I just checked my posting history, and I see that I haven't posted on here in over a year. That was something that surprised me because I've occasionally come back from time to time during that year so that I could lurk, read things and hopefully gain some cool insights that people on this forum often seem to have. I hadn't realized I didn't give anything back at all during that time.
I think I'm done taking and now want to start giving back.
In this thread I'll be documenting as much as I can on a company that I'm forming, which oddly ended up with revenue and customers before the company was even oficially formed. I'm going to try to give as much insight into my thought processes as I can in this thread, so please don't hold back with any questions, thoughts, comments, criticisms or ideas - I have a pretty thick skin and won't take offense. I'll do my best to check back here as often as possible, but I'm working 18 hour days right now as it is, so it may only be as often as once or twice a week.
The Idea
As it stands right now, the two sides of the business are: software & IT consulting, and financial investments (largely) based on advanced data analytics. It's been 6 months in the making; we planned for 3 or 4 months, and have been executing for something like 2 or 3 months now.
Structure
Since I don't really do solo businesses, I have a business partner on this project. I'd say we're both software developers, but I think it would be closer to the truth to say that he's an artist and designer that knows how to program (and that's *really* short changing him), whereas I'm more of a traditional overall developer that has just been around the block and learned a thing or two about large software systems.
I mainly bring the industry experience as well as technology & management expertise, and he brings networking, sales and designer skills. With a collaboration so symbiotic, we're able to cover most aspects of business expertise that we'll need at this point. We're still cross-pollinating on our work out of necessity, but when we can split up work along lines of expertise, we do. Fortunately, we seem to be running into a lot of tasks that are easily splittable.
Two Sides of the Business
The business seems to me like it's a little strangely structured, and that's largely a reflection of the pivoting we've needed to do in order to take advantage of some of the amazing opportunities which have presented themselves to us. It started out with the idea that the investments would be an income stream that would bring in most of the money at first while we built out and started the consulting business, and then it sort of became "both things at once". I'll explain.
As I said, my partner brings the connections, and he's extremely good at networking. One of the connections he has is with a lab dedicated to data mining and machine learning at MIT. He has a relationship with the lab director as well as some of the data scientists. The idea for the investment half of the business is to work with those scientists to create a proprietary financial data analytics software platform that can identify and manage investment opportunities. Basically, we're making a very high tech hedge fund. I don't know a whole lot about hedge funds, but I do know a lot about financial software systems, and I can personally certify the solidity of the systems logic. Besides, the people that we're getting are people that do things like create world class data mining solutions for Thomson Reuters to help them create revenues out of the massive amounts of data they have, so I think we're in good hands.
The other side of the business is the software consulting side. With 15 of my professional years in management of software and IT consulting, I know what needs to be done to make a consultancy successful. I personally wanted to form this side of the business both because I know what kinds of ongoing revenue it can bring into the business, and because I want to form a full training and integration program within the company with consulting at the core of the curriculum. I'm planning my organization to function quite differently than most businesses do. I've worked for many years while consulting at client companies generating various theories for increasing productivity and revenue, creating and testing my ideas, and with many of my ideas validated on the small scales at clients, I'm ready to implement large scale.
The consulting side became an opportunity for two reasons; the first is that my partner is already doing consulting on the side so we can just transfer his existing clients, and the other is because one of our contacts originally from MIT (same lab as above) is actually a post-doctorate fellow at some government university in Singapore. My partner told me which university, but I keep forgetting. That guy has tapped us to become his vendor of software and IT solutions, and since he'll be contracting these services to both the university and the Singapore government, we essentially have a government contract in place. If it all works out well, the plan is to have that eventually open up other world governments to us. We currently have a little headway on some US government contracts, but are putting those on ice until the Singapore deal is actually underway and matured a little. Path of least resistance and all that.
There is also a non-profit that will be created down the line, but for right now we're just focusing on revenue before we engage in helping to fix the world.
Current State
The Good
* The data analytics platform is all but complete - around 97%. I had a test pipeline previously running on the platform, but that was just at the proof of concept stage. I've had to rebuild the system almost from the ground up in order to allow us to be scalable and competitive going forward into the future, so I need to create a new test pipeline to verify it and then it should be good to go for the data scientists to come in and work on the analytics.
