Paul Graham leaves out that Bill Gates had a rich father that seeded Microsoft, and a rich mother that was on the Board of Directors at IBM, 2 important factors for Bill Gates success that had little to do with luck (tangential to the point of the article no doubt).

Like you, I always commit to myself to not work crazy hours when starting a new venture, but it just seems like developing proprietary software is such a time consuming endeavor. I can never figure out how to get around it … at least in the first year.

Looking forward to your next post.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by asmartbear: One entrepreneur’s real-world experiences being AND acting like a small company: http://bit.ly/aAnpgF…

I think there is often a danger that the customer’s project gets less focus inside a larger firm, hence my point about having less stuff “on the go”. However if that gets interpreted as “we have less bandwidth”, I accept that isn’t a great message. Your points about flexibility and customisation are well taken on that front.

You were right about the point about conflict of interest – it wasn’t very obvious so I’ve made a minor update, adding “… with a larger supplier there is always a chance they will have their own product or service where their interests are not perfectly aligned with those of your prospect” – perhaps this isn’t all too common but it certainly can be a factor in favour of the small company.

As a general point, I thought about what you wrote in your excellent article “You’re a little company, now act like one” – I agree the early adopter is a great target market, but if you are entering a more established market with a “better mousetrap”, you don’t always get the luxury of wooing early adopters. The idea of this article was to provide a counterpoint for those entering more established markets.

(The font BTW is Georgia – I think it’s the Thesis default but I’m a PC so I’ve no idea what it looks like on Macs sadly. Glad you like it ).

I agree with most of what you said here. I don’t believe one of a small company’s advantages is always overhead; big companies do have overhead but also can afford to waste a ton of money, so they still might deliver a product/service that a small company could never match (for the price), even if that means the big company is actually losing money on every sale.

Also saying a small company “doesn’t have much to do so we can pay attention” is maybe not the best light you can shine! Perhaps better is: “Because we’re small and agile, we can customize the product for you, even adding entire features that you need (if we think others need it too). Try getting THAT from a big company!”

Said another way, things like “we have less internal conflict of interest” isn’t exactly a benefit to the end user. Or at least, nothing immediately comes to mind. Casting it as “You can talk directly to the founder” is tangible and obviously valuable, so maybe communicates that benefit more directly.

Overall though love and agree with this post!

Finally, I love your font, at least on a Mac browser. Usually not a fan of the serif fonts for on-screen reading, but this looks nice!