In my opinion, the decision is a no-brainer. Follow your passions and start a company. At this point in your career, it will not look bad on your resume if the business fails and you need to go work for someone else. If anything, the experience of starting and running your own company should count for much more experience than the equivalent time in a fresh-out-of-college job. This is generally the case unless the hiring manager is not very good at what they do, but that is an entirely different subject.

The other factors to consider are the opportunity costs and the risks of failure. Starting a business full-time as opposed to taking a job leaves potential salary income on the table. This is the opportunity cost while trying to pursue the entrepreneurial career.

How much do I need the income that a normal job will provide? What are my current living expenses? How long will it take for me to generate enough income in my venture to cover these living expenses? And do I have any savings to cushion this or provide backup? These are the questions to ask yourself.

Graduating students have a unique financial situation for the most part. They have minimal financial responsibilities compared to their older counterparts. No kids, no mortgage, and likely their debt is credit cards and student loans – both of which can be managed with smaller monthly payments. If the business completely fails, the financial ramifications can be much less devastating than if an entire family was supported by the entrepreneur.

I Twittered these thoughts yesterday and received some interesting feedback. One response was that it is expensive to start a company and can be difficult for a young entrepreneur to raise capital even from friends and family. I can’t disagree more with this statement.

The cost of starting a business can be extremely low. It all depends on what you’re trying to accomplish. If the company is going to be in consulting or another type of service business, the costs are minimal. Company formation can be done online inexpensively via services like LegalZoom and many of the basic business management tools are available online from free to low cost.

If it’s a Internet based business, again the costs are low. The same application that would have taken hundreds of thousands of dollars to build a few years ago is now in the tens of thousands (if not less via offshoring). Server and other infrastructure costs have dramatically fallen. And if you’re a technical founder, you’ll be doing much (all?) of the development work yourself, so it’s not that hard to build something and launch it for minimal costs.

Obviously, none of this applies if your business idea is to start a new biotech company or a micro brewery or a semiconductor manufacturer. Yes, these require large amounts of capital to get started. But it’s quite possible, with the right idea, to start small and learn quickly.

It’s easy to get started (especially as a young entrepreneur), but I’m not necessarily implying it’s easy to become successful. That will be the topic of some future posts.

UPDATE: For more discussion of student entrepreneurs, Rob McNealy of Startup Story Radio is currently running a series of podcasts with a successful young entrepreneurs.

When you run a small business, you’re usually running too fast and hard to think about data backups. Then something terrible happens—a hardware failure, an employee or contractor gets sloppy and kills a month’s worth of work—and you realize that you better slow down and figure out a few things.

If you’re like me, you’re not exactly an expert in backup systems. All you know is that you need to have something in place in case of emergency. So you stand there looking out over the yawning precipice of possible solutions. There are USB and FireWire external hard drives, network-attached storage machines, Linux machines you can repurpose as backup machines, thumb drives, and hosting solutions to which you can rsync files. From a distance, they all look pretty much alike, except for maybe price point and storage capacity.

The article covers getting set up with Amazon S3, understanding how the service works, and some PHP to perform the backup.

Another excellent resource once you have an account with Amazon S3 (if you don’t want to roll your own backup scripts) is Jungle Disk. Jungle Disk is a desktop application (Win, Mac, and Linux) that enables you to use Amazon S3 storage as a mapped drive on your computer. Think of it like a USB drive with unlimited storage.

Virginia finished in the top ten in four of the six main categories (business and living costs, job and income growth, business climate, educational attainment, venture capital investment, and quality of life) examined by Forbes.

Virginia’s top attributes include an incentive environment that is the fourth-best in the country, according to Pollina Corporate Real Estate, a commercial real estate consulting firm, as well as an unemployment rate that’s the third lowest in the nation.

The remainder of the top five states were Utah, North Carolina, Texas and Washington. This chart lists the full rankings with related data.

Many entrepreneurs I speak with echo the fact that Virginia is a great state for business. It’s nice to see this sentiment qualified by an organization like Forbes. The more publicity the better.

What pauses me to think is the growing trend towards web-based office applications. The benefits are great, but I just don’t think the mass market is ready for this dependence on the web. Today was a perfect example. For many of us, Internet access often appears ubiquitous. We never think about it until we don’t have access or when our wifi connection is on the fritz. If I wasn’t using a desktop based email and office suite of applications, I would have been completely grounded.

