Hi, my name is Ted Paff. I have been a serial entrepreneur for over 15 years. Prior to that I was a venture capitalist and an investment banker. I have an MBA from Columbia University and a BA from the University of Maryland at Baltimore County. I am married and have 2 children. I love to play and have lots of hobbies including almost anything that is in, on or under moving water (surfing, kitesurfing, white-water kayaking, diving etc.).
In the early part of my career, I was paid to advise business leaders on how to start, grow and finance their businesses and, eventually, achieve liquidity (ie sell their equity). In what would best be described as ass-backwards career planning, after a successful investment banking and VC career, I decided to become an entrepreneur.
As I quickly discovered, it is very hard to have an accurate perspective on any business that you are running while you are running it. Because the perspectives we have inform and drive our strategic decisions, it is no surprise that a small army of consultants and advisers are available with promises of helping us see our situation and options more clearly.
The problem is, having been one of those advisers, the perspective I thought I had on the businesses I was advising was far from complete or accurate because things inside of a business (ie the reality of the situation) are seldom as they appear on the outside.
So if you don’t have an accurate perspective while running a business and advisers are never going to have a complete perspective either, how do you at least get a more accurate perspective on which to make decisions?
Welcome to Bootstrapping
Wait, what does perspective on building and running a business have to do with Bootstrapping?
This blog is intended to be most useful for business leaders that have not raised significant amounts of outside equity capital (VC, private or public equity), which is also called “bootstrapping”. Although there are lots of downsides with raising equity capital, one of the real upsides is that a professional, multi-experience-based board-of-directors is typically forced down your throat.
My hope in creating this blog is to create a forum for bootstrapped entrepreneurs to gain perspectives on their own business, ask questions anomalously of others in the community and help each other. I plan to publish a new post every week on Sunday. But, I wont always hit that goal. Goofing off, working on my next start up or helping someone else may take me away for a while but I will return. I am planning on covering a wide range of topics focused in the following areas:
> Getting Started
> Managing Yourself
> Managing Others
> Strategy
> Capital
> Liquidity
What topics would you like addressed? Feel free to answer in the comments or get in touch with me directly.
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