The buzz from startup executives, especially high-tech ones, has long been that startups are no place for Baby-Boomers (1946-1964) – you must have the high energy and crazy determination to work 20-hour days to succeed. Only the under-35 age group need apply.

I will argue that times have changed, and you better take another look. First of all, the Boomer demographic is currently the single largest, mainstream pool of experienced talent in the market today (76 million people strong). They have worked with high technology and computers for at least 20 years, are highly educated, and highly motivated. Last year about 40% of the total workforce was Boomers.

Most surprisingly, according to a report from the Kauffman Foundation, the highest rate of entrepreneurship in America has already shifted to the 55–64 age group, with people over 55 almost twice as likely to found successful companies than those between 20 and 34.

In addition to being startup founders, there are several other key roles that I see Boomers taking more often these days to drive successful startups:

1. Advisory Board. How can you beat finding someone who has been there and done that, able to mentor Gen-Y, has lots of connections to people in your industry, and is often willing to work for equity alone? Most actually have the time and inclination to help you, rather than compete with you.
2. Angel Investor. Almost all angel investors are “high net worth” individuals who made their money running a successful business in your domain, and they will mentor your team as well as demand the discipline you need to make your business work. Boomer angels won’t squeeze you for every dollar; they want to see your joy in success.
3. Interim Executive. Startups can rarely afford or even attract the young superstar C-level executives they covet – these people want big salaries, big staffs, and big budgets – who are also known to push founders out of the way. What you need is an experienced executive, who is willing to work for equity, and will happily step aside in a couple of years when your revenues exceed $20M.
4. Customer Service. Who better to run your customer service than an experienced professional with a little gray hair, who is firm but calm, soft-spoken, and credible around your customers? They know how to arbitrate immature tantrums, and lead by example.
5. Executive Assistant (aka Secretary). Here you want someone who knows the ropes, never gets ruffled, always shows up on time (no kids to drop off at school), and knows that their retirement depends on doing this job well. They have the maturity and sophistication to deal with your demanding executives and partners.

Of course, there are other positions were Boomers are sometimes not the best fit:

• Leading-edge technology architects, designers, consultants, and engineers.
• High-travel sales and buyer positions.
• Retail sales to Gen-X and Gen-Y.
• Construction and heavy labor jobs.

With the current difficult economic times, when companies fold, merge or cut back, more workers of all ages find themselves in search of new jobs. While everyone around you is snapping up the younger workers, my recommendation is that you think carefully about the job requirements in your startup before you follow the crowd.

In my view, there is an obvious opportunity here for a win-win situation by bringing together the best of Boomers with the high energy and crazy determination of the under-35 crowd. The crowd of Boomers won’t be going away any time soon, and more and more of them are finding that taking another bite of the apple is a healthy step for them. Join them today.

If you have a unique creation or invention, and you are not selling it around the world on the Internet, now is the time to start. The cost of entry has never been lower. Anyone can be an entrepreneur today, without a huge investment, bank loans, venture capitalists, or Angels.

In the early days (20 years ago), most new e-commerce sites cost a million dollars to set up. Now the price is closer to $100, if you are willing to do the work yourself. Here are the key steps for a personal home-based business website selling a few products (as an alternative to Ebay):

1. Go online to reserve a website domain name. Be sure it matches your business, and get a hosting agreement from one of the popular providers like GoDaddy. The cost for the domain name is maybe $10/year, and the hosting starts around $50/year. Start simple.
2. Download free website tools. Many hosting services offer free tools, or will build a default website for you. Other popular tools are available at low cost, with built-in e-commerce capabilities (pay via PayPal or credit card), including FrontPage in the Microsoft Office Suite, and DreamWeaver by Adobe.
3. Open an account with PayPal. This costs nothing, and allows you to safely collect money from customers all around the world. If you want to also accept all the popular credit cards, that will require a merchant services account for a low monthly fee.
4. Personalize a simple web site. Customize your website using one of the tools above, selecting one of the standard templates for design and layout. You probably want at least a home page, product page, order page, and contact page. The menu should include a link to your blog, separately set up on Blogger, WordPress, or TypePad, again free.
5. Publish the site and now you are in business. But don’t be fooled into expecting people to flock to your site after you tell a few friends. Now the real work begins – promotion, marketing, blogging, and all types of search engine marketing. But even these can be done for almost no cost, if you are willing to learn and do the work yourself.

