Tag: Entrepreneurship

When Should We Meet?

Category : Entrepreneurship
Posted on by

“When Should we Meet?”

It’s a tough question, especially if you are trying to schedule a meeting with more than two or three people.  My friend Jason Strutz, who also wrote ExchangeHut, just completed a new project aimed at answering this very question.

MeetingWhen is a free , easy to use tool to help you schedule meetings.

Instead of bouncing emails around trying to guess good times for everyone to attend, MeetingWhen allows you to take control of the scheduling, and ensure that you maximize the chances of high attendance.

The more people in your event, the harder it is to schedule manually. But with MeetingWhen you can schedule large meetings without any fuss!

MeetingWhen.com allows you to:

  • Create an event
  • Input your availability
  • Invite others to input their availability
  • Pick the best time for everyone involved

I was one of the beta testers and really like the idea.  Check it out for yourself and see what you think.  You do not have to register and can use it for free!

Paul Graham’s 13 Sentences

Category : Entrepreneurship
Posted on by

Paul Graham is one of my favorite writers right now.  Here’s his bio from his website:

Paul Graham is an essayist, programmer, and programming language designer. In 1995 he developed with Robert Morris the first web-based application, Viaweb, which was acquired by Yahoo in 1998. In 2002 he described a simple statistical spam filter that inspired a new generation of filters. He’s currently working on a new programming language called Arc, a new book on startups, and is one of the partners in Y Combinator.

Y Combinator is a great idea that I wish would be replicated in other places.  I would love to see a similar program at the University of Wisconsin or in Madison.  Y Combinator:

[M]ake[s] small investments (rarely more than $20,000) in return for small stakes in the companies we fund (usually 2-10%).

All venture investors supply some combination of money and help. In our case the money is by far the smaller component. In fact, many of the startups we fund don’t need the money. We think of the money we invest as more like financial aid in college: it’s so people who do need the money can pay their living expenses while Y Combinator is happening.

For the last few years, he has written essays on life, business, startups, investing, education and many other interesting topics.  Some of my favorites, which I highly recommend along with the rest of his work, are After Credentials, Revenge of the Nerds, Why Nerds are Unpopular, How to Start a Startup and Why Startups Condense in America.

His recent essay titled Thirteen Sentences is a guide to what he believes are the thirteen most important things a startup should know about as it progresses.  His list is similar to what I tried to do for the Entrepreneur Deli last year in my post about the lessons I learned running ExchangeHut, but much better.
Here are a few of my favorite and what I believe are his most important pieces of advice:

1. Pick good cofounders.

Cofounders are for a startup what location is for real estate. You can change anything about a house except where it is. In a startup you can change your idea easily, but changing your cofounders is hard. [1] And the success of a startup is almost always a function of its founders.

2. Launch fast.

The reason to launch fast is not so much that it’s critical to get your product to market early, but that you haven’t really started working on it till you’ve launched. Launching teaches you what you should have been building. Till you know that you’re wasting your time. So the main value of whatever you launch with is as a pretext for engaging users.

5. Better to make a few users love you than a lot ambivalent.

Ideally you want to make large numbers of users love you, but you can’t expect to hit that right away. Initially you have to choose between satisfying all the needs of a subset of potential users, or satisfying a subset of the needs of all potential users. Take the first. It’s easier to expand userwise than satisfactionwise. And perhaps more importantly, it’s harder to lie to yourself. If you think you’re 85% of the way to a great product, how do you know it’s not 70%? Or 10%? Whereas it’s easy to know how many users you have.

8. Spend little.

I can’t emphasize how important it is for a startup to be cheap. Most startups fail before they make something people want, and the most common form of failure is running out of money. So being cheap is (almost) interchangeable with iterating rapidly. [4] But it’s more than that. A culture of cheapness keeps companies young in something like the way exercise keeps people young.

9. Get ramen profitable.

“Ramen profitable” means a startup makes just enough to pay the founders’ living expenses. It’s not rapid prototyping for business models (though it can be), but more a way of hacking the investment process. Once you cross over into ramen profitable, it completely changes your relationship with investors. It’s also great for morale.

Check out his essays at PaulGraham.com.  They are worth the read if you are interested in startups, education or creativity.

Business School Way of Life…Revisited

Category : Entrepreneurship
Posted on by

My previous post from Saturday generated the most feedback of any of my posts so far.  I received tons of emails from some people who agreed and others who thought I was full of it.  I’ll try to clarify and expand further with this post.

