I stumbled across a cool blog entry listed on reddit. Here's the intro from the blog entry:

"Last year in May I got my BA in Physics and Philosophy from Yale; three days later Emmett and I officially started work on Kiko and became entrepreneurs. We've been working on Kiko full time for the past ten months, and during that time I've learned a few lessons as a young (newb) founder that I thought were useful enough to share. I'm not claiming to know it all about starting your own company, or even most of what there is to know (I still haven't made a dollar of revenue, sold a company, brought a company to IPO, the list goes on...), but I wish someone had told me these things ten months ago."

(OK, sure - the guy's an American programmer and not a UK filmmaker but everything he mentions is relevant to us UK filmmakers who are planning to setup a company).

I've been thinking a lot about my own attempts to build companies recently, largely because my first company (a production company) is having a few expensive tax issues at the moment and secondly because we at UKFilm.org are in the process of formalising our little team into "a company". I've got to say that the blog linked to above makes some great points that really resonate with me.

Have you setup your own company? How did you find it? Did you set up on your own, with old friends or with people you met on set? Why do so many companies die within their first year (I believe something like 50% of companies wont live longer than 2 years).