Start-ups backed by venture capital typically require large sums of money to rent office space, hire and pay people, develop
the product or service, bring it to market, and slowly achieve profitability. This is a multimillion-dollar activity. In fact, the scale of it is sufficiently high that the original investors in a company almost always know that they are just providing the first round of financing, with additional rounds to follow as the company grows and hopefully makes progress toward its objectives.
In contrast, a go-it-alone business is about investing a limited amount of money in start-up costs (typically from $2,000 to $20,000), generally establishing a home office, and figuring out how the founder is going to live during the period in which he or she builds the business. The risk associated with a go-it-alone business should also be substantially lower: By the time the founder reaches the point of attempting to make the business go, he or she should be well along in developing the product and testing its viability with paying customers
DID YOU KNOW EINSTEIN DID IT?
In 2000, Time magazine named Albert Einstein Person of the Century, because “even now scientists marvel at the daring of general relativity.” To Max Born, who was himself a well-known physicist, that “great work of art” [Einstein’s general theory of
