“Don’t worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you’ll have to ram them down people’s throats.”

- Howard Aiken, computing pioneer

If you ever find yourself the recipient of stock with a vesting clause, make sure to heavily consider an 83(b) election. It’s usually the right thing to do, and can save you a ton of pain down the road (and even bankruptcy, in extreme situations). Without one there may be some unexpected and very unpleasant tax consequences. There are many articles about this; here and here are two that provide a quick intro to the topic.

Check out David Fry’s (serial entrepreneur, investor, and CTO, Fry Communications) great answer to “What’s the shrewdest, smartest maneuver you’ve ever seen in business?”

My (and many others’) favorite definition of entrepreneurship was penned in 1987 by Harvard Business School Professor Howard Stevenson: ”Entrepreneurship is the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled.”

Nothing in this definition requires entrepreneurs to be starting their own companies; entrepreneurial individuals can just as easily exist within established
organizations. How one marshalls the resources to purse an opportunity may look a bit different, but the principles are very similar. (Budding intrapreneurs can find some pointers here, here, and here.)

It is true that entrepreneurs get a disproportionate share of the attention. A ton of innovation, perhaps without the same glory, is being generated simultaneously by intrapreneurs (Sony Playstation, LinkedIn’s People You May Know, and Gmail are just a few examples). As a result, smart companies encourage intrapreneurship.

If you want to solve big problems and drive real change in the world, intrapreneurship may very well be the best answer (for example, distribution and thus monetization is often much easier within established companies). So be a true entrepreneur – start pursuing an opportunity today, using whatever resources you can find.

“When you begin with ‘Everyone’ you’re just stuck: How do you make any honest decisions? How do you solve any real problems? You don’t. You start to invent people and you start to invent their problems and it’s amazing because those people and those problems line up almost exactly with what you’re building and how you’re thinking about it—imagine that. Lying to yourself is amazing for productivity. …

[Solving real problems for a real audience is] the only way you make something that lasts, because you made something that someone actually cared about.”

- Daniel Sinker in “Oh my god, don’t make things for ‘Everyone.’“

If you haven’t already, check out First Round Capital’s inspiring introduction to Holacracy: “How Medium is building a new kind of company with no managers“. Holacracy, a self-described “social technology for agile and purposeful organization,” is called by Medium‘s Jason Stirman “hands down, by far the best way I know or have ever seen to structure and run a company.” Holacratic organizations are characterized by purpose driven work and structure, clearly distributed authority without people managers, proactive and systematic tension resolution, lean and role-centric organization with organic expansion, and highly effective meetings. Even organizations that are not ready to take the full plunge to adopting this fairly radical governance model – as most will not be – can learn a lot from it.

“Everyone wants to build a billion-dollar company, and they think they need to go out and find angel funding. Not everyone starts with that ability. … Do what you can within your means, and just work hard. … It’s cliche, but money’s overrated.”

- Mike Chang, cofounder of Rapid LED