I'm not sure where you saw this on the site? I wasn't even aware of the acronym ESRI prior to your post, so I don't have a good answer If you can link me to it I'll try to get to the bottom of it... but in the meantime...

As a local company we have done a lot of work in the geo space but most of it was sort of ad-hoc. We always tried to go with the simpliest solution that could work and that often meant hacking something together using a simplier method (indices on lat / lng columns with a query to do haversine distance, etc).

Over time as our technology evolved we eventually got to the point where we had re-implemented a lot of existing GIS technologies (e.g. we started out on MySQL and eventually moved to Postgres but not before essentially implementing some of the PostGIS extensions ourselves). Most of the time there was no point in switching so we stuck with our home grown stuff unless there was a compelling reason to switch.

Of course we also tried to rely on existing software (e.g. Maxmind's geolocation stuff) whenever possible to avoid having to write our own or source our own data, etc.

Ok, so I can forget about assuring or guaranteeing. Also, lets toss out the notion that I have some moral right to this idea since I came up with it. If its a profitable idea, I expect people to clone it and if they do a better job my business will suffer.

Lets talk about practicality.

Since I have the idea, I can use that to my advantage to be the one with the head start. Let's say I get a very preliminary design of the product. Beyond that I need partners. I would think I need a person with technical expertise, and someone with experience in the field growing a business.

Now, what are some ways I can curb my risk? How can I be smart about the way I go about finding partners, so as to minimize the chance of someone taking my idea BEFORE I even launched my idea?

One thing I come up with off the top of my head is only discuss with people with good reputations. I can ask around a bit about the person. Do you guys have anything from your experience?

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Another question is what in the world do I bring to the table? The only thing I can think of is creativity, and vision. That doesn't seem like much to me. Maybe I need to acquire the technical skill? I don't need to do this right away, so I have time to make myself valuable to the team.

Also I don't think of this as some HUGE idea, like Milo. However, I feel if executed right it has the potential to grow to be worth 5-10 million. There are many other ideas I will have, plus many other ideas that I can use that can be worth this much in the course of my life. Yet, I came up with the idea. Its like my baby (corny, sorry) and I'd like to be a part of it.

Well, I would only recommend the e-myth to people that are thinking of trying to turn a technical skill (whether it's software development or baking pastries or construction or whatever) into a lifestyle business. Although I suppose it might still be somewhat useful for people thinking of doing a VC-style startup in that it gives you some background on all the non-core/non-fun stuff you'll have to deal with.

For the average budding entrepreneur... hmm, there are some good books out there like Built to Last and the Art of the Start but I think the most valuable information these days is contained in blogs. I made a post here somewhere with a list of interesting blogs but I can't find it with search/google now... however I did find this post by Evan from 2007 which is still surprisingly spot on and has a lot of overlap with my list:

http://archives1.twoplustwo.com/show...396&page=0&vc= (search for "37 signals")

This is a really interesting question and one I've thought a lot about. I don't think that I will ever be able to throw myself into work with the same level of dedication and work the same long hours, etc. that I did with Milo because I won't be as hungry -- however I am still pretty hungry compared to the average person and I am pretty passionate about doing good work on things I enjoy. I'm not the type of person that can just sit around doing nothing (at least not for very long ) so I think it'll just be a matter of taking advantage of the benefits that being set financially provides instead of taking advantage of the benefits that being extra hungry provides.

I think there are actually some sites that are literally for hooking up entrepreneurs with investors but I've never heard of anyone successful using them or any major investors using them for that matter.

I think the best path is to hang around places where existing entrepreneurs and investors hang around (e.g. y-combinator, thefunded.com, maybe reddit, the various blogs that were linked above, etc) and just keep networking.

You may also be interested in sites like halfbakery.com but they aren't going to net you investors.

It really depends on exactly what you want to do, but fundamental ruby and python are pretty similar in their capabilities, the differences lie mainly in philosophy (python is all about explicit over implicit, ruby is all about magic which can be a double edged sword).

Really I'd experiment with both and see which feels more natural to you and then go with whichever that is. They are both great tools for accomplishing most of the same tasks.

When we started out we actually switched from ruby to python for two primary reasons: 1. performance, 2. availability of libraries for certain specific tasks.

Both of these reasons are now moot as ruby as caught up in both areas.