Obviously, commercial e-commerce sites handling thousands of products and back-office functions are more expensive, and usually require professional help to do the custom programming and special site navigation features. All this may cost a few thousand dollars, but don’t get talked into an Amazon.com replacement just yet.

The next step in complexity is building a software product that you can offer as a service to your customers. A simple example might be mortgage calculator to add to your real estate sales site. Any credible software developer should be willing to tackle this kind of tool for a couple of thousand dollars.

Then there are full-featured software sites like Facebook. The logic behind all these features is millions of lines of code, and cost millions of dollars to develop and maintain. Don’t expect that you can create a new social networking site in your garage, and steal all the users away from Facebook. Facebook is making money today, but only after a $150 million investment.

But even Facebook started simple, and then developed more and more robust iterations as user interest caught on. I give this advice all the time “launch fast and iterate.” You can’t get it all right the first time, and the market will be gone if you try to include every feature in the first version.

The net is that if I see a website business plan today with a projected development cost greater than $200K, I suspect the founder must be including some fancy perks, or they don’t understand the market dynamics of e-commerce today.

Budding entrepreneurs and home-based businesses should be writing business plans before they start, so they understand and can manage the tasks ahead, but no outside investor need ever see the plan. Fund it yourself (bootstrapping) and do-it-yourself entrepreneurs are the best kind, because they can focus on the business, rather than fund raising, and have full control of their destiny. Life is more fun that way. Grab your shopping basket.

Almost every startup is a virtual team these days, since most don’t start out with dedicated office space, and some or all members of the team work part-time or out of their own home. It’s a small world, so these team members may not even be in the same town, or the same country. Outsourcing is just another extension of the virtual team concept to people you don’t even know.

Working effectively with a virtual team of any sort has many challenges. How do entrepreneurs establish and maintain rapport with people they rarely see, and team members who have never met? How do they keep track of what everyone is doing and assure effective communication between all team members?

Experts on this subject, including Yael Zofi, in her latest book, “A Manager’s Guide to Virtual Teams,” has identified eight key characteristics of high-performing virtual teams, which every startup founder should understand and enable:

1. Members exhibit a global mindset – they look outward, not inward. Effective virtual leaders widen their focus from the local to the global, which implicitly creates an environment of respect. Respect engenders buy-in, without which members can’t take ownership of work product and work toward a common goal.
2. Members share responsibility for achieving the mission. High performing teams have a sense of purpose where members internalize their piece of the mission, thereby transcending the isolation that defines working in a virtual environment. Team members develop an understanding about their mutual dependence to achieve objectives.
3. A culture of openness facilitates trust and authenticity. Effective founders work to create and maintain an environment of team trust to defuse miscommunications. They focus on behaviors, not on personalities, because they know this engenders trust. Then they “say what they mean and mean what they say” to model authenticity.
4. Members engage in meaningful communication with each other. High-performing virtual teams establish and maintain standards on frequency and modes of communication, and hold members accountable for acting accordingly. They also regularly use synchronous communication at critical points to speak with each other.
5. An easy flow of information exists using various forms of technology. Everyone must have access to appropriate technology to enable reliable, current exchanges of information. The amount of “pushed” information (unfiltered e-mails and phone calls) to team members is lower than “pulled” data (e-bulletin boards and intranets).
6. A conflict management mechanism. Conflicts are inevitable, and when even simple miscommunications don’t get acknowledged and fixed, trust gets eroded. The founder or leader must actively engage team members early, and follow up to ensure appropriate resolution. When this happens, lengthy energy-draining confrontations are avoided.
7. Work systems produce deliverables within defined constraints. When team members are geographically dispersed, a rigorous effort is required by all team members to coordinate and align components of critical work systems to meet deadlines within time and budgetary constraints.
8. Members have a positive “can do” attitude that spans time and distance. They must all assume their efforts will lead to success. When conflicts and tensions arise, as they inevitably do, members hold these situations within the context of the larger picture and look to quickly find solutions, rather than assign blame.

