Generating High Growth Innovation Hubs

Chile 1208 generating innovation hubs 2010

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Read full story Creating the Next Silicon Valley – The Chilean Experiment

Lessons we learn ...

Tony Hsieh built his online shoe retailer into an e-commerce powerhouse. But with credit tightening and investors eyeing the exits, Hsieh was forced to ask: Was selling Zappos really the only way to save it?

... At the time, we made almost all our money selling shoes, but our hope was that we'd eventually go into all sorts of other businesses. We saw Zappos as a global brand like Virgin -- except whereas Virgin was about being hip and cool, Zappos would be about offering the best service. The plan was to grow sales to $1 billion by 2010 and eventually go public.

These ideas about the power of our company culture had yet to be proved. As I talked to Amazon founder and CEO Jeff Bezos, who visited our headquarters in 2005, I realized that to Amazon, we were just a leading shoe company. If we sold, we'd probably be folded into their operations, and our brand and culture would be at risk of disappearing ...

[ By Tony Hseih – Why I Sold Zappos ]

From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned

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From Zero to a Million Users - Dropbox and Xobni lessons learned

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20th Century Business and APIs...

There is a perspective some people apply to evolution, social theory, and language change called punctuated equilibrium (credit goes to Jess Ruefli for pointing this out). It suggests that change is not gradual, but that change comes in sudden punctuated bursts between stretches of relative stasis or equilibrium.

The Web from 1995-2000 was certainly a surge like this as every business "went online" in order to continue to function in a newly competitive economy. I believe that we're going through such a surge right now as the early versions of the web - designed for people using browsers - gives way to the next version: using APIs to design the web for people using applications that communicate on their behalf in complex ways to the services that make up the world's businesses.

[ By Sam Ramji – Darwin's Finches, 20th Century Business, and APIs ]


Darwin's Finches, 20th Century Business, and APIs

Do not care about business plan, care about business model

[ By Steve Blank Woodstock for Entrepreneurs – the Startup Lessons Learned Conference ]

Why accountants don’t run startups

If you wanted to know what I’ve been thinking about after Customer Development, you can see and hear it in the talk I gave at the conference. Watch the expanded version of “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups below.
- The first story, Shifts in Entrepreneurship starts at 4:20
- Not All Startups Are Equal starts at 7:30
- What VC’s Don’t Tell You starts at 12:00
- Business Plans Versus Business Models at 14:08
- Startups Search Companies Execute at 17:05
- Leadership Versus Management at 24:50
- Durant Versus Sloan at 30:13
- E-School Versus B-School at 33:41

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The New Face Of Venture Capital

[ By Kevin Lawton from TrendCaller ]

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To be great, does not need to be Good...

[ By Paul Buchheit ]

By now, everyone is tired of hearing about the iPad, but the negative responses are so perfectly misguided that it would be wrong to waste this opportunity. Even better, we can look back at the 2001 iPod launch and see the exact same mistakes. But this isn't about the iPad or the iPod -- it's about product design.


The most famous iPod review was from Slashdot, which simply declared, "No wireless. Less space than a nomad. Lame." The iPad reviews are similar in that they focus on the "missing" features.

Read full story - If your product is Great, it doesn't need to be Good

What is the right age to found venture ...?

[by Vivek Wadhwa - TechCrunch ]

Research that my team conducted, based on a survey of 549 entrepreneurs in high-growth industries, showed that the average founder of a high-growth company launched his venture at age 40. We also learned that these founders are likely to be married and have two or more kids. They typically have six to ten years of work experience and real-world ideas. They simply got tired of working for others and wanted to rise above their middle-class heritage...

Read here full story - When It Comes To Founding Successful Startups, Old Guys Rule

The long lost formula for start-up success. No, really

[By Nigel Eccles - Hubdub Ltd]

You know the story. A group of friends come up with an amazing product idea, lock themselves away, code like demons, eat pizza, drink coffee and several months later come out with a prototype. The prototype is good enough to convince some investors, they raise money, build the full product, launch it, users love it, product gets traction, acquirers circle and then founders exit to a large pay-off. They then give media interviews which gets summarised into something that sounds like...

Read here full story - The long lost formula for start-up success. No, really

Three Israeli Femme-preneurs To Keep an Eye On

[ by Roi Carthy - Techcrunch.com ]

...
the fact of the matter is that female entrepreneurs are a rare breed. Let’s all try a mental game together… How many female startup CEO’s can you name off the top of your head? I am embarrassed to say that I have trouble coming up with more than a handful, but I don’t think I am alone.

