The United States of America's Legacy

I met up with a friend of mine today, someone I hadn't seen in over 4 years. The last time we met, he and his business partner were trying to convince me to leave my employer and go with them to start a company, and they wanted me to be their CTO. It was a very attractive offer, but for a number of reasons I declined. And, except for an occasional email over the years, we kind of lost touch.

Well, I was in another meeting earlier this week, speaking with some people about working with Angel Investors in the start-up phase of a business, and someone pulled out an "example checklist" that they thought was a good evaluation guide that they used. The company name on the sheet? You guessed it - it was the company we were considering starting! So, of course I told my friend about it.

Anyway, as I was driving home from our meeting today, I came away with a number of different ideas. One of them was about the state of employment in the U.S.. For the last 80+ years, our society has nurtured the idea of a career working for a large corporation, through which we could have our financial security and other needs met. It worked well for a while, but it turned out that it's not a model that's sustainable over the long term. The engine of commerce has always had its roots in the small and medium sized enterprises.

With the growth of the technology sector, and some of the tools that are now freely available, the barriers to entry for an individual or even groups of individuals, to launch a new enterprise, have really fallen through the floor. Other than tangible inventory (if that's even relevant for your business), it is now possible to have a virtually "free" infrastructure for your startup:

- computers (most people have one; a pretty good one that could fit most of your needs can be acquired now for anywhere from $500 - $1500)
- phones (with a number of different Voice Over IP (VOIP) offerings now available, you actually have a choice of providers
- office productivity software (openoffice.org has a free word processing / spreadsheet / presentation software suite you can use; Google, Yahoo, etc. have free email and calendar applications you can use)
- office space (in most cases, you can literally work out of your home to get started)

So, if you ever wanted to start a business in the States, the minimum you have to do is to go and file your DBA with your local government, and your in business. Then, coupled with the above and your very own website, you can get your idea up and running. It's that simple.

So, if it's that simple, why don't more people do it?

Because it's not easy. It's very, very, very hard. For every 10 businesses that start, 9 will fail within their first two years of operation. But what's interesting is that for those individuals who start more than one business (generally 3 - 5), that statistic reverses itself - 9 out of 10 succeed into their fifth year! What's the difference?

Persistence.