Toronto Entrepreneur

Your level of education before starting your business will truly help you throughout the entire process. Unlike many other experiences you’ve had with education, this one can actually be fun and motivating. One of the main reasons that it’s fun, is because it involves a lot of creativity and innovation. You don’t only get marks in return for you assignments, you get recognition, criticism, followers, competition, evangelists and of course revenue if you do your assignments well. The best time to start your education, is before you start your startup.

I know how busy life is when you’re close to graduation. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts Starting a startup after graduation, I also know how tough it may be for you to decide that you’re going to start your own startup. But believe me educating yourself on how to start a successful startup is going to become the exciting and fun part of your life. It will motivate you and help you take from school the things that matter most in the real life.

There is plenty of education that I need myself but here are some stuff I’ve picked on the way so far. First of all try to take advantage of any business related course you can take at your university. For example UofT’s Business of Software (CSC 454) course was an amazing course that I took, for several reasons. They teach you what a business plan is, what goes in it, why it is important and finally how to write one. As you go through this process you learn about other aspects of the business such as angel/VC investment, marketing, your competition and much more. You are introduced to great references throughout the course, such as Art of the start, Selling the invisible and if you’re looking for something to really increase the adrenaline in your blood, Netscape time. Last but not least, these courses are great places to make connections. You will meet other like-minded people and people who are in the industry who are sometimes invited to give a lecture at your class. Next step is following the right blogs.

Learn to follow blogs and make sure you follow the right blogs. You learn about good blogs over time and you’ll learn who’s a good blogger and who is not. A great blog reader is Google Reader. If you’re not familiar with blogs and like a starting point, I could recommend Alltop which they call “an online magazine rack of popular topics”.

I will have a second part to this post where I will talk about various social networking events in Toronto as well social networking tools and how you should leverage them. I will point out some of the very active people in Toronto’s startup community and their efforts so far to build this community from ground up.

Yours truly,

Rokham Fard

Tags: education, startup, toronto

This entry was posted on Monday, November 24th, 2008 at 11:32 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.