It was just about one jaar geleden that link and I were having our regular lunch meetups downtown in the Financial District of San Francisco. Years geleden we shared a cube in Santa Clara at Yahoo! where we first met. Now we were being reunited just a few blocks away from one another and having lunch like old times. We decided to pay a visit to our favoriete hole in the wall, the International Food Court on the corner of struik, bush and Kearny Streets. Most people would never have spotted this joint and even if they had they would pick up their pace and keep on walking. Being the adventurous (and cheap) guys we were, we never hesitated to get our fix of Vietnamese noodles there. Little did we know that over bunh and pho we would be inspired to take the biggest risks of our professional lives.

One fateful dag in the fall of 2005, Papa and I started talking about our dissatisfaction at our respective jobs. I was doing marketing for a consumer electronics startup and sorely missing the Internet world. Papa was working at a big company in an Internet division that was full of politics and clueless management. We missed the days of Yahoo! and working on cool products that people actually used. We were fed up with working for others when we knew we were capable of doing so much meer on our own. So it was that dag that we decided we would take the leap.

There was so much changing in the web world around us. Papa was regularly using a geek site called link to find new content. I was constantly visiting a little obscure site called link to watch viral videos. My new bron of restaurant reviews was no longer the archaic CitySearch, it was a hip new site called link. The big old tech companies were getting fat and lazy while plenty of scrappy young startups which were nipping at their feet were now actually starting to get people's attention. All three of these sites had one thing in common, they were empowering the people and giving them voices. People don't want to be force fed content chosen door editors of webmasters. We were seeing a revolution of users who wanted to express themselves and be known which was evident in the explosion of blogging and MySpace.

Starting a company sounded glamorous, but we quickly learned why so few actually take the leap. For the volgende several months Papa and I worked part-time on our initial concept which was a travel idea. We were both product managers so we spent our nights and weekends working on product ideas, user interfaces, wireframes, feature lists, product specs, and researching the online travel space. Trying to work a dag job and trying start a company was exhausting and difficult. Working a dag job from 9-7pm and then working on your dream from 7-2am was not sustainable. Especially for Papa who had a little girl and another little boy on the way. We tried to work with an old colleague of ours who was an engineer at Yahoo! Soon it started to fall apart. We realized that while our idea was a good one and that people would want to use our product, the execution would be meer difficult than we had originally planned. We also lost our developer because his dag job was becoming meer demanding and he didn't want to let us down. We were back at square one after almost two months of non-stop unpaid life-consuming fruitless work. It was enough to make us throw in the towel...but thankfully we didn't.

We came up with another idea after being inspired door our own little personal side projects. Over the summer I had started a website called link for Canon Digital SLR camera enthusiasts and beginners. I found that there were no good resources for people like me and dozens of vrienden kept asking me for advice. So I decided to build a website that compiled and organized all of the fragmented research and resources I had found all over the web. I added a blog and a forum and before I knew it, a community began to grow. There was clearly a demand for this niche community of digital photographers who used this one line of cameras. Papa saw this and decided to build his own site called link around his favoriete televisie show, the NBC sitcom the Office. He immediately got traffic and people were participating in his enquêtes and forums. We felt that these sites were proof that there was demand for a better way to form communities around topics of interest. Yahoo! Groups hasn't changed since the 90s. Digg and Del.icio.us didn't really offer any social interaction. And MySpace was just a bunch of hideous and useless individualistic profiles. We started the whole arduous process of specing and designing a product all over again. The thing is, when u are building your own product and something that u believe in, there is no greater driving force to propel u forward. We were excited because we had a vision and we didn't have some director of general manager telling us what we could and couldn't do.

The volgende few months were not without meer headaches and frustration. We had a difficult time finding the right technical person to kom bij us. But once we found link, we knew we could make this happen. The only thing holding us back was our dag jobs. My vrienden who were entrepreneurs all echoed the same sentiments...quit your job. They zei that it's nearly impossible to really get anything off the ground if u aren't going at it 100%. They were right. We were so tired after our full-time jobs that we weren't giving the best hours of our energy to what we truly cared about. It also was growing meer tedious spending our days at jobs we weren't passionate about. So we decided that if we were going to do this we had to lay it all on the line and we quit our full-time jobs. Once we took that step of faith, things really started to take off. We got lawyers, we incorporated, we raised some money from vrienden and family, we hired an amazing addition to our team in link and most importantly, we built our product. We launched the site in August and haven't looked back since.