If you're interested in pursuing a specific niche you may want to check out the availability of libraries for that niche as one or the other may still dominate your particular niche.

Our situation was somewhat unique in that Jack incorporated the company as a sole proprietor prior to bringing me (and eventually Ted) on as co-founders, so our deals worked a little differently than a normal scenario where all three founders would've been involved in the incorporation of the company. I can't go into details but essentially in my case I had a larger share than a normal employee would get but otherwise my equity was treated similarly to any other non-founding employees in the sense that there was vesting and so on.

In the worst case scenario I could've been fired (I'm not sure if it would've taken a board vote to do that, or not) but in that case I would've maintained any vested ownership and lost any unvested ownership.

In the general case I'm not sure how that would normally work. It basically depends on how the stock is distributed and any specific agreements that have been put into writing. I think this piece has some interesting stuff to say on the subject:

http://venturehacks.com/articles/fire-co-founders

Specifically the best piece of advice is "The best strategy for not having to fire your co-founders is to not bring them on board in the first place." -- which, as the post explains, is not to say that you shouldn't have co-founders (you probably should) but rather than you should make sure you get the right ones.

Picking the members of the founding team is going to be one of the most important decisions you make, so you better do it right or you're going to be building everything else on a weak foundation.

That said, it's always risky -- I have never in my life worked as hard for as long as I did and I really didn't know that I had it in me until it was all over and I was able to look back and say "wow".

If I were ever in a situation where I was on the founding team of a startup and I was unhappy with one or more of my co-founders and I was not in a position where I could fire them or otherwise influence the situation to correct it to my satisfaction I would just leave and find a new project to work on because I would almost certainly find it too stressful and risky to stay.

Unfortunately I didn't get to work with him too much. Jack interacted with him a lot more than I did though and I know he was very helpful in making introductions and similar things.

I've been to one of his parties and attended some dinners and things with him though and he's always a great presence and a very humble guy and very generous with his time for someone who's time is in such demand.

My deal is actually pretty unusual but I do have a full 4 years of incentives which I think is pretty standard. It's much more heavily front loaded than usual though. I've actually been running some of the numbers recently and I think it may make sense for me to stay longer than a year (EV wise) unless I have a really amazing alternative ready to go.

But even if I left immediately I would still be in pretty good shape and certainly after a year I'll be in very good shape.

There's probably no such thing as a "typical" startup, but that being said, in a "typical" start up I think you are WAY better off having a technical co-founder. Anyone who doesn't have a lot of skin in the game is simply not going to go the extra mile, not going to put in the extra effort, they're not going to be as interested in really spending all their extra time thinking about the right way to do things and looking for opportunities to optimize and accelerate development, etc.

That being said, in some cases, especially if it's not a very engineering heavy startup you might be able to go the other way. I think if I were going to go the other way though I would go 100% the other way and do everything entirely with freelancing. Of course the trick then is too find really good freelancers and realistically it's going to be hard to find them on e.g. rentacoder or whatever... so that pushes me back towards just thinking that in most cases you should try to have a technical co-founder.

If your particular idea is not very engineering heavy you may be able to find someone to serve as a technical co-founder and not give them that much equity (e.g. 20% or 30% instead of 50% assuming there's just 2 of you)... but you're probably going to need to get closer to an even distribution if they are any good.

As I mentioned earlier my particular case was not a perfectly even split for various reasons (including me needing to take a more normal salary earlier) but it was pretty equitable under the circumstances and at any discount I think I was a steal

Oops, missed this part of the question.

I think the best route to finding a good developer is going through your network so that you can get a personal referral from someone that's worked with them and can vouch for the quality of their work as well as their personality, how easy they are to work with, any strange quirks, etc.

I've heard occasional stories of people getting lucky with recruiters and I'm sure every once in a blue moon there's someone good that just happens to roll out of a job and due to relocation or something else not have a good network wherever it is they are trying to get a job and as a result ends up using a headhunter, but my guess is it's a real rarity.

Again if you don't have a personal network to exploit I'd suggest maybe hanging around Hacker News or programming.reddit.com and trying to mingle and get to know people. Then either find someone directly that way or get referrals from the people you meet. This applies roughly as well to regular developers as it does to technical co-founders.

