A Quantum Immortal

Someone asked me today

I’d like to ask how you educate about different things that are important in startups, for example how to develop your business, how to build a team etc. Do you have any good sources or something?

First of all, I’d like to state that I’m quite a newbie at this – Bitblu is my first startup, and I’m still learning the ropes.

Still, I believe even newbies can teach what they know, and I’m glad to do my bit. What follows is a bulleted list of resources that I gathered on this  topic along the years:

Quora

Quora is the best site in the world after Google. Any question you have about anything – ask it on Quora, and you’ll find the answer sooner or later. Quora is swimming for experienced founders, many of them very eager to help and share their knowledge.

Your Friends

As you start getting into the startup business, you should build yourself a network of friends, more and less experienced than you are at the business of entrepreneurship. It can be hard to crack this if you don’t know any founders (a good tip is to go work at a small startup for a while, it’s a great school). Once you have a foot in the door, you’ll often find that it’s easier than you thought expanding this network and building honest relationships with people that have done this before, and are happy to share.

Just a word for the wise – don’t try to abuse these relationship, and make sure not to just look for people to learn from, but give back and teach and help others. This kind of honest, helpful communication helps the entire network and will expose you to the right kind of people.

You should use social networks, especially LinkedIn, as appropriate (FYI, Rapportive is a must-have extension for you) – just don’t be a jerk and respect other people’s time.

Meetups

Meetups are a terrific way for someone without a lot of founder friends to surround himself with like-minding individuals. They all may be of varying skill and experience levels, but their agendas are often similar, and the content that is presented in many of the meetups is extremely helpful.

Look for startups on Entrepreneurship and Startups in your vicinity. I’m lucky to live in Tel Aviv, one of the world’s best startup hubs, and have access to a lot of such meetups, most of them free of charge.

Blogs

Blog is a terrific resource for understanding what kinds of questions you should even ask yourself. I am following several such blogs myself, but there are a ton of them out there.

How to find and choose among them? Remember my first bullet – Quora?

I just searched for “startup blog” on Quora and found this terrific question, with many good answers.

Learn it on the go

The worst thing for your startup is to think that you can’t start it without knowing all the answers. The essence of startup, the essential product that you are producing, is not code … it is Learning. You learn your business problems, your customers, your technological hurdles. This learning is an ongoing, never-ending process – it’s not done before you get going, it is the work in itself.

You’re welcome to add any important resources that I missed in the comments below.

Good luck!