I’m going to challenge common myths that the regular ‘want-a-preneur’ or amateur has. I’m going to start building startup ‘recipes’ for ways to handle situations and break down my thoughts on why I deem something successful or not.
I’ll start either with an idea or with nothing and navigate using only 10-20 hours a week with a max of 80 hours total to establish a startup, test it out and see the results.
I have some advantages compared to the average startup founder.
- I have strategic and operations planning experience from my time in the military.
- I have created and joined startups in the past some successful, most failures.
- I’m at a ‘mentally’ prepared state of mind.
- I’m creative: I took up painting after leaving the military.
- I have software technical skills: I taught myself to code in about 6 months of sheer pain and suffering.
- I have liquid capital (cash). While no billionaire, I’m not hurting.
So keeping that in mind. I will make sure that at least a few startups are lacking in some of the above areas to make it a more level playing field.
With that in mind
While a billion dollar company will surely be so unique that it will be almost impossible to navigate most of the problems. By studying patterns and the ‘stratagems’ behind them one can attempt to expect the difficult through managing the easy and small things.
Recipes
These are tactics from past experiences or current projects. These could easilly decay or be useless after writing them because they are completely and utterly contextual in the nature in which they are written. It’s designed to make the beginner who is overwhelmed have some training wheels.
AAR
After Action Reports are done at the end of the month to showcase what went right, what went wrong, how to fix what went wrong.
TTP
Tactics, Techniques and Procedures will help provide you with some additional insights into best practices or things that could be considered best practices by some.
Leadership Development
Leadership is taking people from the known to the unknown
Leadership development articles are intended to challenge your thinking. The previous three are all ‘management’ level thinking. What I mean by this is that AAR’s, TTP’s and recipes are just things we have learned from. While I think most of America believes this is a form of leadership. I don’t. I believe it’s a form of management. “Here is the book of what works. Follow it.” Where leadership is about forging ahead and taking people from the known to unknown.
Stratagems
Short to the point articles that unveil a way to think about a specific problem. I enjoy using metaphors and these will no doubt be filled with them.