Re: Think like a bank
spex, you should probably clarify what sort of business you are talking about.
Bank loans aren't really a reasonable way to fund a startup. They're just not in the business of investing in equity and startups don't make any sense as entities to force structured payments upon. You're going to severely limit the upside potential in almost all cases and you're going to increase the failure rate at the same time.
The only loan agreement that would even be applicable would be something with no payments for a certain amount of time. To compensate for that risk the bank would have to charge extremely high fees. The point is that most (really all) startups (which I think you're talking about) just make more sense for equity funding. Both the investors and the founders end up with much better terms.
A question like "what makes a good business plan" is basically impossible to answer. Well thought out and complete reasoning is about all I could say without having more details. It's like asking "what makes an idea good?"
Tien, do you really care what they write as a 10 year goal? That is almost never going to have any meaning even 2 years from now. Business structures and outside conditions can change so much in that sort of time span that trying to project that far into the future is really useless. For many businesses (pretty much any sort of web service, for instance) it's probably not even worth reading their 1 year plan. Read stuff from any successful startup founder and you will see that even core fundamentals of the business can change 180 degrees in the first few months.
If you're talking about something like opening an auto repair shop or a bakery or something a lot of this won't apply.
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