A Too Common Conversation of Late

Layoffs continue to encourage old friends and co-workers to reconnect and many to consider–somewhat involuntarily–an entrepreneurial phase for their next career move. I spoke to three people today who had been laid off in the last month or so. Here is the summary of some key suggestions the three conversations:

• If you are considering joining or forming a startup, check out a Bootstrappers Breakfast that’s convenient. We are up to four a month in Palo Alto, Mountain View, Sunnyvale, and Milpitas.
• Probably the best South Bay group for professionals seeking employment is the eight year old CSIX, they meet every Tuesday in Cupertino and every Thursday in Saratoga.
• If you are considering a career in consulting consider joining/attending
• The IEEE Consulting Network
• The Professional and Technical Consultants Association
• An Area Breakfast for Consultants
• If you are feeling inventive check out the Inventor’s Alliance and TechShop.
• We see a decidedly mixed economic environment with some clients prospering and others not so much. It’s definitely not as bad as the dotcom meltdown for technical folks in Silicon Valley but it’s not good and it doesn’t look like it will turn around this year.
• There is a lot of opportunity, especially if you are able to take advantage of some technical and business innovations whose full effects are yet to be felt:
• Skype, and VoIP in general make global conversations, both personal and teleconferences much less expensive.
• Cloud computing, in particular Amazon’s EC2, make launching a new web business cheap and easy to scale.
• Wikis and real-time document collaboration services are fundamentally altering consulting service delivery.
• More generally, software-enabled services that blend human expertise with automation are creating a number of new kinds of businesses.

I am always happy to hear from old friends and former co-workers and happy to try and connect you with other folks or firms where there may be some synergies.