Technology has made virtual teams an everyday reality for entrepreneurs. Your challenge is to reduce the “virtual distance” between team members to zero, using personal communication, appropriate technology, and clear goals to maintain member satisfaction, collaboration, and innovation. Have you measured the virtual distance to your team members lately?

It would be no fun if starting a business was simply plotting a straight line between your idea and success, with no challenges along the way. Zigging and zagging amongst the obstacles is the fun part of being an entrepreneur, and it’s what sets you apart from the average worker who knows exactly what he or she has to do every day to get paid. Relish it, or if it scares you, don’t try it.

That doesn’t mean that starting a business should be a random walk into the unknown. There are certain foundational elements that every entrepreneur must build on to succeed, as well as some critical tools we all need. I found these tried-and-true principles summarized very well in a new book “The Zigzag Principle” by serial entrepreneur Rich Christiansen:

1. Assess your resources. At some point financial capital is usually needed to meet business goals. But it’s not a substitute for the other critical resources, mental capital (domain knowledge, skills, and passions), plus relationship capital (friends and advisors). Money results from mental and relationship capital, not the other way around.
2. Identify your beacon in the fog. Start with a big audacious goal to guide you, so that every once in a while you can hit a smaller goal, to provide a break in the fog and catch sight of the beacon before those next steps into the darkness. Goals need to be written down, measurable, and realistic. Expect your fair share of zigzagging to get there.
3. Create a catalyzing statement. This is a key element of every elevator pitch, with enough specificity and fuel to keep you and everyone around you moving toward the beacon in the fog. This quantified big dream should be a long-term goal that your short-term zigzags are all leading to. Use your values as the foundation.
4. Drive your startup to profitability. A first zig of getting to profitability is important to every business, because being broke and always fighting for funding can cause a lot of pain. More importantly, profitability can drive you to find hidden assets, zag to interim revenue sources, and force you to pace yourself in getting to that final destination.
5. Define processes and add resources. After the initial zigs and zags to get profitable, it is time to formalize and document the processes that worked. Only then can you expand those things that led to your initial success. It also means that it’s time to stop micro-managing, hire some of the right people, and start giving up some control.
6. Scale the business. This is implementing a model that you can replicate, to get your product or service out across the country, and around the world. Scaling models charge by the transaction, or subscriptions, or have digital assets with no cost to reproduce. Switch to a mindset of working “on” your business, rather than “in” your business.
7. Stay within your guardrails. Set up some rules to constrain your zigs and zags to prevent “out of control” situations. Common controls include some spending limits, time commitment limits, financial milestones. These guardrails should be closely aligned with your values. Practice the art of saying “no,” and the discipline of delegating.
8. Develop reward systems. To keep you and your team from burning out, you need to define a simple system of motivators and rewards. Too much reward leads to an entitlement mentality. As you hit each zig, you need to take a break from the intensity, celebrate, and enjoy the fruits of your labor.

The alternatives to planned zigzags are a planned straight line, or a planned random walk. Neither of these are realistic for an entrepreneur seeking success, but I still see them every day, and I see the pain that results. Smart entrepreneurs are nimble and flexile, bootstrap to the maximum degree possible, and pivot for emerging opportunities. Be one.