It's no biggie but it's an L, not an I, FWIW.

I definitely think I have some innate skill, or at least I have the right kind of mind for computers, but that being said I think "a ton of time learning" is the majority of the answer. I think perhaps the biggest advantage I had was that I was strongly motivated to learn more, and as I mentioned early, part of that was due to growing up in an area with no much else to do.

Also as mentioned I mentioned in one of my recent replies, my path to a technical career went through the hacking community and in that world there are no real well defined boundaries between programming, networking, databases, etc. It's all just "systems" and you learn whatever you have to learn to accomplish whatever it is you're trying to accomplish.

Unfortunately the hacking community these days is quite a different world than when I was coming up. There's nothing stopping anyone from taking an old school approach but the world is so different that it probably doesn't make much sense anymore. When I was starting out the only systems that ran unix were big workstation (or bigger) machines at universities, like Sun 3/60's (in the pre-solaris days) or various vaxen (running ultrix), etc. If you wanted to learn about those types of systems as a typical 15 year old kid your only option was to break into them and learn that way. These days you can download any one of a hundred distributions of Linux, various *BSD's, etc and install them on your $400 computer and learn whatever you want. It's not quite as exciting though

It's not impossible to raise angel/VC money as a 1-man startup but it's certainly a handicap.

And yes, it definitely matters what stage you are in. If the concept has been proven it'll make big difference. Having revenues can definitely help under most circumstances but as I think I alluded to earlier in the thread the thing you have to watch out for there is that once you have revenue there is an increasing pressure to focus on the bottom line and just grow that revenue.

This is fine sometimes but other times you may find that the best thing for the business would be to stop and focus on building out a non-revenue producing component of the business or to stop and experiment with a couple of ideas that may take time away from revenue generating/increasing work, etc. and now you've got a tough decision to make.

If it really is a turn the crank point then you may also consider looking into venture debt. More often this is used by companies that have big equipment costs or something where the loan is collateralized by assets than can be sold in the event of a liquidation but I've also heard of the venture debt guys doing deals where the company has created a machine that produces > $1 for every $1 that goes into it which can obviously be capitalized on by having more dollars to put in the machine.

Well, definitely for most web-based startups programmers are going to be in heavy demand. To a lesser degree other tech people (SAs, DBAs, etc) but these days in the startup world there's a big push towards "dev-ops" which basically means the developers doing their own ops and DBA work, so definitely more demand for developers than anything else.

Depending on the nature of the startup some will want sales people (e.g. groupon, facebook) and some may not (I'm just guessing here, but e.g. maybe heroku, github, etc).

In terms of tips for getting the job, it depends a lot on what job you want and what you're background is, but I guess I would say if you're young and no opposed to doing an internship that's a great way to get a foot in the door.

If you're older or need a real paycheck then I would say that networking and persistence are key, probably in that order.

There is some incentive for startups to hire people with backgrounds from big/name companies -- it's easier to explain to investors why you spent a lot to hire someone if you can say "they came from the xyz division at microsoft working in our space" or "they worked on xyz at Google" etc and it'll basically never hurt -- there's a lot of smugness in the startup community about how much better it is to work at a startup than to work at a big company (some of which I think is legit, some of which may be sour grapes or people just trying to make themselves feel better about some of the big-company perks they are missing out on) but at the end of the day no one's really going to think that you're somehow tainted by having worked at Microsoft or Amazon or whatever.

The other advantage of working for a big company for a little while is just to have some perspective. If you've never worked for a big company you don't know what kind of trade offs you're making to work at a startup -- and believe me there are a lot of trade offs and some cut in each direction.

For example, for quite a while in the beginning of Milo I had no health insurance. Luckily I've always been pretty healthy and with staying inside writing code all day there wasn't a lot of opportunity for me to get hit by a car or fall off a cliff or whatever, but I could've developed any number of other health problems as a result of sitting around writing code all day, etc.

That being said, I don't know if I'd say it's necessarily best... if you know you want to work at a startup, work at a startup.

I can't go into any detail here but I think someone already linked to this tech crunch post which is more or less in the ballpark and should give you some idea:

http://techcrunch.com/2010/12/02/con...ake-a-killing/

I definitely can't go into any detail on this, but I've alluded to two specific answers elsewhere in the thread.

