McCombs MBA Alumni Network: Chris Treadaway, MBA ’05 in “The Age of the Thrifty Entrepreneur”
From McCombs Director of Communications David Wenger and ID University
Are you willing to obsess over costs, eat Ramen for dinner, toil far from the PR limelight, and build the business one customer at a time?
I walked the path over to Chris Treadaway’s blog, The Common Sense Web…An Entrepreneurs’ Blog, and was immediately taken by his posting on An Alternative Startup Approach. Treadaway quotes Rob Adams (one of the driving sparks behind the UT business school’s vibrant entrepreneurship program) at a recent Texchange event, saying that it is “easier for a startup to sell a major customer than it is to raise funding.”
Treadaway highlights a few of the reasons this is so, noting that even angel investors are seeking safe investments, as there isn’t much appetite for risk these days. He suggests that conditions as they are have created a temporary shift of power to the bootstrapping entrepreneur. Read his article for the details, the conclusion as I see it is this. How much do you want to bring your idea to market? Are you willing to obsess over costs, eat Ramen for dinner, toil far from the PR limelight, and build the business one customer at a time? Read more.

