Bicycle Safety

I wrote something a long time ago called Bicycles on the Information Super Highway. I was talking about being a one woman shop on the Internet.

This is exactly why so many local micro enterprises have a Facebook page as their web presence: because it's not really the information super highway and they don't feel up for taking their little bicycle out there.

Facebook is a walled garden, a stop along the way. It's like one of those Kansas interstate rest stops that can only be accessed from the interstate and not from any local roads, but in addition to being able to park and use a bathroom, there's a fast food place or three and a truck stop.

It's a really big problem globally that our entire planet is structurally top heavy and the mega corps have sucked all the life out of local economies, local businesses, micro enterprises and anything new that isn't positioned to be a venture capital style startup planning to become the new big dog.

There's an African saying: When elephants fight, it's the grass that suffers. The elephants -- the mega corps -- have fought until most of the grass has died and they are rolling around in a mud hole and beginning to starve because of it.

I spent some years on Hacker News, a discussion forum run by a venture capital firm called Y Combinator (YC). I was fascinated with the cover story that some woman started a company with three random men and supposedly "dated" one of them while doing so and somehow became a successful company anyway.

I was fascinated because to my mind that sounds like a recipe for three guys fighting over a woman and forgetting all about the business and business goals. To me, that sounds like a recipe for a situation where if anyone ever hears about them at all, it will be a scandalous headline along the lines of "Former startup dissolved as we wait for results of the paternity test."

That's not really how that company started. Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston met at a party shortly after he sold his first business ViaWeb. They began dating and she was job hunting and being strung along but not hired and after batting ideas about with her regularly over dinner, he suggested they start a company together as her next career move instead of continuing with this exercise in frustration.

And then within a day or two, he called his old partners up from ViaWeb and offered them stock and the title of "cofounders" to come on board part time. So basically free help for him and they only get paid if this company succeeds because that was the budget he could afford and -- importantly -- it aligns their goals with his.

Although Y Combinator is currently a multi billion dollar company with probably dozens of employees, it was initially two people with part-time help from Graham's two buddies from his previous successful business.

And it funds startups of the venture capital sort. Like the start of YC, that's typically only two to four people at the start, but with plans to get big and be worth big bucks.

The difference between a local mom and pop shop and a company that qualifies for venture capital isn't the number of people involved at the start.

It's something more like how ambitious they are, what kind of problems they are trying to solve and how seriously they take themselves as businesses.

You don't necessarily need to have big ambition to succeed as a small shop. You do need to take yourself seriously as a business and signal that to other people.

The companies YC funds are also typically just bicycles on the information super highway at the point of getting funding, but they don't just have a Facebook page and they aren't afraid of getting out there on the information super highway. Because they either know something about bicycle safety or they pay someone who does to handle this for them.

If you want your business to succeed, you need to get a real website and it needs to be designed as a serious business website while respecting your small size and your goals as a micro enterprise not interested in becoming a mega corp.