I'd love some feedback from John on the truth to this article
http://finance.fortune.cnn.com/2011/...azines_fortune

It looked to me like excellent advice, but I'm not a seasoned startup veteran. It certainly echoes what you've been saying about the criticality of the team from the start.

Also, why is the spot on Milo's eye in your logo on the wrong side compared to the actual Milo? Which came first, the company or the dog?

How did it feel to be important enough in a company to be the only John, making the other "John" go by Hamilton instead? (this isn't a joke, I'm genuinely interested if being a co-founder of what looked to be a successful startup inflated your personal ego prior to the sale). You mentioned increase confidence positively affecting your dating life: do you think this is more a factor of the money or the prestige from the sale?

What do your parents think of all this (the sale), and how did you tell them? What was their reaction when they found out you were working for yet another startup?

www.angellist.co is a good one

I can't go into too much detail on this, but in essence the entire site is one big ad. We drive traffic to stores in two ways -- 1. click throughs from a product page to a merchant website and 2. driving foot traffic into the store.

#1 works on a normal internet affiliate arrangement where we get paid for driving the easily measurable online traffic. #2 is a bit trickier and not something I can elaborate on, but as I said when I was describing what originally got me interested in being part of Milo was the fact that if you can drive sales for merchants (online or even better in the store) they will happily pay you to do that.

Our case is a little more complicated than what you described, that being said... as I touched on in my post about defensibility I don't think there are many web-based ideas that can't be copied. Of course we did it in the first place, so someone else could do it too. It really comes down to execution in the end.

As an example, there are tons of Groupon clones now and afaik they are almost all make a lot of money. With a few exceptions (like living social) I don't think they are making anywhere near what Groupon is, but still they were able to copy Groupon and make some cash pretty easily. If one of them manages to out execute Groupon they could certainly dethrone them, but so far Groupon's first mover advantage combined with good execution has kept them well ahead of (at least most of) the pack.

There were several companies that were around long before us and were better funded than us (e.g. Krillion, Nearby Now) that just never made it happen. I think Nearby Now pivoted to some sort of mobile play and then sold out to JiWire (http://techcrunch.com/2010/11/23/jiwirenearbynow/). I don't know anything about the terms of the deal but my guess is that it was more or less a firesale (which the techcrunch comments seem to suggest also). Krillion still seems to be around but I don't really know what they are doing... I don't think their site has changed in a long long time.

Likewise there are also a couple of new competitors popping up (e.g. Lucky Local and Goodzer) which show some promise if they can execute well enough to back up some of their claims but so far they haven't. From a startup perspective I wish them all the luck in the world, because I've been where they are and they are working on an idea that I believe in... from a competitive perspective, I say, bring it!

I definitely had to do a lot of boring work at various points in the company history (manually cleansing data, etc) but overall working at a startup is almost never really boring. There's always something crazy going on and the pace just moves so ridiculously fast compared to a big company that you barely have time to catch your breath and realize that you were working on something crappy.

Of course it's a little harder now that I am in a different place financially and have to go to work at a big company every day, but we are trying hard to maintain the startup atmosphere within eBay and keep Milo a fun and exciting place to work, keep the quality of the team high and keep working on fun new projects, which so far as been going pretty well and been keeping my interest.

I think someone posted a pretty good answer to this below, but the short answer is that you can't.

The long answer is that you can't but it doesn't matter. The idea doesn't matter, the execution does.

Unless you happen to have that 1 in a billion idea that is trivial to implement, easy to scale, requires little or know domain expertise, has a huge network effect and/or first mover advantage and will make a ton of money over night, then the chances are extremely slim that anyone will even try to copy you (there's a good quote I can't find that's something to the effect of "If you really have a great idea you'll have to cram it down people's throats to get them to accept it").

Also, if your idea is that great the people that want to steal it would probably rather work with you than against you.

So if you do find yourself in that infinitesimally unlikely situation of someone trying to steal your idea they STILL have to out-execute you, so the only way this could really hurt is if they could spin up a better team faster.

I don't think I've ever heard a story where someone stole someone else's idea and I thought the original person got screwed. It's usually the case that someone had an idea and never acted on it or the idea was so obvious than 10 people came up with it at once or something like a Groupon situation where there was little to no defensibility and lot of money so a lot of also-rans surfaced and took small pieces of the pie.

