Lessons in Entrepreneurship – First Lesson: Don’t take my advice.

There is one and ONLY one type of person qualifed to schlep advice about being an entrepreneur and that is someone who has:

1.  Actually built a company by creating a product or service that brings real value to real people (hint: that’s not a facebook app or a mashup) a real product or service is something that takes planning, time and resources to build.
2. Gotten to a cash flow positive state with their company
3. If you’re talking about raising money, then someone who has successfully raised real money at the level you’re looking at
4. Exited from at least one company that THEY started.

Again, those are the requirements to be QUALIFIED to schlep advice – oddly enough, it’s sometimes hard to find qualified advice amongst the gaggle of unqualified noise plenty of people are happy to throw at you – kind of like I’m doing right now.

So my first advice is to not take my advice.  I’ve only nearly completed item 1 above though I’m working on 2 and 3.  So I’ll be trying hard to shape what I’m saying not as advice, but as sharing my experiences.  I’ll also say that I’ve found plenty of schmucks who actually meet all 4 requirements.

A lot of this is common sense, so why am I saying it?  Because real entrepreneurs are hard to come by.  There are bajillions of “entrepreneurs” who are just thinking about starting a company, scripted together some “app” over the weekend, or had their company handed to them by daddy.  It’s hard to get good advice and in the void it can get confusing determining whether you should do what this really friendly rich dude said…

Experience on the other hand is different for each person and much direction can be learned from other’s experience – both directions to follow and directions to ignore.

So in closing, there are only two pieces of advice I’m offering 1) Don’t take my advice cause I’m  not qualified and 2)If you aren’t qualified to share advice on something then shutup.  As for everything else I’m going to say, hopefully you can learn something from my experiences.