Cofounder, chairman, and CEO
Cofounder and president
Shorebank Corp.
Chicago, Illinois
Finding a business partner is like finding a life partner: You should try to find someone whose talents complement yours. A good team has both a visionary who keeps raising the bar and a good operations person who keeps things running smoothly. And each has to trust the other implicitly. In our business, team management seems to resolve a lot of conflicts.
Managing a startup requires learning to let go. And part of letting go is developing others -- creating opportunities for people to move up and run organizations on their own. Shorebank has 22 subsidiaries, and every one of them has a president or the equivalent. We keep watching to see who the leaders are. If we were to do something different, we would start investing in the development of general managers even earlier than we do. As we try to expand, we're finding that we don't have enough people with general-management skills.
When you start a business, don't underestimate the growing pool of potential investors who are interested in business ideas that have a social component. There's a growing group of wealthy people who want to invest some of their capital in something that has a social purpose. But those people aren't looking for idealistic dreamers; they want to be confident that their capital is going to be conserved. And if they can actually make some money, that's even better.
Shorebank (www.sbk.com), which focuses on serving underinvested communities, was one of the first community-development banks in the United States. It was started in 1973 (as the Illinois Neighborhood Development Corp.) with $800,000 in capital and a $2.4 million loan. It now offers real-estate development, debt financing, and other business services in five metropolitan areas.
Chief Tellme
Tellme.com
Palo Alto, California
What's unique about a second-generation company like ours is that we draw not only on our own experiences but also on the experiences of the people with whom we've worked. At Netscape, we learned about the Internet economy -- but we never really cracked the consumer-marketing nut. We modeled our organization on Yahoo! That involved bringing in acquaintances from Yahoo! as well as people who understood how to build consumer services.
Our early experience with the Internet helped attract the amazing team that we recruited. And that helped us attract funding. The first people you hire form the DNA of the company, and that team will drive your valuation in the future. So it's important to get the funding that you need to build the right organization. These days, money is so much easier to come by than it used to be. But people are hard to get, and investors understand the costs of building a great team. It's much easier to tell an investor that you need $1 million to hire more people to solve problems than it is to tell an investor that you need $1 million to license a cool technology.
One of our challenges has been to keep the quality bar high. If we build great technology, that's only because we've been able to hire great engineers. We want to build a great consumer brand that serves millions of people -- in other words, a real business. And we're taking all of the organizational steps necessary to make that happen.
Tellme.com (www.tellme.com) was launched in February 1999 by a group of employees from Netscape and Microsoft. Former Netscape managers Angus Davis and Mike McCue head up the company, and former Netscape CEO James Barksdale and former Microsoft executive Brad Silverberg are key funders. The service aims to use the telephone to provide much of the information that people now seek from the Internet.
Founder, chairman, and CEO
space.com
New York, New York
There's something metaphysical about taking a concept, making it a reality, and creating a great enterprise. The management of any startup is the administration of the unforeseen. And space -- the focus of my startup -- is a concept without limits.
Before you even get started, there has to be absolute enthusiasm about the idea behind the business. And love of the subject matter has to exist organizationwide: Those who will provide the capital have to share your vision.
You have only one chance to create a world-class business. We brought together a small group of people who had worked together before, who had participated in the success of CNNfn, and who understood what it would take to launch a successful business. Creating a world-class company may cost a little more money. At the margin, it may even create a diversion from your core business. But the payoffs can be profound.
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