In the cases where someone did eat someone else's lunch it wasn't because they did a good job of copying them, it was because they did a BETTER job of executing on the original idea (or a better variation of it) than the original company did.

I guess I should read ahead more, this is a much more succinct way of saying what I was trying to say

And he's dead on about NDAs. In fact, asking a VC or angel to sign an NDA is like wearing a t-shirt that says "rookie" on it.

I had done programming of various sorts from the moment I got my first real computer -- in fact before I got a "real" computer I had a Coleco Adam and learned basic and logo on that system (this computer used casette tapes as it's primary media to give you an idea of what we're dealing with here)....

Once I got into the hacking world I immediately had to learn shell scripting and C programming to be able to do anything -- again I thought I was a neophyte but even just this little bit of practical exposure catapulted me way ahead of most college grads entering the work force (as an aside, I think there's a big problem with most college's approach to CS vs software development as a trade, but I'll save that for another time).

I also did take some AP CS classes in high school and a couple of college CS courses (as well as helping some people in higher level classes with their homework/projects) but I didn't learn much I didn't already know by this time (though I did learn some things that came in handy later like Big-O notation and other aspects of algorithm analysis).

This sequence of events positioned me the way I later described where by the time I was working as a sys admin on a project at a "real" company I realized as was as good as if not better than most of the developers they had. Of course this was during the first dot-com boom and there were a lot of college grads that had gone into computers to make money and had no legitimate passion or interest in them and as a result sucked pretty badly. I think that's still pretty common but you see less of it out here in the valley these days then I did back home on the east coast in those days.

If you're serious, feel free to send me a PM with your resume and/or some more information about yourself but we don't just hand out free jobs

This is reasonable. You could also initially limit yourself to talking to people that are already working on something they are very dedicated to. E.g. founders of other startups in completely different spaces. Get your initial feedback from these guys and use it to refine your idea. From there get referrals from them to reputable developers or entrepreneurs that may be interested.

Well, first of all I would say you are quite a bit more realistic and self-aware than a lot of people. There's a stereotype of the biz school grad that posts something on craigslist like "I have the most amazing idea. I just need a developer to work on it for free for a year and then I will be able to give you 1% equity! This idea is going to make billions!" etc.

Acquiring a technical skill is not a bad idea, but if you're not naturally a technical person then it's probably better to play to your strengths elsewhere. Like I've said a couple times in this thread one of the most important things is to build a good team. To build a good team you have to be able to communicate your idea, the value of the idea, etc. clearly and then you have to be able to inspire and lead people.

As much as a lot of tech guys would like to think if they just had the idea they wouldn't need a business guy, they're almost always wrong. You really need a balance of everything. If you can bring the team with the appropriate skills and experience together and sell them on the idea and get them working together on it, you'll have contributed quite a bit.

Of course at that point you can't just rest on your laurels but once the ball is rolling there will be tons of stuff that needs to be done and if you've gotten that far chances are you will be a good leader for quite a while.

If you are going to try to learn a technical skill and you aren't naturally technically inclined I'd say maybe study up on web design, web development and/or UX. A lot of developers are great at building something pretty if someone gives them a pretty mockup to work from, but absent that they have no design or UX skills and will build something terribly ugly and unusable to anyone but other developers.

Well, it's always important to honestly evaluate and analyze an idea, and you're not going to be able to raise any VC money for an idea that tops out at $5-$10m, but you can certainly raise money from friends & family or perhaps an angel or two and there's nothing wrong with building a $5-$10m business.

Of course if you get to that point my guess is along the way you will find any number of opportunities to either modify or add on to the original idea and grow it to an even larger size.

And there's definitely an advantage to feeling some pride/ownership of your idea. It's a lot lot lot easier to execute well on an idea you are passionate about than one that you're meh about.

That being said, if you want to get VC funding you're going to have to pursue an idea that will scale to a much larger market. If you (or anyone) would like to PM me with any info about your idea I'm happy to help you evaluate it and I won't tell anyone else about it and I probably won't steal it

That said, as I mentioned earlier I do have an idea I would like to pursue at some point in the future -- it's in the travel space, so if your idea is in this space, probably best not to share

That was so helpful. Thanks so much.