Here’s what I find strange about all this: I speak to VC’s and private investors regularly, and have never EVER heard anyone comment negatively on deal-flow based on the entrepreneur’s gender. Startups—at least this has been my experience—are weighted on the merits of the product, market and the team, but never on gender. Frankly, I can’t explain why female entrepreneurs are a rare commodity in our industry. (Feel free to enlighten me about the gender bias underpinning the tech industry in comments).

The situation in Israel is not much different. But it should only be the quality that counts… To that end, here are three Israeli female entrepreneurs worth keeping
...

Read here full story - Three Israeli Femme-preneurs To Keep an Eye On

... 10 Questions to Ask Before You Join a Startup

[ By Guy Kawasaki - Alltop.com ]

1. How much money do you have in the bank?
2. What is your net outflow per month?
3. What is the post-money valuation of your last round?
4. What can you do that your competitors cannot?
5. What can your competitors do that you cannot?
6. Who are your investors?
7. Who is on your board of directors?
8. Has anyone in the engineering team actually shipped a product?
9. Assume that you have $0 for marketing, how would you market the product?
10. What keeps you awake at night?

For answers read this article ...

Tips For Landing That Startup Dream Job

[By Dharmesh Shah - onstartups.com]

The single most important attribute that many startups look for in recruits is that they get stuff done. You can be the most brilliant engineer/marketer/whatever on the planet, but if you don’t have a tendency to get a lot of stuff done, you’re not an attractive recruit.

The reason is obvious and simple — but I’ll tell you anyways. Startups are a grand exercise in resource-deprivation. There’s always too much work and not enough people.

If the startup team hires you, they want to know that you’re going to put a dent in their workload — not just come up with great ideas for other people to work on ...

Excellent article, highly recommended... >>> Tips For Landing That Startup Dream Job

... startup is like a rock and roll band ...

Surfing and reading today about Startups I have found very good comment, I've liked very much and offer to yours attention:

Choosing the people on your core founding team (first four or so) is an important factor in success. They need to be smart, energetic and committed. It helps if they can fill multiple roles at the same time (sell, write software, deliver services and invoice).

I like to say that a startup is like a rock and roll band. You can fail if you don't have the talent, don't produce the right product, egos get out of control or people lose direction.

Get the right people with the right attitude, and you'll have a much better shot.

More, here in excellent post 10 Things Most MBA Schools Won’t Teach You About Startups by onstartups.com

In continue to previous post...

[By holyexposures.com]

At the meeting we heard from one VC, Blumberg Capital, who specializes in seed round investments of internet companies.
The partner of the firm who spoke, Bruce Tarragin, said that they were closing a deal in Tel Aviv now, and had already closed another deal earlier this quarter.

The Capital Market Bulls Return
There had been several months, since last October, with virtually no dealflow that was actually leading to investment. Now, there seems to be a reawakening of the capital markets. The negative sentiment of the market has been replaced with a feeling that we have already reached bottom, and now there are good ideas out there that are worthy of investment.


Continue here Israel Economy for Start Ups – Signs of Improvement

10 steps to catch VC cash

[By CNN Money]

Looking for funding for your big idea? Follow our 10-point guide to landing the right investors.


"The entrepreneur is the Pied Piper of a company," says Chip Hazard, general partner at Boston-based Flybridge Capital Partners. "We want an articulate, passionate CEO who can excite others - employees, customers, business partners."
Flybridge joined the syndicate that backed Goby Technologies, a Boston-based search startup that provides comprehensive leisure and travel information in a single site - first with a seed round to build a prototype, then with a multimillion-dollar Series A round to fund longer-term operations. >>>

Venture Capital Under Attack

The journey to find these ideas has taken me from inventors’ basements, to obscure research labs, to, in one case, a smoky Milwaukee bowling alley renowned for its fried Twinkies. With a lot of hard work and a little luck that journey ends on the floor of a stock exchange, witnessing a company you helped build go public. It’s a helluva ride.

Great article by Adam Grosser with interesting statistics about the value of VCs to economic prosperity. The challenge is - what can be learned from the current financial crisis that will improve the VC industry.

CREATE is a key theme!

