Espen has some quotes from Neil Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (which occupies a place ony my bookshelf, despite being yet to be read...) on what should go into a business plan for an upstart company:
EXTREMELY SERIOUS WARNING (printed out on a separate page, in red letters on a yellow background): Unless you are as smart as Johann Karl Friedrich Gauss, savvy as a half-blind Calcutta bootblack, tough as General William Tecumseh Sherman, rich as the Queen of England, emotionally resilient as a Red Sox fan, and as generally able to take care of yourself as the average nuclear submarine commander, you should never have been allowed near this document. Please dispose of it as you would any piece of high-level radioactive waste and then arrange with a qualified surgeon to amputate your arms at the elbows and gouge your eyes from their sockets. This warning is necessary because once, a hundred years ago, a little old lady in Kentucky put a hundred dollars into a dry goods company that went belly-up and returned her only ninety-nine dollars. Ever since, the government has been on our asses. If you ignore this warning, read on at your peril -- you are dead certain to lose everything you've got and live out your final decades beating back waves of termites in a Mississippi Delta leper colony.
I am constantly surprised at the number of technically competent and verbally adapt people (not naming names here, but you know them.....) who have "Cryptonomicon" and haven't read it. It is a great book - and leaves you wondering what to do when you have finished it....
Posted by: Espen on June 3, 2004 06:26 PMClearly I'll put it straight on to the "must read" list. Hopefully I'll get to it sometime this summer :-) Thanks for the heads-up, Espen!
Posted by: Anders on June 3, 2004 07:28 PMIt does not look like I can find a friendly advice on ths site... Look at the warning...
Posted by: on June 28, 2004 08:59 AM|
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