Startup Tips Day 21: Ted Rheingold from Dogster

Day #21 in the CenterNetworks Startup Tips Month come from Ted Rheingold from Dogster.

Ted's Tips

• Entrpreneurship is akin to living your life on a roller-coaster. Highs and Lows happen weekly every week of the year. To steel yourself for the lows, avoid over-celebrating the highs.
• Picking the right founding partners is the most important of your whole company. Do not enter into relationships with any unknowns such as capabilities, professional expectations and aspirations, working requirements for the first 3 years, trustworthiness, adaptability. You are, in effect, marrying these people. Make sure there is not a premature divorce.
• Line up a diversified list of advisers early. Look for people that have both the time and interest. If their primary interest is money, they are probably not ideal.
• Spend as little money as possible to prove your model. Strive to prove revenue models while you prove customer adoptions.
• Run your business as a business based upon tradition business practices. It's heartbreaking to invent the next Rubik Cube only to learn that you can't even get the money back it cost to develop.
• Get management and finance books and read them. While you may be great at inventing new technologies, running a business is just as important a skill.

Ted Rheingold, CEO, founded Dogster & Catster as a way for people to unite around their common passions. At Dogster, Inc., Ted sets the company's strategic direction and growth, though he's still a coder at heart. Prior to founding Dogster, Ted's entrepreneurial and leadership skills were honed running the web services company One Match Fire, which he founded in 2002.