Job creation, innovation and new technologies will help lead global economy back to a growing and successful economy. Venture Capital plays an incredibly important role in the global economy, and thanks to VCs (in both time and money), entrepreneurs and start-ups management have indeed been able to grow seedling ideas employing many and driving worldwide competitiveness.

There is a lot to be said for a creative and transformative approach to take the best of what the VC’s do and creatively use it as one of the solutions to rebuild the economy through creation.

Failure is just part of the path to success

But it is not the rule ...

Not all failures are equal, explains William H. Davidow, a founding partner in the venture capital firm Mohr Davidow Ventures. A company might fail because its timing was bad or because the entrepreneur was a poor manager. Mr. Davidow, who says he would have expected “a higher follow-on success rate for the failed entrepreneurs,” says that an entrepreneur who has failed in a previous venture “would get in the door to talk to me” about a new idea. But, he adds, “I would want to know why that last deal failed, and what the person learned from it.”

More in excellent article Try, Try Again, or Maybe Not.

P.S. Try ... Fail ... (or not) ... and Start-up again ...
:-)

Why things goes wrong?

Start-up, or any other business beginning – is a hard under pressure work, very limited in time frame, so only highly professionally crew have chances to success. Therefore looking back to my personal experience, - I think it is safer to go into business with a work colleague than with a friend. Even you know what you're getting in to - starting a business with a mate may sound like a good idea, but some-time better is just stay friends and save yourself a lot of heartbreak.

I like to share with you excellent article with a lot of useful information packed in - Starting up with a friend (What could possibly go wrong?) by Daniel Tenner.

* Make your agreements explicit so that you don’t break implicit promises
* Detail your agreements so that your promises are clear
* Don’t be afraid of discussing negative scenarios, so that you don’t add the stress of misunderstanding to already bad situations
* Write things down so you’ll remember
* Don’t make things work at all costs, so that you don’t spend the next years living with a deal that’s not acceptable to you
* Don’t assume things will get better with time, so you’re not surprised when they don’t

Making resume, I like to point - whether you going to start new venture or just some web-project/service, - make sure you have a mutually agreed upon, objectively measurable set of criteria for success. And most important point is to write everything down. Regularly measure yours, individual performance and the corporate performance against those criteria to avoid unexpected situations and surprises.

Any business idea, relation between friends, colleagues, clients etc, should be written down also to avoid misunderstanding in the future.

If only I'd read this article before I started my first business, I could have avoided many problems and a lot of stress. I hope someone else does find it useful in their own endeavors.

Top 10 Resolutions for a More Profitable 2009

Hello my dear friends, In the down economy, saving money ... What can we do? What can we do to protect ourselves and re-build our communities? Here are "Top 10 Resolutions..." I have found in article written by Dr. Susan L. Reid:

1. Focus on your primary greatness
2. Be transparent and honest in your dealings
3. Keep it simple
4. Care forward
5. Create a loyal fan base
6. Embrace eco-responsibility as an overall business strategy
7. Master social networking
8. Cultivate a culture of collaboration.
9. Find new opportunities for expansion
10. Strengthen relationships

Loss of jobs. Difficulty maintaining our standard of living. We’re in a worldwide global recession.

We’ve seen financial markets collapse, mortgage lenders go under, home loss through foreclosures, extreme bailout packages, and growing unemployment

More detailed here

Back to blogging - Video from Business of Software

Hello to all my friends and readers, long time (since November 26, 2008)I have not published any articles … Sorry, I am investigating some new (at least for me) frameworks and technologies (Websphere, WII, DOJO, etc ...) on the fly while working on some interesting Web 2.0 project. So, there is absolutely no free time.

But anyway, I like to share with you some excellent video I have found - Everything I Know About Startups by Dharmesh Shah - OnStartups.com

1. Your idea can suck. Just get started.
2. You can be in the middle of nowhere and still build a great business.
3. Not having cash breeds good behavior. It’s helpful to have constraints.
4. In defense of the modest outcome: You don’t HAVE to build the next Facebook. Modest liquidity events are highly under-rated.
5. “I’m a complete introvert. It’s not that I don’t like people, I just don’t like being around them a whole lot.”
6. Something’ changed here. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to get your message out there.
7. The real issue with VC is not the cost of capital (which is high), but how hard it is to actually raise it.
8. You have to go through the 12 flaming hoops of venture capital.
9. All the time you should’ve been spending solving your customer’s problem, you use to start to solve the VC’s problem.
10. Write a blog, not a business plan.

Enjoy the great presentation.
Regards