When we first began exploring the idea for AccelerEyes, we had several other ideas cooking simultaneously. I’ve written about those grad school ideas previously.
Over the course of 6 months or so, we knew that AccelerEyes was the best bet, so we dropped all the other ideas to focus exclusively on GPU computing and AccelerEyes. It was the right choice, because trying to bootstrap a company while still in grad school is all-consuming. More distractions would have sunk us.
We’ve always stayed very focused on building AccelerEyes and ignoring all other tangents. Initially we would not even consider doing anything other than a very focused concentration on a particular technology in our market. I wrote about right-sizing market focus before.
Once the revenue picks up, the resources become available to look at putting other entrepreneurship irons in the fire. I’ve not done that before. I’m curious to hear from those who have seen success spinning up other ventures. The exemplar is David Cummings and spinning out other opportunities (big ones) from Hannon Hill. Other entrepreneurship irons can come as hands-off investments or as parallel startups.
Obvious requirements for a parallel entrepreneur are:
- The existing startup must be capable of running in founder-less mode
- Resources must be sufficient to invest in a new startup without diminishing the viability of the existing startup
- All the normal idea vetting, customer development, and other validation exercises must be performed on new ideas before anything serious is committed (and before people really become motivated)
Would you consider spinning up parallel startups? If so, how would you evaluate when to consider devoting some attention to new ventures?
Related articles
Comments on this entry are closed.
{ 1 trackback }