I don’t think its wrong to be rich or wrong to want to get rich.  Where it becomes a problem is when the main or only goal is to get rich.  In situations like this, people cut corners and look the other way to make a quick buck.  They do not do the right thing or build for the long term.  As my friend Joe, an Indiana business school grad said, “its becomes poker to them.”  As in all get rich quick schemes, at some point, someone ends up holding the bag.
My problem with the Business School Way of Life is that, for many, the main and only goal is to get rich.  Getting rich should be the byproduct of doing something that is useful and that you like to do.  If you create something worthwhile that people want, odds are, society will compensate you for your efforts.  
Business school is not the only area of the American economy that is prone to this disease.  During the tech boom, people started companies with the express goal of getting rich, rather than building a useful product.  In the end, the bubble burst and the people who were in it solely for the money ended up failing.  Athletes who are in it only for the money don’t seem to do as well as those who love the game.  Construction workers who cut corners to make a quick buck fall victim to the same disease. 
At least in previous bubbles, the people who tried to “get rich quick” left behind lasting infrastructure.  The railroad tycoons connected America.  Oil barons found new resources to lead the world into the automobile age.  The fiber optics companies paved the way for the Internet.  What has the finance industries’ boom and bust left us with?
My previous post was more a critique of American culture as a whole, using the business school way of life as a lens to focus on the problem.  It seems to me that many people my age now expect to love their jobs AND get rich without putting in full effort.  It seems to me that people in previous generations expected to have to grind away in jobs that they did not necessarily love in order to succeed.  I am not suggesting that everyone should go to work in a big company and grind away in corporate America.  On the contrary, I think it would be great if more people took the risk of joining smaller companies out of college or even started their own.  This way, they would be more focused on building something lasting, rather than “playing poker” with other people’s money.
I may have been too harsh on business schools and the people who attend them, but I truly believe that the world would be a better place if more people decided to go into other, more productive careers.  If more people would stop trying to get rich quick and instead tried to build something new and interesting, maybe we wouldn’t be in this mess that we are in now.  I think that if current college students and recent grads got back to the basics of trying to solve problems and build interesting and worthwhile things, they, along with us, would be better off.

The Business School Way of Life

Category : Entrepreneurship
Posted on by

John Talton’s recent article on britannica.com called “Business Schools & Financial Services: Oh The Harm They’ve Caused” is a great article on a subject that I have been meaning to write about for awhile now.  Talton’s main premise is that:

…for a generation or more…so many of our brightest college graduates have gone to Wall Street to get rich, rather than creating something useful or beautiful, rather than helping to strengthen and reinvent industries that actually produce something. Those with less talent, connections or family money have mimicked them, choosing to work in “financial services.”

Tellingly, they are enrolled in highly publicized “ethics” courses. And year after year, the top graduates go into finance. Most graduates move into settings where they continue their socialization into being an unquestioning cog in the matrix. The motivation is at once banal and uniform: I’ve talked to many classes where students say their main goal in life is to “get rich.”

As a Poli Sci major who started and ran businesses while in college, I became disillusioned with many of the students who took their classes in Grainger Hall and the courses that they were enrolled in.  By Sophomore year, it was clear to me that many, if not most, of these students were on the “get rich quick” plan and had no interest in building anything interesting or worthwhile.  They wanted to become cogs in investment banks or work in financial services.
Their goals were so completely different from mine, as were their values.  They valued name over actions and flair over substance.  They viewed business school as the next step to bonus millions, rather than a place to learn how to actually do something.  To be clear, not everyone who I met in the business school fits into this category.  I can think of many counter examples of smart people who were genuinely interested in the inner workings of finance, real estate or accounting but in my experience, the vast majority fit into the “get rich quick” group.
Michael Lewis’ great article from the December edition of Portfolio called “The End of Wall Street” visits many of the same themes.  He is hopeful that with the recent downturn, many of these smart people will be dispersed into other, more productive industries.
I wholeheartedly agree.  The best thing that could happen during this recession would be for the extremely smart people currently working in finance to move into other industries.  Imagine if these smart people were unleashed to tackle other problems like the future of the auto industry, green technology, education or any other huge problem.  I know many will take those last few sentence as sarcasm since these same people had their hands in the financial meltdown, but I am hopeful that they might be more successful in other industries.
It would be great if the best and the brightest college students just entering college now eschewed not only the business school, but what I’ll call “the business school way of life” and learned common sense life lessons.  Instead of doing “finance” they learned history and politics and how the world actually works.  These smart people would be poised to lead America’s next generation of companies that actually create, invent and innovate, rather than just move money around.  I believe that America, not to mention the world as a whole, would be much better off if these changes occur.