The Hype Cycle was a concept put forward by Gartner, Inc. back in 1995 meant to apply to technology product evolution and acceptance. As I was reading about it recently, it occurred to me that the concept relates directly to how investors see startup opportunities and potential success as well, at least those with technology in their offerings.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept, the Gartner Hype Cycle characterizes the over-enthusiasm or “hype” and subsequent disappointment that typically occurs with the introduction of new technologies. Hype curves then show how and when technologies move beyond the hype, offer practical benefits and become widely accepted. A hype cycle in Gartner’s interpretation always comprises five phases:

1. Technology trigger. The first phase of a hype cycle is the technology trigger or breakthrough, product launch or other event that generates significant press and interest. This is the “truly disruptive technology” that startups often claim.
2. Peak of inflated expectations. In the next phase, a frenzy of publicity typically generates over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. There may be some successful applications and startups using the technology, but there are typically more failures.
3. Trough of disillusionment. Technologies and related startups enter the trough of disillusionment because they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. Consequently, the press usually abandons the topic.
4. Slope of enlightenment. Although the press may have stopped covering the technology, some businesses continue through the slope of enlightenment and experiment to understand the benefits and practical application of the technology.
5. Plateau of productivity. A technology reaches the plateau of productivity as the benefits of it become widely demonstrated and accepted. The technology becomes increasingly stable and evolves in second and third generations. Startups can now truly define a problem, and position their solution for rapid growth. Investors love this stage.

For the latest info, Gartner recently released their Hype Cycle Special Report for 2011, detailing some of the biggest trends in technology this year. This report evaluates the maturity of more than 1,900 technologies and trends in 89 areas. New this year are application services and outsourcing, cloud application infrastructure services, cloud security, privacy and smart cities. It’s definitely worth a look.

According to the report, private cloud computing, NFC and Internet TV are at the moment overvalued. While, in the field of social media, social monitoring and activity streams as well as shopping communities, have moved into the Peak of Inflated Expectations. Other newly featured high-impact trends include big data, and natural language question answering. Disillusionment, on the other hand arises in the case of augmented reality.

There have been numerous criticisms of the hype cycle, one of which is that it is not a cycle, and that all technologies don’t really have the same outcome. Another criticism is that the shape of the line has not altered or accelerated in ten years, even though all the evidence suggests that the half-life of new technologies is getting shorter, and the number of competing technologies is increasing.

So, of course you have the option of ignoring hype cycle predictions, and pushing forward with your latest technology startup. Just don’t be surprised if you get investor pushback while early in the cycle, and be prepared with counter arguments. Great startups always beat the hype.

Change is about the only thing constant in the world of startups. Despite their own focus on changing the world, they often forget that they too have to change rapidly and often as the market evolves. Too many find that out too late, and are left chasing a rabbit that is long gone.

The solution is to establish and maintain a culture and processes that don’t view change as a discrete event to be spotted and managed, but as an ongoing opportunity to improve competitiveness. Chris Musselwhite and Tammie Plouffe, in an HBR article last year on change readiness for large companies, define it as “the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance.”

Since the startup environment is usually more volatile, the challenge there in balancing advantage, risk, and performance, is more critical than in big companies. The following initiatives that Chris and Tammie define for large companies apply just as directly to startups:

1. Improve change awareness. How good are you and everyone on your team at proactively scanning the environment for opportunities, emerging trends, and customer feedback? This contextual focus is critical to innovation and survival – the right product at the right time.
2. Increase change agility. Change agility represents a startup’s ability to immediately and effectively engage everyone in pending changes and innovations. It starts at the top with the founder and CEO, but has to extend quickly to the bottom of the organization. This requires leadership, teamwork, and trust at all levels.
3. Expedite change reaction. This is the ability to appropriately analyze problems, assess risks, and take responsibility for problem-dictated and market-dictated changes, while still sustaining the day-to-day business activities. It’s called the management of unplanned changes, or how well your startup reacts to crises.
4. Implement change mechanisms. Every organization needs to have specific mechanisms in place to facilitate change, including regular effective communication, reward systems that reinforce desired change behavior, and accountability for results. These won’t work in an autocratic or dysfunctional management environment.
5. Build a change readiness culture. Change readiness is hard work, and requires creativity sometimes in conflict with task orientation. People have to have the right attitude, and make the choice from the beginning to be ready to change at any time. They need a sense of urgency to handle change, and confidence in their leaders.
6. Imbue customer change focus. The more everyone in the startup is obsessed with satisfying customer needs and providing better customer service, the more effective the startup will be in adapting to change. Provide direct customer contact to everyone, as well as training.

