Give me granularity. If you’re a Web-based startup, for example, show me how many unique visitors you think you can get in the beginning, and what you’re using for an estimated conversion rate (buyers to browsers). And it’s surprising how few startup founders think in those terms. And it becomes really important to have that granularity really fast. I’ve talked before about initial conversations with founders and the questions I’m likely going to ask Startup Software Development – Do Your Homework Before You Develop Anything . Tim Berry has a great post on Why I Hate Those Huge Market Numbers tells us that he doesn’t like to see business plans with multi-billion market numbers used as the basis for projections.

I’ve worked with 30+ early-stage companies in all sorts of capacities (and spoken to many, many more), so I thought it might be worthwhile trying to classify the various ways that I’ve engaged in different technology roles in startups. Background This post partly really came about as a result of a great conversation yesterday with David Croslin a former CTO at HP who recently conducted an interesting experiment. He posted on several social networking sites the following message: If you know of a startup company that could benefit from the knowledge, experience, professional

It was a great time to start a sports memorabilia company. We quickly built upon our meager initial capital by buying and selling cards that otherwise would likely have ended up in landfills. As noted in Small Ideas, Big Benefits , Capital Cards was an exceptional experience for both me and my brother-in-law, as it allowed us to hone our business skills, while competing with people who were more than twice our age. In 1933, baseball card collectors were frustrated. For some reason, they found it impossible to complete their Goudy Gum 240-card set.