* We're looking to automate literally anything and everything within the company that can feasibly be automated; from tracking the current state of our open customer tasks all the way to automating tax submissions to our accountant. The system that manages that is around 90% complete. It's on hold at this second, and we'll be circling back around to it once we take care of some other pressing client and internal concerns.
* Last night we sent our capabilities and interests list to Singapore for those guys to read and digest. They're going to review that list to identify which work they have that best aligns to the list we sent them. Since our capabilities are full SDLC for software and full IT support, the field is pretty open.
The Weird
* My partner has a previously-set-up-but-never-used LLC available to use with the main business, and we're going to amend the papers this week to make me a 50% partner. We were supposed to do the amendment earlier, but we've had so much work to do that it was necessary to induce the proper momentum into the project before looking at the legal/financial side. We sort of ended up forming the company before we really technically formed the company.
* We have money coming in, but we don't have a bank account yet. My partner has a totally separate LLC bank account that the money is going in to, but it's not a whole lot yet - just a couple thousand dollars a week - so not having a bank account isn't a huge deal quite yet. We're going to set up a real account this week...hopefully. My partner wants to use BofA, and I have yet to get his thoughts on why that's the right bank for us.
* I'm personally building the bulk of the back end software and IT systems for the hedge fund as well as defining a large portion of the business plan for the consulting business, and it's starting to be too much work for me to do alone. My partner and I have talked about it, and we're going to offer some equity to a person we've both identified as an absolute superstar developer so we can have some help. I need to talk to the developer to find out his level of interest and what he feels is proper compensation. We'd like to keep the equity close to 10%, but are certainly willing to entertain other ideas if they have merit. Deciding on how to present it to him and then actually presenting will be this week.
* With the Singapore list out of the way, I'm working on getting the back end systems for analytics finalized while my partner works on some client work. We're both scheduled in a week and a half to be at a point where we can both tie up that work and put it in hibernate mode while we work on some internal stuff. In my experience consulting work tends to follow a kind of cycle, and if you can learn how to dance with the beat of the cycle, it becomes much easier to plan things out.
The Ugly
* No ugly...yet. Yay.
Future
By all appearances it looks like we may grow very fast, which I'm nervous about for two reasons. First, we're making an effort to define our roadmap at every step (we're using the USAF's OODA loop concept pretty heavily), and I'm worried that too much momentum will make our ability to do that fall more and more by the wayside. Secondly, while I'm fairly quick in my hiring process, I'm also very specific, and I don't want to get into a mode where we're looking to hire so fast that the quality of the hires diminishes. These are both things that haven't happened yet, and can be mitigated with some relatively simple strategies. I'm taking a wait and see approach while doing what I can in each moment to keep us from heading in that direction.
We're both itching to quit our jobs and go full time with this thing. I think we have a good chance of achieving that within 2016 based on the opportunities that are either already set up, or soon out of the pipeline. My partner has enough money saved up to quit today, but for a number of reasons we decided it was best for him to stay put working where he is for the time being. In the meantime, we're creating some forecast numbers and a revenue plan to understand where the tipping point exists that gets both of us working full time on our company.
As far as future revenue and opportunities, there are so many that will (and even have already started to) appear as natural outcroppings of our consulting and analytics work that my partner and I have almost completely stopped talking about it. Thinking about all those opportunities was getting too overwhelming and starting to distract us from the main business, so we're just going to identify things as they appear, at which time we'll evaluate the viability of those ideas. It'll be a case-by-case basis, and I have no worries about missing an opportunity here and there because if we miss one, another one will be arriving short on its heels. We've decided to look at the ones with the greatest point and ongoing revenue, and pass up the other ones.
Conclusion
I know I've said a lot here, but I'm sure I also missed a lot. Hopefully I was able to cover the most relevant points to give people a sense of what's going on with this project.
We have a lot of upside here, and some very solid indicators of success. Out of all the businesses that I've either started myself, was the first employee of another person's vision or consulted for an already established business, I can't recall any of them having the energy and symbiosis of all actors like this one.