Experts say that we live in a world where the pace of change is accelerating at the fastest rate in recorded history. On the other hand, change management practices seem to be changing very slowly, resulting in a 70% failure rate of change initiatives. Failure rates this high demand a new mindset and startups are the logical place for this to happen.

For starters, the whole team needs to be constantly trained and encouraged to develop their skills. Relevant skills include continuous improvement of existing methods, processes and devices against a set of quality metrics. The ultimate skills, which lead to innovation and totally new processes, usually come from experimentation and special studies.

In summary, change will happen. If your people and your startup do not change, statistics say you won’t succeed. It’s up to you to get out of your comfort zone and make things happen in your startup, rather than let things happen to your business.

Everyone in the business world has heard of the book by Geoffrey A. Moore titled “Crossing the Chasm” (1991), but most entrepreneurs have no idea how it relates to them. In fact, it’s all about the “focus” required to get early stage technology products across the deadly chasm from early adopters to mainstream customers.

Most investors and startup professionals expand this concept of focus to apply to key issues of every aspect of strategic and tactical planning in a startup. Missions and products that are too broad confuse your team, your customers, and potential investors. There are other chasms out there just as deadly as the technology one, such as the ones below:

• Market requirements chasm. The first chasm is getting the customer requirements right, product or service, to satisfy a real need that a large number of customers will pay real money to satisfy. It takes focus to resist adding a long list of features that seem to make the opportunity larger, but dilute to focus of both you and potential customers.

• Product development chasm. Another common chasm is never-ending product development. Focus is required to resist adding a few more neat features, made possible by the new technology, which in fact make the product more complex to use, impossible to test, and very expensive in time and cost.

• Marketing and sales chasm. Lots of people still believe the major cost of a new product is development. These days, with all the clutter in the marketplace, the highest cost is usually marketing. Focus is required here to pick the low-hanging fruit, break through the clutter, and then move on to the next segment. Marketing costs can be a deep hole.

• Customer support chasm. Products that have features which are unfocused, or aimed at too broad an audience, can be almost impossible to support. Customers need lots of help with installation, or can’t make the product work the way they expect. The result is that customer satisfaction in unachievable or at least very expensive.

In his book, Moore limits his discussion to the transition between customers that are visionaries (early adopters) and customer pragmatists (early majority), in the context of high technology products that appear “disruptive,” meaning they move innovation in that arena to a new level.

Here are the five customer segments outlined in his analysis:

• Innovators – they love the challenge of a new technology and expect problems
• Early adopters – customer visionaries driven by technology who expect it to work
• Early majority – pragmatists that buy only with peer review, references and support
• Late majority – conservatives who wait until the product is no longer state-of-the-art
• Laggards – skeptics who will only adopt when forced or the need is critical

The reason that his book was so popular, and is still studied in MBA programs and talked about by investors, is because his analysis has proven to be right so many times. There is a big gap between people who love to try new technologies, and the rest of us, who tend to be much more “technophobic.” Startups need to show real traction before attempting to cross the chasm.

I always recommend focus as the key to avoiding Moore’s chasm, as well as the others highlighted here. Start your business with a narrow niche and a focused strategy, but don’t stay there. As the company matures, and you learn more about your customers and your market, then it is time to go broader or deeper.

Build an overt strategy with feedback triggers to enhance the product to meet the needs of another segment of customers, and add more features to serve additional needs for the customers you already have. With this approach, you will find it a lot easier to jump all the chasms without crashing or breaking a leg.

With the tenth anniversary of 9/11 behind us, and the ongoing financial woes, there seems to be a growing population out there worried about all the people and companies watching to hurt them. Why is everyone so paranoid these days? My plea to entrepreneurs is to recognize it as an opportunity, and go the extra mile to make people’s life better rather than stoke the fires.

I must be the only one who believes that most of the “watching” in the real world, and on the Internet, is done by businesses to help you find what you want, protect you, and improve your experience, rather than invade your privacy or scam you.

