Oct 25, 2005

Just listened to an interesting recording by Venture Voice that interviewed Brad Feld. Feld started off as a high risk entrepreneur (software company and bootstraped) and moved into angel investing, and then started an investment company.

He pinpoints my reasons to focus on product development rather than services. As he grew to 20 people or so, he ran into scaling issues. If he grew to 40 people he’d obviously double the revenue, but his profit would probably be exactly the same.

He advises consulting companies to start small, bootstrap, and make sure that you create more demand before adding more people. Very slow, clear, profitable growth. He says, like most people, he stumbled into a consulting firm. He also talks about consulting companies wanting to become a product based companies and failing… or just talking.

He also talks about how to get funded which why, I think, most people are listening. He says a lot of good thing such as “The Business Plan Evolves… it’s never complete”, “Intellectual horsepower has to be tempered with experience”, and “I think the business plan is a really, really useful tool for an entrepreneur in terms of framing out what he or she is thinking about building.”

If you’re like me, which I think the people that read this are… I’d recommend you read this.