I'm excited to move forward and hopefully in the process of sharing this I can help someone else in some small way.
I think I'm done taking and now want to start giving back.
In this thread I'll be documenting as much as I can on a company that I'm forming, which oddly ended up with revenue and customers before the company was even oficially formed. I'm going to try to give as much insight into my thought processes as I can in this thread, so please don't hold back with any questions, thoughts, comments, criticisms or ideas - I have a pretty thick skin and won't take offense. I'll do my best to check back here as often as possible, but I'm working 18 hour days right now as it is, so it may only be as often as once or twice a week.
The Idea
As it stands right now, the two sides of the business are: software & IT consulting, and financial investments (largely) based on advanced data analytics. It's been 6 months in the making; we planned for 3 or 4 months, and have been executing for something like 2 or 3 months now.
Structure
Since I don't really do solo businesses, I have a business partner on this project. I'd say we're both software developers, but I think it would be closer to the truth to say that he's an artist and designer that knows how to program (and that's *really* short changing him), whereas I'm more of a traditional overall developer that has just been around the block and learned a thing or two about large software systems.
I mainly bring the industry experience as well as technology & management expertise, and he brings networking, sales and designer skills. With a collaboration so symbiotic, we're able to cover most aspects of business expertise that we'll need at this point. We're still cross-pollinating on our work out of necessity, but when we can split up work along lines of expertise, we do. Fortunately, we seem to be running into a lot of tasks that are easily splittable.
Two Sides of the Business
The business seems to me like it's a little strangely structured, and that's largely a reflection of the pivoting we've needed to do in order to take advantage of some of the amazing opportunities which have presented themselves to us. It started out with the idea that the investments would be an income stream that would bring in most of the money at first while we built out and started the consulting business, and then it sort of became "both things at once". I'll explain.
As I said, my partner brings the connections, and he's extremely good at networking. One of the connections he has is with a lab dedicated to data mining and machine learning at MIT. He has a relationship with the lab director as well as some of the data scientists. The idea for the investment half of the business is to work with those scientists to create a proprietary financial data analytics software platform that can identify and manage investment opportunities. Basically, we're making a very high tech hedge fund. I don't know a whole lot about hedge funds, but I do know a lot about financial software systems, and I can personally certify the solidity of the systems logic. Besides, the people that we're getting are people that do things like create world class data mining solutions for Thomson Reuters to help them create revenues out of the massive amounts of data they have, so I think we're in good hands.
The other side of the business is the software consulting side. With 15 of my professional years in management of software and IT consulting, I know what needs to be done to make a consultancy successful. I personally wanted to form this side of the business both because I know what kinds of ongoing revenue it can bring into the business, and because I want to form a full training and integration program within the company with consulting at the core of the curriculum. I'm planning my organization to function quite differently than most businesses do. I've worked for many years while consulting at client companies generating various theories for increasing productivity and revenue, creating and testing my ideas, and with many of my ideas validated on the small scales at clients, I'm ready to implement large scale.
The consulting side became an opportunity for two reasons; the first is that my partner is already doing consulting on the side so we can just transfer his existing clients, and the other is because one of our contacts originally from MIT (same lab as above) is actually a post-doctorate fellow at some government university in Singapore. My partner told me which university, but I keep forgetting. That guy has tapped us to become his vendor of software and IT solutions, and since he'll be contracting these services to both the university and the Singapore government, we essentially have a government contract in place. If it all works out well, the plan is to have that eventually open up other world governments to us. We currently have a little headway on some US government contracts, but are putting those on ice until the Singapore deal is actually underway and matured a little. Path of least resistance and all that.
There is also a non-profit that will be created down the line, but for right now we're just focusing on revenue before we engage in helping to fix the world.
Current State
The Good
* The data analytics platform is all but complete - around 97%. I had a test pipeline previously running on the platform, but that was just at the proof of concept stage. I've had to rebuild the system almost from the ground up in order to allow us to be scalable and competitive going forward into the future, so I need to create a new test pipeline to verify it and then it should be good to go for the data scientists to come in and work on the analytics.