I certainly agree that just like in the real world, consumers have to assume that there are always bad groups on the Internet, as well as down the street, trying to rip you off, so stay out of bad neighborhoods, and keep your wits about you at all times. Internet users need to start watching out for themselves, like looking both ways before you cross the street.

In addition, there is a real business opportunity here for startups. I know companies who collect sensitive data from consumers all the time, and still seem to keep a squeaky clean image (Amazon.com, Ebay). There are others who are always a bit suspect, or have been hit hard by their mistakes.

The opportunity is to take advantage of the new power and tools on the Internet. Here are a few specifics on how to be part of the solution, rather than part of the problem:

• Put a personal face and address on your site; don’t hide behind an “info” email address.
• Make your company visible, reachable and responsive through social networks.
• Market your solution and user benefits, not the mysterious technology behind it.
• Use video and audio, rather than jargon, abbreviations, and computer lingo on your site.
• Make navigation simple and consistent, with abundant online help

The good news is that, if your company does it right, it might be another Amazon. There seems to be an insatiable demand from consumers for a better shopping experience, meaning they will pay a premium to a company that can present them a better match in products to their interests, without jeopardizing their good name.

In support of this, despite qualms, consumers seem very quick these days to provide more personal data to get something they want. Young people naively enter their pictures and personal data for fun on social networking sites, ignoring constant feedback from the media that these are bad practices.

The bad news for startups is that your company can lose big if it’s caught in the middle. A few months ago, the Sony PlayStation Network was hacked, with personal data of up to 70 million people stolen, and this black eye won’t soon go away. A few years earlier, PayPal was hit by a scam to get the personal information of its users, and some feel it hasn’t really recovered since.

Sometimes the problem cause is that startups forget the technical standards and quality processes that every Internet rollout must follow to reduce the risk. Don’t take shortcuts on these. I see lots of new software put together on a shoestring as a “proof of concept” – but then gets rolled out to customers “asis” due to lack of time or money to “harden” the product.

What I learned from a panel discussion a while back, sponsored by an association of lawyers, is that lawyers don’t have any answers, and are all too quick to fan the flames of fear and paranoia. They merely highlighted consumer privacy rights, with much hand-wringing about big bad companies that are capturing shopping habits without consumer knowledge on the Internet.

A better approach is to use your marketing power to tell people that you can now ring their cell phone in front of their favorite store for a special sale, and allow them to “opt in,” rather than surprising them with your new technology. Few people are paranoid about something they want and expect. That’s just good business.

When I heard a friend make the statement “Your startup can’t fail if you don’t quit,” I realized that every entrepreneur should adopt it as their mantra. Pivoting or dealing a new hand is not quitting. If we all take this mantra, we can drastically improve the statistic that over half of new startups fail within five years. Nothing is more discouraging to future entrepreneurs than a failed startup.

Why do most startups fail? There are a thousand reasons listed by pundits across the media, but most of them agree that the number one reason is NOT running out of money. The number one reason is that the founder quits. Of course, they may be quitting because they ran out of money, but good entrepreneurs tell me that running out of money is most often an “excuse” rather than a “reason.”

Let’s take a look at the main reasons given for startup failures, and suggest some alternatives to quitting:

• “I’ve lost interest – I don’t want to do this anymore.” This suggests you have lost your passion for the current business model, probably because someone suggested you change from your original concept to make it easier, or to make more money. My suggestion is to morph the current idea into one you love and enjoy, rather than quit and take an employee role you never wanted.

• “I can’t find any investors in this economy.” If you can’t bootstrap the venture yourself, find a partner, friend, or family member rather than a professional investor to carry some financial weight. Otherwise, look for advances from distributors, vendors, and even future customers. Try bartering services you have for something you need. I’ve seen countless creative solutions to the cashflow problem, from people who don’t quit.

• “The people around me are all turkeys.” We all make people mistakes. So you made some bad hiring or partner decisions. Now is the time to face up to these issues and move out the people who don’t fit, rather than let them destroy your startup. The sooner it is done, the happier both of you will be.

