Paul Lutus, the Oregon Hermit, and what his example says to me

Posted Tue, 10/27/2009 - 16:03 by Michael

Here's something interesting supporting the notion of a startup retreat: Paul Lutus, who wrote Apple Writer, an early word processor, did it by retreating from society so he could concentrate.

1.1.4 Establish strategic vision (10020)

Posted Sun, 10/18/2009 - 22:07 by Michael

Not to get all self-referential on you, but my interpretation of the PCF says that what I'm doing now is "establishing a strategic vision". This begs the question: what is the difference between a strategic vision and a mission? Oh, Internet, is there nothing you've failed to consider long ago? The vision is how we see the world being different because we are in it; the mission is the day-to-day things we do that are intended to bring about the vision.

"Best Practices": the APQC-PCF and open-source business process standards

Posted Sat, 10/17/2009 - 19:58 by Michael

The APQC (American Productivity and Quality Center) is a member-supported, non-profit research center into business processes and "best practices". I put scare quotes around "best practices" because it's such an abused term that it basically means nothing, but APQC's Process Classification Framework, which is basically an open-source business process design framework, looks like a pretty nice document.

Business plans for dummies

Posted Fri, 10/16/2009 - 21:15 by Michael

So (duh) the Small Business Administration has business plan templates. Here's a good place to start. Incidentally, for financials, did I mention my sister is a CPA?

I strongly suspect the theme of this blog for the next couple of weeks is going to be boilerplate management structures.

The NBIA, and two ideas

Posted Fri, 10/16/2009 - 19:45 by Michael

The National Business Incubator Association (NBIA) is basically a national association of business incubators: unsurprising, given their name. Their website is extremely informative, including both superficial FAQ answers for people in a hurry and a complete archive of their articles.

The NBIA carried out a study in 1996 to determine best practices for incubators that could be applied to any incubator regardless of focus or mission (their words), and boiled things down to two basic principles, and I quote (from here):

Welcome to Richmond

Posted Thu, 10/15/2009 - 15:00 by Michael

So if you've made it here, you know why you're here: I want to save Richmond's grand old houses by putting hackers and makers in them. There's no Earthly reason this shouldn't work, so I'm happy you're here.

But at the same time, I can't devote much time to this. I'm going to let it grow organically as far as possible, by guiding a community. It might be that no such community will arise right now. That's OK. These houses and I aren't going away. I'm just going to keep talking to people and thinking out loud here. If you feel moved to do so, please feel free to contribute.

Right now, I'm just at the talking and thinking stage. There's a lot for me to learn about what existing incubators already do, and to be frank, it still has to be evaluated whether an incubator is even what we want. For me, the following goals are paramount:

  1. Save as many antique houses and buildings as possible.
  2. Revitalize Richmond's economy on a lasting, stable basis.
  3. Make people successful on a stable, conservative basis.

I've been thinking pretty hard about this during the week, and have already talked to some interesting people. There will be more to come.

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