evan williams, a former ceo of blogger.com which is now part of google, has posted some nice guidelines for new web startups.
i think he has a point there. in 1999/2000, when i started my first practical at ibm unternehmensberatung interactive media, i met a few guys who were more or less successful in founding new web startups like ciao.com or uni.de. many parts of the above-mentioned guide were essentials for their buisness rules like “be casual”, “be tiny” or “be narrow”. some of them who struggled and failed are using their expericence these days to help other startups stop from doing the same failures again and, of course, are quite successful in founding new innovative startups 😉
later on in 2001 during my diploma thesis i worked for a startup called böttcher hinrichs ag which regrettably got into financial trouble at the end of my studies. although the company wasn’t a true web startup, they had some ideas which can be compared to “be picky”, “be self-centered” or “be balanced”, too. besides, their implicit key to success and basic idea of public and investor relations was the management of contacts in politics and economy, nowadays called ‘business or social networking’.
therefore i was pleased to be involved in the beta testing of a platform for networking called openBC, which was established by the co-founders of böttcher-hinrichs ag lars hinrichs.
if you know about nick denton’s toolkit for web startups then you should add openBC to it 🙂