doesn't, it's time close > the company) and maybe even hire employees. > I know that a new office in Herzelia and 50 highly-paid employees with > company cars sound better, but only if you have someone throwing millions > at you, and at this point it isn't very easy... Ahha, but you do forget it's Israel here, where payments are "shotef + 60" minimum and most companies won't talk to you if it's not "shotef + 90" as a way of payment, and even then - you'll get the checks later, so your employees need, again - to either open their saving or do a part time job for you. As for a place - you don't really need one. You can rent "secretary service" where a girl will answer with your company name, and you can hire a meeting room. That way you can signal to your investors that you're serious about tight budget ;) > I remember, about 8 years ago, when I was invited for some business meeting > with one of the first Internet companies in Israel, called "Macom" if I > remember correctly (they were perhaps the first commercial company in > Israel to do sites for other companies; they went belly-up a few years > later, if I remember correctly). They were a bunch of young guys operating > from a shoddy rented appartment in a residential area of Jerusalem. I came > there with a bus (they didn't offer to send a cab to get me), and the CEO > of the company cleaned a glass from the dirty sink and offered to make me a > drink (no coffee-making machine, no business meeting in the downstaires > arcafe). They expected their business to survive and grow (it didn't > unfortunately), not to make $10,000,000 in the first year and be valued at > $1 billion after the second. > I wonder if it's impossible to do the same thing nowadays. Well, I remember being interviewed by couple of companies when the dot shit bubble was happening. I was talking to some other interviewers who were waiting as me to get into the interview and we chatted a bit. I was shocked to find the sallery that they request (NIS 35K!) to work as a Linux developer while they didn't know even what is GCC! and you know what? they were hired and those companies paid those prices! There are 2 good example of the dot com area - allow me to show you: * bad example: eazel. They didn't know anything about making money, they had a shitty managment and when I talked to them about revenue, they told me that their 3rd generation Nautilus will make revenues (by no less then ads! - someone did forget that nautilus was/is open source) - so they burned 15 million dollars on a ... bad file manager. * good examples: TheKompany, and CodeWeavers: both companies didn't get any investments money and went the old way. Both companies still alive, thekompany has lots of products and CodeWeavers which started to see some money when they started selling CrossOver office. So, back to your question: if you want to create a company - then I would suggest for you to seek clients first, and then, after you've negotiated some draft deals, then start the companies. I'm sure you can find some people once you got some assured way to generate revenues for salleries.. Hetz > > Allons enfant de la Patrie > Le jour de gloire est arrive! ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
