In any startup company, EACH employee MUST wear many hats. In a large company, job specialization is the rule. However, job specialization does not make for a successful startup, as it requires too many people and both the costs and risks would greatly increase with the added levels of people and communication.

It is a well-known fact that there are diminishing returns with each layer and additional employees on any project. This is even more pronounced in knowledge-intensive areas and professional services like software engineering and other knowledge and design-intensive areas.  (Read The Mythical Man-Month). In early-stage and smaller companies, each employee must provide a range of value-added responsibilities that might encompass several jobs at a large company.

Therefore, employee selection in early-stage companies is not only more critical because there are so few people, but also more fraught with danger because each person's "scope", ability and attitudes must be...

Launching a startup company may be the hardest thing you ever do.  This is a big question with many moving parts and hundreds of things to get right that comes from experience and art, not just black and white answers. However, there are many things that can be easily agreed on that will go a long way to getting you there.  First, let's talk about the stages because it is clear that there are very different skill sets and modes of operation at different stages of the company's development.  Let's call these stages Raw Startup, Early Revenue, and Established.  Raw Startup is the idea development stage, working out of the home or "garage" without a significant burn rate.  Generally, you are spending most of your time developing your plans, researching the market and customers, and defining the product.  You may also develop the actual product, or need to raise funding to accomplish this.  Early Revenue is when you have a product or service...

John F. Welch Jr., CEO of General Electric, identifies four types of managers:

Giving Toothless Boards Some Bite

Consultants And Getting The Most Value Added

As a CEO I struggled long and hard over any decision to use a consultant. There are many issues that need to be managed by the client to keep a consultant from going overboard on time and costs.

Too many need to long to get up to speed on your business (on your dime), cost too much, and can not provide tangible results on a limited project basis. Too many are unproductive and do things in ten hours that I know I could have done in 2-3 hours, as paying by the hour is often a demotivation, while paying by the task aligns the client's and consultant's interests more.

All that said, I currently make my living as a consultant and do believe there is a better way.

The old saying that a consultant is someone who you pay to learn your business who then goes down the street to sell that expertise to someone else next week can be true if you let it happen that way. But it does not have to be that way if you use consultants appropriately and as a...

From www.Joelonsoftware.com  

What gets most early-stage companies in trouble is the areas that they just don't understand, that they don't know enough about.  In other words, the biggest problem is that they don't know what they don't know.  Nearly every failed company will say they ran out of cash, couldn't raise enough capital, or just did not get the sales they expected quickly enough. But these situations are generally the effect, not the cause. Generally speaking,  other problems that the company or entrepreneur does not understand very well are usually the root cause. This situation is actually far more dangerous than just not knowing because you cannot tackle a problem that you do not even know exists.  The best entrepreneurs and CEOs are learning machines and understand what they do not know.  I call this the Prudent CEO or person that appreciates the fact that the last Renaissance man, or woman, existed hundreds of years ago. In this day and age, there is just way too much...

You can't be all things to all people

Ever notice how that last 10% of almost any job takes half the time or more? This is a simple fact of life in most tasks because the more detail you try to finish the further you get up that exponential cost/time curve to perfection. Even painting your house perfectly is an unachievable and ridiculously expensive goal. In fact, an excellent job will cost twice as much as a very good job, and that will cost twice as much as a "good" job, which will cost twice as much as an OK job. That means an excellent job can cost about sixteen times more (2 X 2 X 2 X 2 =16) than a good job! Think about that next time you get a fixed price quote! So you need to decide where you want to be on that quality curve, which is also exponential. How close will you want to look at that paint job to feel good about it? How much will customers want to pay? This fact of life applies to most products and services in some way.

Unlike large companies, where thousands of...

Early-stage companies are the most fragile, have the least resources and the biggest challenges ahead of them.  Developing a new business is one of the biggest challenges in life and generally requires experience in at least five key disciplines (product/service development, finance, sales, marketing, and operations) to do well.   For a founder or entrepreneur and their team to be successful, they must have not only industry domain experience but all these skills available to design the business at both the strategic and tactical levels (a vision).  Taking all these disciplines into account and then allocating resources appropriately for the specific situation among these areas requires much experience and entails many trade-offs and judgment calls.  The only experience can be our guide here.  Identifying and managing risks is also something only experience and knowledge can conquer. For very early-stage businesses, hiring a full-time,...