999 Posts Found

There is a wonderful psychologist at the University of Toronto called Jordan Peterson… He says that if you look at the big five personality traits, entrepreneurs are characterized by openness — which is obvious — creativity; conscientiousness – again, obvious — diligence [and being] disagreeable. That is to say, they are not people who require the social approval of their peers.

Content: Quotation | Author: Malcolm Gladwell | Source: Knowledge@Wharton | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Learning is the unit of progress in entrepreneurship. It’s more important than making money, getting customers, building features, or engineering technical quality. Of course, those things are important, but only insofar as they contribute to learning what creates value and what creates waste.

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric Ries | Source: strategy+business | Subject: Entrepreneurship

The problem is that in finance, equities never become bonds. They’re separate assets. But successful entrepreneurial products grow up to become established products. Under the old system, the people who launch a product tend to migrate with it. That causes a lot of problems because the skills and at-titudes that make for effective entrepreneurs don’t necessarily make for effective managers of status quo operations.

Content: Quotation | Author: Eric Ries | Source: strategy+business | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Entrepreneurs often talk about the importance of identifying a mission that is likely to stay consistent even while the scope changes as the venture grows, as customers engage with it, and as it is influenced by the ecosystem. Developing a mission and guiding vision that is malleable enough to accommodate and even anticipate inevitable pivots is critical for success. All ideas change, and entrepreneurs need … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Heidi Neck | Source: Babson Insight | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Mission

Entrepreneurial leaders need to learn to be cognitively ambidextrous, engaging both prediction logic and creation logic, in their decision-making approach. When an organization’s future goals and environment reflect the past, entrepreneurial leaders can engage traditional analytic models to predict and manage the situation. However, when the future is unknowable and bears little resemblance to the past, entrepreneurial leaders must learn how to create the future … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Source: Babson Insight | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Leadership

Venture capital is in the midst of a structural sea change, evolving from a secretive old boys club into a much more accessible and transparent… well, new boys club. One thing that has generally remained guarded, however, is investment strategy. Not the broad strokes of sector and stage focus, but the nitty-gritty about how a firm makes its decisions on who to fund and … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Dan Primack | Source: FORTUNE | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital | Company: Bloomberg Beta

Paul Graham, essayist, programmer, investor, and co-founder of YCombinator, the Silicon Valley tech accelerator program, describes a contrast between “maker schedules” versus “manager schedules.” Manager schedules break the day into hourlong chunks conducive for meetings and communication, but not for work that requires deep thinking, creative problem-solving, writing, or making. The work of [entrepreneurship] necessitates uninterrupted blocks of time.

Content: Quotation | Authors: Heidi Neck, Paul Graham | Source: Babson Insight | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Management, Time Management

We studied new venture entrepreneurs as well as those entrepreneuring inside organizations of all kinds—corporations, government organizations, nonprofits, and religious organizations. And, the method and practices they use are more alike than different when creating something new. There are five specific practices of entrepreneurs both inside and out.

Content: Article | Author: Heidi Neck | Source: Babson Insight | Subject: Entrepreneurship

I suspect that in my 13 years years or so in the venture business I have received somewhere on the order of 5,000 executive summaries directly from founders. I read all 5,000 executive summaries. I met with some of those entrepreneurs too. Yet, I didn’t fund a single one of them. But it got me thinking. Maybe I was biased. … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: David Hornik | Source: VentureBlog | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Most of the startup learning curve is a learn-on-the-job endeavor. Nothing replaces the real experience of managing your own company; however there are some lessons that are worth learning ahead of time.

Smart entrepreneurs learn to pick out which teachings should be followed and which should be discarded. This is my common response I send when friends ask for a book list. In fact, I … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: Jason Freedman | Source: humbledMBA | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Saras Sarasvathy, a professor at the Darden School, at the University of Virginia, has researched the differences between how entrepreneurs and very good senior managers at Fortune 500 firms think. She gives them a scenario about a new-product introduction. The typical Fortune 500 manager will run projections from the market data. But the entrepreneur says, “I don’t trust the data. I’d find a customer and … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Authors: Chip Heath, Saras Sarasvathy | Source: McKinsey Quarterly | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation, Management, Trends / Analysis

James Altucher offers this bullet FAQ on starting a business with the caveat that, depending on your business, some of these won’t apply. All of these questions come from questions he’s been asked.

Editor’s Note: This is far too simplistic a list (e.g., “If someone wants to give you money, then take it.”) and I think some of the advice is wrong (e.g., … [ Read more ]

Content: Article | Author: James Altucher | Subject: Entrepreneurship

There is something about how to do a startup in 2013 that is 180 degrees different from what an intelligent, thoughtful outside observer will intuitively do using their own common sense.

Content: Article | Author: Jason Freedman | Source: humbledMBA | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Budding start-ups often aim at the big prize of either going public or getting acquired, but both avenues can hurt innovation. What’s the best path to growth while maintaining your firm’s creative flair?

Content: Article | Author: Vikas Aggarwal | Source: INSEAD Knowledge | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Innovation

Paul Graham offers some very useful advice to entrepreneurs about trying to raise money. As he points out, most inexperienced founders try to convince with their pitch when they would be better off if they let their startup do the work—if they started by understanding why their startup is worth investing in, then simply explained this well to investors.

Content: Article | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

John Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, discusses what one should look for when joining a company.

Content: Multimedia Content | Author: John Doerr | Source: Stanford University | Subjects: Career, Entrepreneurship, Organizational Behavior

Beginning in 2005, Brad Feld and Jason Mendelson, managing directors at Foundry Group, wrote a long series of blog posts describing all the parts of a typical venture capital Term Sheet: a document which outlines key financial and other terms of a proposed investment. Since this time, they’ve seen the series used as the basis for a number of college courses, and have been thanked … [ Read more ]

Content: Book | Authors: Brad Feld, Jason Mendelson | Subject: Entrepreneurship

No company, however successful, ever looks more than a pretty good bet a few months in.

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subject: Entrepreneurship

Investors are looking for startups that will be very successful. But that test is not as simple as it sounds. In startups, as in a lot of other domains, the distribution of outcomes follows a power law, but in startups the curve is startlingly steep. The big successes are so big they dwarf the rest. And since there are only a handful each year (the … [ Read more ]

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital

The time to raise money is not when you need it, or when you reach some artificial deadline like a Demo Day. It’s when you can convince investors, and not before.

Content: Quotation | Author: Paul Graham | Subjects: Entrepreneurship, Venture Capital