jessica livingstones´ interview of ray ozzie shows how two documents can be essential for start.ups.
the complete interview with ray ozzie is part of the book "founders at work". this highly recommended reading shows what for more or less successful founders worked and what did not.
ray ozzie got famous for his lotus notes history. he had numerous moderately successful start.ups with groove being the last one. after groove got acquired by microsoft he became microsoft´ chief software architect.
so how does ray ozzi starts his companies? he sits down an writes two documents:
founding document 1: outside view
describe the challenges/problems solved for the end user.
founding document 2: inside view
describe on a technical basis how to solve scenarios described in document 1
this approach gives founders a structured way to organize their thoughts. without being afraid of having to write an "executive summary" or even a "business plan".
having done that, he collects the core team of people he already worked together. to do that, the above docs show their first payback. future team members get the main start.up idea and can decide fast, if they are interested to join in or not.
he get’s a big open office and a whiteboard. together with the team he works out the technical details on how to solve the challenges, the toolchain, languages used, architecture. then the coding starts.
p.s.: looks like the business guys are left out for quite a while.
the complete interview with ray ozzie is part of the book "founders at work". this highly recommended reading shows what for more or less successful founders worked and what did not.
ray ozzie got famous for his lotus notes history. he had numerous moderately successful start.ups with groove being the last one. after groove got acquired by microsoft he became microsoft´ chief software architect.
so how does ray ozzi starts his companies? he sits down an writes two documents:
founding document 1: outside view
describe the challenges/problems solved for the end user.
founding document 2: inside view
describe on a technical basis how to solve scenarios described in document 1
this approach gives founders a structured way to organize their thoughts. without being afraid of having to write an "executive summary" or even a "business plan".
having done that, he collects the core team of people he already worked together. to do that, the above docs show their first payback. future team members get the main start.up idea and can decide fast, if they are interested to join in or not.
he get’s a big open office and a whiteboard. together with the team he works out the technical details on how to solve the challenges, the toolchain, languages used, architecture. then the coding starts.
p.s.: looks like the business guys are left out for quite a while.
