Rise of the Parallel Entrepreneur

Fred Wilson has an interesting post up discussing the increase in parallel entrepreneurship - the practice of running two or more startups at the same time.  Fred cites long-standing examples like Bill Gross as well as more recent additions like Evan Williams and Kevin Rose.

This topics is particularly interesting to the lab as it is founded by a team of parallel entrepreneurs.   Both Ranvir and I are both actively building our separate entities.  Our desire to start the lab was almost thrust upon us through the experiences we were having carrying out those daily activities.  Often, this has been attributed to a lack of focus, however, I’ve countered often that it is not necessarily the case.
Fred makes one particular point worth noting:

Sam’s right, you can’t be a parallel CEO. But Scott is right that you can be a parallel entrepreneur. The key to the parallel entrepreneur model working is getting the management part right. Each project, once it gets launched, needs focus and attention. Someone has to be minding the store. If parallel entrepreneurs can figure out how to make that part work, they might be able to operate in parallel forever.

Source: A VC, “The Parallel Entrepreneur“

I will have to definitely concur on this assessment.  A good team within each of your projects is critical to the ultimate success of them all.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 29th, 2006 at 11:20 pm and is filed under Startup. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.