CS Entrepreneurship: How Do Tech Entrepreneurs Start Businesses?

A tech entrepreneur is just like any other entrepreneur, but their focus will be heavily oriented toward the domain of computers in general, but more specifically in software development.

To that end, their personality must be less extraverted than most entrepreneur personalities, since computers are very anti-social experiences with logic and programming.

Business Ideas

The speed that computers run means that most of the limits in building your own business is mostly based on how well you can develop software, along with the ability to keep computers running for the necessary services that software needs.

Of course, once an organization gets larger, the people running it have to spend more time managing teams, which takes away from software development. It allows larger-scale work, but the hourly-rate new hires won’t have the passion for it like the people who get paid more for doing a good job.

Eventually, the organization will mostly consist of wage slaves. Since the technology will have been established, the organization will keep maintaining and curating a potentially old “codebase”. They won’t want to change it under the “if it ain’t broke don’t fix it” mentality, partly from.

Thus, since all computer code can be improved, tech entrepreneurship always has room for freelancers and people who are willing to explore a new way to use computers.

Business Plan

While most business plans require plenty of assets, the only assets tech always needs are computers and tools.

One of the most distinctive domains of business plans that contrasts with almost any other business is the freedom of version control. By releasing products to the public in alpha or beta, you have the luxury of selling a product that’s not complete and not tested, but you can start making revenue on it while receiving a wealth of information via bugfix and feature requests.

Scaling: Financing

You may have an amazing business idea, and may have even been working it as a side hustle, but how do you prove that this thing will make enough money that someone would want to invest?

To start with, you need to prove that you’re legitimate. Very often, scams prey on new trends like blockchain. This is where your social skills become important.

But, more importantly, you must demonstrate that you’ll make the “venture capitalists” money or, in a “not-for-profit” (NPO), legitimately change something for the better. You might get lucky and become a “unicorn” (with a company value surpassing $1 billion), but it’s more likely that you’ll have a long, hard road ahead.

Exit Strategy

In the tech industry, intellectual property is everything related to software. To that end, the risks of intellectual property theft are so strong that any organization observing your startup has every incentive to learn what they can and imitate the idea.

If you plan to sell your intellectual property or entire startup organization to a large company (especially Big Tech), get lawyers involved in the process as early as possible.