Having witnessed several successful startups grow from concept to real-business, I can finally sit down and define what elements you need if you hope to succeed.

1. At least one of the founders must have a car, in case you need to pick up office supplies from Office Depot. However, multiple founders should help pay for parking when you meet at Starbucks.
2. There should be at least one girl in the group, whether she’s a founder, employee, or one of the founder’s girlfriends. The girl is a good litmus test for flagging extremely stupid ideas.
3. Draft roles, processes, timelines, plans, bylaws, org charts, or resource allocation charts at least once a year, but no one should look at those docs for the rest of the year. At least one team member should protest “whats the process for this” or “whats his role” to which someone might reference the fact that there is a document for that somewhere.
4. Whenever the founders go home from the office around 6pm or 7pm, they should go back to their computers and keep working until 1am, communicating frequently over gtalk ot Skype. In fact, more communication should happen over gtalk and Skype than by phone or in-person.
5. Own at least 2 dry erase boards and always run out of markers. Accidentally use a permanent marker at some point.
6. Have at least one founder who thinks he is a good designer, humor him a little, though everyone unanimously agrees he can’t design.
7. At any one point in time, at least one founder should be working at a coffee shop, even if you have an actual office.
8. Have 3 pitches for your startup. One pitch is for smart investors who understand your market and might actually invest. Another pitch is for people you meet at parties, explaining why you’re going to save or change the world. The third pitch is for your parents or non-techy degree’d friends explaining why you’re not wasting your life.
9. Have private corporate documents indescriminately mixed in with personal notes, like print-out maps to the airport or university alumni newsletters.
10. Have at least one founder who refuses to maintain a calendar, so that everyone else is forced to call him every few hours asking where he is or if he is coming into the office.

I noticed an interesting similarity between entrepreneurship and sustainability. Aside from the causal relationship (entrepreneurial innovation leads to more sustainable practices) there is also an analogy to be drawn between the short-term self-interests of private institutions who do not currently proactively fund either sustainable development or startups, and the public goods created by entrepreneurship and sustainable development. In other words, the Principals who possess the capital (corporations, funds, wealthy individuals) do not adequately invest in either risky startups or sustainable development, since most of the positive externatity of those investments cannot be quickly monetized. Invention raises the standards of living, and Sustainable development preserves ecosystems. Yet a private agent, by current market forces, often does not have the private incentives either to invest in their own sustainable practices for long-term efficiency, or in the equity investment of high-risk startups due to a lack of strategic focus.

The bottleneck is most often that entrepreneurship and sustainable development never get off the ground and remain in ‘idea land’ since any collaborating agent must set aside his own short-term self-interest in order to cooperate with other self-interested agents on a goal that might profit the public as much as it profits the institution. Sometimes the goals run in parallel, such as corporate investment in electric cars or alternative energy patents, where sustainable outcomes are also privately profitable to the investor. Yet often the goals are divergent, when an entrepreneur cannot bring his invention to public market because it might be more convenient to the investor or partner to create artificial scarcity, or a startup may not get funding from any one institution because each institution may want to develop the technology internally (or not at all).

Private institutions often create artificial scarcity of information, where a startup may have a technology whose distribution is both a private good to the investor or partner, and a public good to the economy. Yet what that invention is, how it can be used, and who might best take advantage of it is effectively privatized and kept secret via the corporate partners. The question of ‘who has the incentive to help fund, distribute, and integrate this innovation’ is similar to ‘who has an incentive to integrate this sustainable campaign’ in that few individual agents have the incentive to best capitalize on innovation within the context of public good. Often these innovations and sustainable campaigns are funded by universities, private benefactors, the government, or corporations looking to make a PR play. Yet both entrepreneurship and sustainability are not ’systemetized’ to incentivize all parties to act both out of private incentives and public good. Therefore it is a campaign for the next century to systemetize, through PR and marketing as much through legislation and tax credits, the macro-processes of discovery and distribution of innovation whose greatest benfactors may not be the investors but the public at large.