About Upstarta.biz

Origin

Arjen Lentz has been interested in business models and strategy for many years, and his current main business Open Query is founded on a wide mix of sources and prior experiences. Over time he has shared many insights with others on an ad-hoc basis, also gaining significant benefits from this himself. Exchanging ideas and insights, and asking questions, even with people some might consider to be direct competitors, is more valuable than risky.

At a BarCamp (one-day unconference) in Brisbane in July 2009 he did a short talk on "cheap business practises" which was particularly well attended and received. People were interested in following up on this further in a more organised way, and thus the idea for a group was seeded. A few days later, Elspeth Thorne and Arjen set up the basic infrastructure.

Naming

Our name is derived from an Australian-ism where words ending in -er are pronounced with -a. So, each of us is an upstarter. But you can also read it as upstart-a-business (hence us using the .biz as default domain, and the .com domain redirects).

Dictionaries describe an upstart as "suddenly raised to a position of consequence" but also "self-important; presumptuous". The latter is of course not a desirable trait, but we note it with tongue-in-cheek as some of our principles are generally seen as odd/quirky and thus presumptuous, i.e. "why don't we just do things like most other businesses?"

Well, we feel that "business as usual" is not the only or even best way of doing things. We're not inventing anything particularly new, our ideas stem from a myriad of well-researched resources and experience, and we apply these ideas in today's economic environment and using available technology. By pooling and documenting our experience, we prevent reinventing the wheel.