I just had lunch with a good friend who recently launched ShackPrices.com. He and his co-founder have bootstrapped their company, and as we were discussing his new business, which offere real estate listing for Washington State (soon to expand to other states), I began thinking about the values of bootstrapping over seeking funding.

I am a firm believer that if a company can be bootstrapped, then it definitely should be. However, I would be very interested in how many bootstrapped firms are successful? Along those lines, how many companies listed on TechCrunch.com are bootstrapped..?

Y Combinator is an interesting hybrid between bootstrapping and angel investing. They provide funding equal to $6,000n, where n is the number of participating founders for three months. They provide experience and mentorship for startups, which some would say is exactly what they need.

As nPost.com grows and begins offering new features, the key question I ask myself as a co-founder is simply; what will it take for us to be successful? Can we do it with the resources that we have available now? At this point, I do believe that yes we can.

How do two people work together to create a company? What type of relationships work best to ensure the highest probability for success? I can only speak from personal experience as well as insights into other companies through the interviews that I have conducted.

The partners must create a balance between debate, patience and control. Debate will allow good and bad ideas to be heard, and discussed. No one person has all the answers, but two people can develop good ideas as well as insights into the business model and the issues that the company faces.

Debates must be moderated with patience, if founders want to ensure the ideas are vetted sufficiently then some time must be used in making decisions. While entrepreneurs want to jump on a new idea or opportunity, sometimes it is best to be patient so that you can have a better understanding of the positive and negative impacts of a new idea. It takes time to actually consider the ramifications of different ideas on; infrastructure, strategy, focus, and working dynamic.

Finally, one of the partners should have ultimate authority to make a decision. As with any organism, nothing survives long with two heads. One person must have the ability to decide yay or nay for any decision. However, it is their responsibility to convince their partner of their decision or at least lay out the logic and reason behind it, both the pros and cons. The team has to be brought on board, and if they don’t know why decisions are being made then they are less likely to contribute at their best.

Partnerships work because both parties are bringing different experiences and skill sets to the table and they can only work together through discussion. Email, IM, wikis, blogs, etc don’t suffice on their own. They can contribute, but you must talk, talk, talk.

As starting a company becomes easier and much less expensive, what are the key skills needed to start a successful business?  More importantly, is it likely that one individual will have all of the necessary skill?

Open Source technologies, decreased costs for storage, bandwith and computing power and publicly available APIs have all contributed to a proliferation of startups websites offering new and quite innovative services.  The number of individuals who work from home whom are trying to build a business has

The issue for startups is that while the person building the site may not have the skills necessary to build a viable business.  It is easy enough to drill a well in the desert, but in no one knows that it is there does it do any good?

Many of the people that are starting sites using Open Source technoglogies and APIs have great ideas, but don’t know how to be heard above the noise…  What are the skill sets needed to be successful?

1. Marketing: simply bringing people to the site that can use the product or service
2. Monetization: how to make money off traffic generated (sales, advertising, other…)
3. Process: build a business that can scale to meet customer needs

The skills needed to build a new service are quite different:

1. Development: software know how
2. IT: networking know how
3. Organization: developing software and hardware systems that communicate and work seamlessly

These sets of skills are usually available in different types of individuals; known as the tech guy and the business guy.  Of course, these skills are not limited to one or the other, but in most cases they are generally true.
I have a co-founder that started nPost.com with me, and he has been instrumental to building out the technology, while I have been more focused on strategy and partnerships.  It works very well, although it requires a great degree of communication, communication, communication.  Without which, even the best ideas and opportunities can flounder.

My next posting will be on how to build co-founder relationships that work for online startups.

A key issue facing many startups is simply, do they have the depth of experience that they need to be successful? This is extremely important to areas without the history that tech rich regions such as Silicon Valley and NYC have to offer. Areas such as Seattle, Austin, Vancouver BC to name a few have a lot going for them, but finding and hiring top talent can be difficult.

John Cook, touches on the issue in a VC Notebook blog post. Capital is available, as are talented individuals, the quality of life is amazing, but how to develop that deep pool of executive talent? Can the schools be engaged? Will that even help in the short term?

nPost.com for its part is located in Seattle and Houston, and is looking to expand. As we do so, we may be forced to look to other locations to bring on the key experiences that we need to grow. So my question is more than simply rhetorical…

This could be simply a growing pain for the smaller tech oriented cities. Time will tell.

I have always been curious about that initial stage between when an entrepreneur has an idea and when they execute upon it. Many, many people have great ideas, but only a relative few know how to take it from concept to reality. What are the key skills that these individuals have? Where does it come from, and how does it work?

First and foremost, I would say that passion is the main secret ingredient.  Without it, everything else doesn’t fall into place.  Passion can be defined in a few ways; passion to prove oneself, passion to change the world around them, or even passion to make things just a bit easier.  Without passion; vision, drive, opportunity and profit are all wasted.  It is passion that drives businesses forward.

What will it take to elevate entrepreneurship in Seattle, Portland, and Vancouver BC? The pieces are in place, the resources are there, and the activity is hot, however, what can we do to take it ot the next level? The ideas are there, the people are there, I think it comes down to a lack of capital and correspondingly the lack of a deep bench of upper level talent.

What is the best way to address these issues? What level of capital is needed for a startup? $20k, $50k, $100k? How do you assemble the right advisory group? What are the key experiences that they need to have?