P1100465 Jason Cohen: from geek to entrepreneur

Jason Cohen (@asmartbear), the founder of Smart Bear Software, gave a talk "From Geek to Entrepreneur: Sifting Through The Bull5h1t". The gist of his advice for techies who want to start their own companies: take all the established entrepreneurial wisdom with the grain of salt. Advice exists in context. Rules -- from how often you should blog about your company, to how hard you should work, to whether you need salespeople, to whether it's better to be bootstrapped or funded -- are dependent on the nature of your business ("Rich vs. King", as shown in the next picture), and exist solely in context. Since rules are meant to be broken, pick the rules that are fun to you! In his speech, Jason Cohen illustrated how he broke each established rule, and still built a successful software company.