How did your start-up start?

How did your start-up start? Here's the story of mine.

I got involved in a little side discussion last night at our first board meeting. We ended up discussing the external factors that pushed us down the route of working for ourselves, of starting up our own business and being our own bosses.

There are currently 4 members of our board, our CEO, the CTO (that being me), our Creative Director and an external investor who is a Non-Executive Director. Either way, during one of the breaks in proceedings the three of us who are actually employed by the company on a full time basis, and also happen to be 3 people who worked together for 2 years at our last company (as employees), got to talking about how we decided to go it 'alone'.

I think we all pretty much agreed that if it wasn't from the experiences we'd had at our last company, rather than setting out on our own adventure we would have probably just found a regular 9-5 job again as the current project came to an end. What were these experiences? Let me summarise:

• The first, and probably most serious - Not getting paid. Towards the end the company just stopped paying. Quickly running out of cash and potential investors the company was just not able to pay the people it needed to. Rather than explaining this situation to the employees the company kept promising money, investment, saviour... etc... Needless to say the entire team was made redundant at the end of April and nobody, as of yet, has been paid (not to mention the fact that the development team, our team, only received half a months salary in October 2010 that is still outstanding).
• Direction - To put it simply, there was none. The company was run by an entrepreneur, like every entrepreneur he had a thousand ideas a day. Unfortunately he seemed unable to differentiate between good ideas and bad ideas or even focus on the current ideas in development. The product changed every few months and the good ideas that were there were often poorly executed or just aimed at completely the wrong market despite what people with more knowledge around him said.
• The Treatment of Colleagues - Needless to say, from the above, along the way there were a few redundancies as the company started to fail. This in itself is not a bad thing, although not ideal, if handled in the correct and proper manner is a perfectly acceptable part of business. Not there. Employees allowed to work for the month and then let go at the end of the month without any pay, notice pay or redundancy pay. Their phone calls where ignored and any sign of a court case regarding pay would see the company put into liquidation and the name changed.
• Company Opinion - Not surprisingly, with all this going on, a few disgruntled ex-employees vented their opinions on the WWW. I'm sure Google gives a higher page rank to bad news rather than good news. Either way, a not particularly hard Google search on the company name reveals all. Not to mention, if you look at the company history, 8 changes of name in the past 2 years doesn't look particularly honest to anybody looking to invest in the company or purchase a product with an ongoing support agreement.

Needless to say this is probably enough to put anyone off wanting to be employed! As such we decided to have a crack at it ourselves. Our experiences have shown us what bad business practices can do to a company and it's employees and we'll strive not to make the same mistakes.

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I have to admit, we have some amazing looking clients already, some generous investment and some cool products in the works. Exciting times ahead.

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