What training and education resources/programs do you wish existed in your local startup community?

May 27th, 2014

It seems as though entrepreneurs constantly have to stumble around and dig for critical resources and educational programs that support them in the early stages of starting up. If a city were to offer regular workshop programming and resources for your local startup community, what topics would you wish for the most? What are the essentials that you wish there were a crash course for?

Tony Clemendor Founder/CEO - GiftWow, Growth & Operations Guy, Startup Advisor

May 27th, 2014

For the non technical founders, I would have liked to have found two things:

A crash course on web and application hosting setup and options. Hosting with services like AWS, Heroku or Engine Yard isn't intuitive in terms of setups, costs, etc. Would have loved an easier onramp.
A primer on hiring technical talent through services like oDesk or Freelancer.

Kevin Keepper Senior Consultant at Capgemini Consulting

May 27th, 2014

Great thread Anuj. If you run some analytics on the questions and popularity of posts on this forum it seems like you would have a strong running start.

As for me, I am currently swimming through the fine tune details of labor laws as my company just brought on the first full time employee last month.

Regards,

Kevin

Rob G

May 27th, 2014

Anuj; not exactly on point, but related, would be a city/state-wide program to promote not just entrepreneurship, but help successful individuals (entrepreneurs or not) better understand angel investing and the startup world. Perhaps state-level crowd funding programs will help lower the bar for would-be angels to get some experience.

@ Kevin K, there is another entire FD thread on the subject, but you might consider a "co-employer" model. We use a WA based company called Pay Plus Benefits - we cut one check every payroll and they handle all the payroll, state and federal taxes, employee-related minutia, HR questions, onboarding, employee handbook, benefits admin, etc. Our employees are W-2, but we don't have to deal with the labor laws, etc. It does ad cost, but it allows us to focus on building a business rather than back-office. just a thought.

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