Don't Start A Business With Friends, And Other Lessons From A Serial Entrepreneur
Kirk Simpson learned a thing or two after his first start-up joined the dot-com graveyard in 2001. Such as: don't start a business with friends. "There's a tendency with your first business to surround yourself with friends as co-founders," says Simpson, who launched adventurelifestyle.com in 1997 at age 23, after dropping out of college. The site helped people arrange extreme adventure trips, such as bungee jumping excursions. "I think there's a natural desire to do it. You have to look at it from 50,000 feet: if I didn't know this person as a friend, would I want to work with him or her? Then look at the friendship -- is there loyalty, trustworthiness?" Adventurelifestyle.com was largely self-funded, with some angel financing. Simpson and his buddy hired five more employees (friends) before it folded. He blames the failure on his youthful naivete, among other things. "We didn't have a big enough network," he says, to really figure o...