I think the realization of a web-based operating system will come, but we’re not there yet with the current infrastructure in place. So, again I greet the latest speculation regarding Google with a healthy dose of skepticism. Apparently some screenshots have increased discussion of an upcoming presentation product for Google to add to their expanding suite. If there was any doubt Google is moving towards an entire web-based operating system, even rumors of this presentation product should quell them.

Trends show us moving in the direction of full web-based office suites being desktop replacements for some workers. Zoho is doing a great job of this right now and I’d consider them the leader for a fully integrated suite of business applications.

When Internet access is a stable as other utilities like water and electricity, then we can completely rely on a web-based operating system for business needs. Otherwise, these applications are great for sharing and collaboration, but not full reliance. Right now I prefer apps that integrate closely with the Internet, yet are still functional without it.

(via Webware and TechCrunch)

Technorati Tags: google, office, software, web

Schmidt, who received master’s and doctorate degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, spoke at Tech’s commencement in 1999 at Torgersen’s request. He’s given to Tech before, establishing the Wilson E. Schmidt Endowed Professorship in Economics at the university with a $250,000 gift in honor of his late father in 1999.

The endowed chair will be used by Engineering Dean Richard Benson at his discretion to support students and programs in the college. Benson said in an e-mail Thursday that the gift will allow him to fulfill his vision for the college.

“The idea that Eric Schmidt would think so much of Virginia Tech’s College of Engineering, when he did not obtain his degree here, is overwhelming,” he said.

With hacking, you never have to worry how something is going to come out. Software doesn’t “come out.” If there’s something you don’t like, you change it.

and

…writing is like painting. You don’t have the same total control over the medium. In fact, you probably wouldn’t want it.

I think this is amplified if you have a perfectionist nature as many programmers do. Always trying to fix things, trying to improve, refactor and make it better. With writing though, you have to actually finish at some point. There needs to be some semblance of a final version or there will never be a copy for a someone to actually read.

Read the whole article as he makes some excellent points. As opposed to Paul’s usually long essays, this one is easily digestible.

These readability stats looked like they were coming out of Microsoft Word, yet I has never seen this feature before. I’m familiar with the basic statistics found under document properties (paragraphs, words, characters), but not one covering passive sentences and ease of reading. After some quick googling, I found the following tip for enabling this feature in Word. If you’re using Word for writing documents, it’s a nice addition that can only help weed out some common mistakes. Now, if Microsoft can just add it to Live Writer for blogging…

Web:

• FreshBooks (http://www.freshbooks.com/)
• Basecamp (http://www.basecamphq.com/)
• Tick (http://www.tickspot.com)
• SlimTimer (http://www.slimtimer.com)
• Harvest (http://www.getharvest.com)
• 88 Miles (http://www.88miles.net)
• 14dayz (http://www.14dayz.com/site/)
• Time Tracker (http://www.formassembly.com/time-tracker/)
• Side Job Track (http://www.sidejobtrack.com/)
• 1time (http://www.1time.ie/)
• myHours.com (http://www.myhours.com/)

Desktop:

• On the Job http://www.stuntsoftware.com/OnTheJob/
• Timeless Time & Expense (http://www.magsoftwrx.com/)

I didn’t realize there were this many applications available for time tracking. We use FreshBooks at EvolvePoint for both our invoicing as well as time tracking. I like the fact that these two operations are integrated into FreshBooks. There are times for separating functions, but I’m not 100% sold on time tracking as one of them. The problem of having a separate, stand-alone application comes when it’s time to actually do the billing. Now you have to export, re-enter hours, or cut and past data. None of these options are preferable in my eyes. It’s a huge time saver to be able to directly transfer project hours straight into an invoice.

If you don’t have this need, I can definitely see the appeal in having a simple time tracking application especially for personal projects or those that aren’t directly billable.

One feature I’d like to see in these applications is more integration with QuickBooks. FreshBooks is starting to do this (they have a single report for export to QuickBooks), but I’d like to see a more robust and flexible feature set in this regard. As QuickBooks is pretty much the standard for small business bookkeeping and these services primarily target the small business, I’m not sure why there hasn’t been more of a demand for tighter integration.