Coop Entrepreneurship AKA Join me on a quest to change the world!
January 18th, 2008
I’ve been thinking a lot these days and I have a lot of great ideas that I don’t want to forget about. Some of them were ridiculous and I killed them right away. However some are fairly good and good enough that I want to do something with them. Who knows, perhaps one of them will work out. This reminds me of a presentation by Sylvain Carle probably over a year ago about parallel entrepreneurship. Instead of throwing 1 dice, you throw 10 dices hoping 1 or 2 will win. This is also exactly what VC’s do. They spread their risk over many good companies hoping 1 or 2 will bring back 10x their initial investment.
The problem is how to form a team when most people have a day job and are very busy? It’s not easy.
Programmers are good at programming but might lack marketing or business skills. True programmers like to code. They often code after work. They contribute to open source projects.
Business guys are good at business but they are rarely good coders or designers. Business guys always think about ideas. They come up with a new idea every time nature calls, whenever they see someone frustrated at something and so on.
Designers are awesome at creating something neat and fun to use but might not be able to code a large application or find out if a market is profitable or not. Designers can transform any ordinary web page in a work of art.
It’s very hard to find a multi-disciplinary individual (ex: someone who’s both a great coder and a great business man). I always believed in working as a group instead of working for yourself. Being in a team, it’s much easier to talk about a project, to do research, to design and code it. The reason is you have access to other excellent resources. When you do it on your own, you must be very focused and dedicated otherwise you will quit or fail. Being solo doesn’t work very well.
So you might be wondering where all this is heading? Well I had this idea where people contribute to startups in various ways. I call it “coop entrepreneurship”. People join startups like they join open source projects. They contribute what they can: they code, they design, they write business plans, they do marketing, they invest money, etc. Basically, they contribute their skills (or money if they are investors). Their participation is evaluated and shares are given depending on their participation. Once the project is completed, they look for funding and launch.
I’d really like to “test run” this idea with a few people before brining the concept further. So if you’re a programmer, a designer/user interface expert, a business man, a network engineer, a sysadmin, an investor, a mentor, a coach, a lawyer, an accountant, a secretary, an idea guy or if you think you could be part of a startup then please let me know.
I would really like to hear your thoughts about the model itself. On my side, I think the model is viable as the coop model has been around for ages. It is just being applied in a different way and actually, I know that Cambrian House is doing something similar. In the medium term, the goal would be to create a hub where people could meet, find partners and start a business. Some sort of business catalyst or perhaps a very informal incubator.
So… who’s in? Just email me.
Posted in Help wanted, Incubator, Montreal, Startups, business | Comments (4)
January 18th, 2008 at 8:05 pm
well, i do development stuff. you can call me, although i dont guarantee i am avalaible time-wise
January 18th, 2008 at 10:50 pm
Great! I will keep this in mind. I need more interested people though. So perhaps you can spread the idea a little bit, that would be great
I can explain in details when we meet.
January 19th, 2008 at 11:59 am
Working on your own is hard. This is a great idea and count me in if you want. Maybe as a front-end developer (not done too much of this recently and I miss it) or a Rails developer. I also have skills in Delphi5 ;). Like Heri, I can’t garantee that I will be available.
January 19th, 2008 at 3:03 pm
@Dan
Like you said, working alone IS hard. Many open source projects succeed so I can’t see why this can’t work..!