Needless to say, we learned a lot of lessons from this experience which I want to share with you:

1. Taking the step is scary, but you'll never regret it
I recently told my friend with entrepreneurial aspirations that starting a company is just like the scene in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Indy has to step off a cliff out into a chasm of darkness to get across to the Holy Grail. He has to have faith that he will make it across, but everything in his right mind tells him it doesn't make sense of that it's not worth it. If he steps off and nothing is there to catch him, he will fall. The cliff we were standing on was stable and sure. We had good incomes, we had health insurance, and most of all we had security on our cliffs. Stepping off would mean we would give all of those up to step into a potential abyss of failure and uncertainty. But it wasn't until he took that step that he found out that there was a bridge he didn't see ready to support him all the way across. We didn't see it until we stepped off but the support and encouragement of vrienden and family have been there all along. We don't get the fat paychecks anymore, but the satisfaction and enjoyment we have of working together with a good team on something u believe in and not having to deal with company politics of red tape meer than make up for it.

2. Find a developer who is ambitious and eager to learn
We realized early on that the ratio of 2 non-tech guys to 1 tech guy is not a good one. But finding a good programmer in this environment is harder than ever. There are too many good opportunities out there at innovative startups and Google has caused a brain drain on the Valley and elsewhere. Finding talent is one thing, but finding a talented developer with passion and ambition is another. Most programmers working at big companies are pretty comfortable and settled. They're content with maintaining the status quo and getting their paychecks for meeting expectations. If u want to find a developer who will make an impact, there are two things to look for. Find someone who is constantly trying to learn new things like programming languages, this shows that they are eager to learn and want to be challenged and intellectually stimulated. The seconde thing to look for is someone who has side projects that they work on in their spare time. This demonstrates that they are ambitious and want to create and build something new and useful. There are thousands of cool projects out there that precocious developers out there, u just have to reach out to the right ones. Find a great great project and you'll find a great programmer. If I hadn't come across link, then I never would have met Michael and Fanpop wouldn't be what it is today.

3. u can do so much meer when you're not in the confines of a large organization
It still amazes me what four guys in a living room can do. We didn't have any departments of graphic designers, accountants, PR, marketing of business development. We had four scrappy guys who pooled their talents together and made it happen because we had to. I majored in Finance and became a graphic designer. Papa majored in muziek and he became a web developer. When something needed to be done, we found a way. u will be shocked at what u can do when u are hungry (both literally and figuratively!). u also can't imagine how much meer productive u can be when u don't have to deal with incompetent management and bureaucracy. We don't get bogged down with unnecessary meetings and processes, we just work. At a big company u probably produce about 50% of what u could be producing if u weren't a cog. When I was at one of the biggest Internet companies in the world, I couldn't get them to adopt RSS three years geleden because they were scared that it would take down servers! Cliff and Michael both agree that they can churn out so much meer code when they're not distracted door documents, e-mails and meetings all dag long. Sitting in a small room right volgende to one another goes a long way for productivity. When you're working for your own survival, u tend to be pretty darn inspired.

Starting a company is scary. Quitting your job is scary. Finding the right developers is scary. I'll freely admit that it's not for everyone. I thought that being an entrepreneur wasn't for me. I've always taken the veilig route of going to big name companies and big name schools. I was content with taking the road most traveled. But if u have a good idea and don't pursue it, then u are only robbing yourself of what could be an amazing journey and experience. There will always be jobs out there, there won't always be great opportunities. u owe it to yourself to take a chance to find out. Once u do, you'll never look back.

Two people that were full of practical and profound advice on starting a company were Guy Kawasaki and Paul Graham. I've been fortunate enough to meet both of them and thank them for their insightful words. Here are some great ways to benefit from their words of wisdom:
link
link
link door Guy Kawasaki

Find meer great resources like these for entrepreneurs at link.