* We're looking to automate literally anything and everything within the company that can feasibly be automated; from tracking the current state of our open customer tasks all the way to automating tax submissions to our accountant. The system that manages that is around 90% complete. It's on hold at this second, and we'll be circling back around to it once we take care of some other pressing client and internal concerns.
* Last night we sent our capabilities and interests list to Singapore for those guys to read and digest. They're going to review that list to identify which work they have that best aligns to the list we sent them. Since our capabilities are full SDLC for software and full IT support, the field is pretty open.
The Weird
* My partner has a previously-set-up-but-never-used LLC available to use with the main business, and we're going to amend the papers this week to make me a 50% partner. We were supposed to do the amendment earlier, but we've had so much work to do that it was necessary to induce the proper momentum into the project before looking at the legal/financial side. We sort of ended up forming the company before we really technically formed the company.
* We have money coming in, but we don't have a bank account yet. My partner has a totally separate LLC bank account that the money is going in to, but it's not a whole lot yet - just a couple thousand dollars a week - so not having a bank account isn't a huge deal quite yet. We're going to set up a real account this week...hopefully. My partner wants to use BofA, and I have yet to get his thoughts on why that's the right bank for us.
* I'm personally building the bulk of the back end software and IT systems for the hedge fund as well as defining a large portion of the business plan for the consulting business, and it's starting to be too much work for me to do alone. My partner and I have talked about it, and we're going to offer some equity to a person we've both identified as an absolute superstar developer so we can have some help. I need to talk to the developer to find out his level of interest and what he feels is proper compensation. We'd like to keep the equity close to 10%, but are certainly willing to entertain other ideas if they have merit. Deciding on how to present it to him and then actually presenting will be this week.
* With the Singapore list out of the way, I'm working on getting the back end systems for analytics finalized while my partner works on some client work. We're both scheduled in a week and a half to be at a point where we can both tie up that work and put it in hibernate mode while we work on some internal stuff. In my experience consulting work tends to follow a kind of cycle, and if you can learn how to dance with the beat of the cycle, it becomes much easier to plan things out.
The Ugly
* No ugly...yet. Yay.
Future
By all appearances it looks like we may grow very fast, which I'm nervous about for two reasons. First, we're making an effort to define our roadmap at every step (we're using the USAF's OODA loop concept pretty heavily), and I'm worried that too much momentum will make our ability to do that fall more and more by the wayside. Secondly, while I'm fairly quick in my hiring process, I'm also very specific, and I don't want to get into a mode where we're looking to hire so fast that the quality of the hires diminishes. These are both things that haven't happened yet, and can be mitigated with some relatively simple strategies. I'm taking a wait and see approach while doing what I can in each moment to keep us from heading in that direction.
We're both itching to quit our jobs and go full time with this thing. I think we have a good chance of achieving that within 2016 based on the opportunities that are either already set up, or soon out of the pipeline. My partner has enough money saved up to quit today, but for a number of reasons we decided it was best for him to stay put working where he is for the time being. In the meantime, we're creating some forecast numbers and a revenue plan to understand where the tipping point exists that gets both of us working full time on our company.
As far as future revenue and opportunities, there are so many that will (and even have already started to) appear as natural outcroppings of our consulting and analytics work that my partner and I have almost completely stopped talking about it. Thinking about all those opportunities was getting too overwhelming and starting to distract us from the main business, so we're just going to identify things as they appear, at which time we'll evaluate the viability of those ideas. It'll be a case-by-case basis, and I have no worries about missing an opportunity here and there because if we miss one, another one will be arriving short on its heels. We've decided to look at the ones with the greatest point and ongoing revenue, and pass up the other ones.
Conclusion
I know I've said a lot here, but I'm sure I also missed a lot. Hopefully I was able to cover the most relevant points to give people a sense of what's going on with this project.
We have a lot of upside here, and some very solid indicators of success. Out of all the businesses that I've either started myself, was the first employee of another person's vision or consulted for an already established business, I can't recall any of them having the energy and symbiosis of all actors like this one.
I'm excited to move forward and hopefully in the process of sharing this I can help someone else in some small way.
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