• “I don’t have the skills or discipline to run this business.” If you knew everything that had to be done, and could do it easily, you would be bored and lose interest (back to item #1). If millions of people all over the world run businesses, there is nothing implicit in the role that is beyond normal intelligence. Half the fun is learning, so get started today, don’t be afraid to ask for help.

• “I finally realized there is no market for what I do.” Big markets rarely spring “full grown” out of nothing. Every entrepreneur has the challenge of making a market, or differentiating his product to match an existing market. Every startup I know has tweaked (or totally transformed) their product several times, rather than quit.

• “I grew too fast and everything is spinning out of control.” This is probably a good reason to scale back and focus on organic growth, but it’s not a good reason to quit. You must have something of interest, or growth wouldn’t be the problem. Reset to the basics, get financial or management help, and failure should not be an option.

Another important point is that even if you declare your current startup a failure, don’t let it defeat you. Most people agree that we learn more from our mistakes than from our successes. The bright side is that investors tell me they are wary of funding an entrepreneur who has never failed (in his own mind), since that often leads to a cocky and unrealistic view of future expectations.

Overall, my view is that starting a business is just like everything else. Nothing important is all that easy, and all of us stumble a few times and pivot along the way as we learn. There is a real difference between cashing in your cards for a new hand, in the face of unbeatable odds, versus quitting and walking away from the challenge. You don’t learn any lessons by walking away.

Over the years, I’ve had the privilege of working with some of the best entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley and elsewhere. On the average, the entrepreneurs I know are struggling. But one thing they all seem to have in common is a love for learning and change. They rush in with a passion to better the world, and money is just an indication of their progress.

The successful ones then invest their time and money in furthering their knowledge base. I’m not talking about academic classes, because at best these only teach you how to learn. In these days of rapid change, most experts believe that the facts college students learn as a sophomore are obsolete before they exit their senior year.

Learning should be viewed as an ongoing part of everything you do, and one of the most important things. It’s an unfortunate artifact of our educational system that young people spend a dozen years focused more on memorizing facts than the learning process, and then thinking that they will have all they need to know for the rest of their lives by the time they graduate.

In business, as in most other disciplines, there are practical steps towards learning what you need for the next stage of your company and your life. These include the following:

• Networking with people who know. A question I sometimes get from startup founders is “What do I talk to these guys about?” I say you can’t learn much if you are doing all the talking. Just ask investors what they look for in successful companies. I’ve never known any successful entrepreneurs or investors who were not happy to share their secrets.

• Read entrepreneur stories. Most successful entrepreneurs have been written up on the Internet, or in magazines, or books. Spend some time with these biographies and soak up the insights and inspiration. Follow up online with social networking to make contact, dig deeper, and maybe even line up a mentor.

• Adopt a mentor. Boomers who have been there and done that make great mentors. They have the time and interest in “giving back” some of what they have learned to the next generation. Gen-X executives are too busy running their own companies to be mentors. A mentor is someone who doesn’t let ego or money get in the way of helping.

• Formal learning. Some formal learning is always advisable, but get beyond university MBA courses to professional seminars and case studies. Formal courses work best for basics, like a business start-up course or financial accounting. Go with topics you are interested in and need today.

• Volunteering with local organizations. Work is highly valuable in any environment of universities and professional organizations. The payback is that you can get experience for free, while working on real stuff. I’ve done business plan judging at local universities, and learned more than I contributed.

• Just start a business. There is no better way to learn about being entrepreneurial than starting a business. No matter how much advice and counsel you have been given, I guarantee that you will encounter new challenges daily, to enhance your learning opportunities.

If you are one of those people who likes structured classes for learning, and counts on spending at least two weeks per year in the classroom to “catch up,” that’s laudable, but don’t try to start a business at the same time. It won’t happen.

If you have decided to become an entrepreneur solely to make more money, you are also likely to be disappointed. It’s that double challenge of learning to overcome all obstacles, while still surviving on the financial front, that keeps a good entrepreneur motivated to face a new day. Join us if you dare.