Start Now
So when should you start your startup and why?
I recently met with a few friends back from school because two of my friends work outside of Canada. One works in the Valley and the other works in London, England. After I chatted with them for an hour or so, this is what they told me. One said “We’ve had two batches of layoffs so far and I’m worried that I’ll be in the next batch.” Now this guys is really smart and really good at what he does. He’s responsible and he’s got great inter personal skills. He’s a fresh graduate (so his salary is probably lower than some of the more seniors in the company and he’s still worried).
The other guy told me that they’ve had some layoffs lately and the company had warned their team that they’re next if the order comes in. Now these guys wouldn’t be layed off, it was worse. They were to be relocated to another department under the same company to a different city. Now each one of these cities were in a different country (New York, Toronto, some place in Singapore).
Another thing I did 3 days ago was post a job posting to craigslist looking for a PHP developer. I received 10-12 replies in less than 24 hours. 3 were spams. 2 or 3 hadn’t read the post properly and were applying to work from a different country. We picked 3 to interview from the rest. One thing I noticed as I was going through the resumes, I realized some people had finished their last job in the last 1-2 months or they had started a part time gig 2-3 months ago. Now that’s a sign that the wave of recession has started hitting the tech industry too and perhaps there are more layoffs to come. Plus it’s January and many companies freeze their hires for another 2-3 months, because 4th quarter of 2008 wasn’t so gloomy for them.
So to answer the first question, if you are thinking of starting a startup, START NOW. To answer the second question, read the above 3 paragraphs. You don’t have to dedicate all your time to it at this stage. Start small and go forward. If you have an idea that you believe in, start researching it. Then start building a really really simple version of it. Something that I would look at for 30 seconds and know exactly what it did. If you don’t have any ideas, look around you. See what your former companies were missing. Try to be creative and change the way things are done. Look at your friends and see what bothers them a lot at work, or in their life. There are a lot of niche markets that you can find a technical solution or improvement to. If you need motivation, read Netscape time. If you need fuel for creativity follow Tim Ferris’ blog. This man is really creative and thinks outside the box. When you’re trying to be creative, don’t think money or cool. Think what are some problems and how you can solve it.
Start small and you will be surprised how the wheels of motivation start rolling in you 
Rokham Fard
Tags: entrepreneur, Netscape time, startup, Tim Ferris, toronto