Are entrepreneurs the new chefs? At the recent launch of this year’s inaugural Made Enterprise Festival James Lohan, co-founder of travel guide company Mr & Mrs Smith, suggested that he was at best sceptical of the current surge in popularity for entrepreneurialism, especially among the young.
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...In a vitriolic attack on the BBC, Luke Johnson a noted private equity investor and very successful entrepreneur in his own right, wrote a column yesterday in the Financial Times in which he asserts quite harshly that the whole of the BBC assumes “that business is ruthless, domineering and egotistical,” and that Dragons’ Den is a farce, a cartoon, and ludicrous. He notes in passing that “when Dragons’ Den was first shown in Britain, there was a degree of novelty and...
Letting someone else write your business plan is almost always unnecessary and almost certainly unwise.
MindBites is much like YouTube except that every tutorial has a price and they are, as a group, of somewhat longer duration and much better quality than the kind of content you typically find for free.
If you were to make a list of the 100 things you and those who work with you spend most of your time doing, you would likely discover that more than 90% of the tasks you undertake have no proven economic value. You think they help generate money, but you can’t prove it. And for the most part . . . you're probably wrong.
Justin Whitston, the founder of VentureLab, has taken considerable exception to my blog post from the other day, entitled, “The Insanity of Angel Investors”. He carefully reviews my points and disagrees with many of them. I shall, in a moment, try to reply thoughtfully to his comments.
But first I want to reply to his over-arching view that in writing a “sensationalistic” piece, I am harming the environment for angel investing itself. Clearly, I don’t think so or I would not...
The best Angels help the businesses they invest in immeasurably. They recognize good teams when they see them. They offer mentoring, advice, encouragement and occasionally a harsh word that keeps an entrepreneur focused, effective and motivated. Good angels are few and far between, but they are entirely worth looking for.
Because the LinkedIn community is all business all the time, it's great place to run Pay Per Click ads targeted at C-level decisionmakers.
I have never understood the antipathy that otherwise rational people have for the so-called “lifestyle business”. Quite recently I heard someone in a position of responsibility in the small business community disparage lifestyle businesses. They weren’t real businesses, he said. They only enriched the owner, he said. What the f**k, I thought to myself?
Even more puzzling was the unthinking regard that everyone holds for the externally funded business. Get angel funding, get venture capital, get debt from a bank...
Technology comes in two types. Sustaining technologies that are incremental in nature and support existing market leaders, and disruptive technologies that represent complete paradigm shifts and displace existing market leaders. Disruptive technologies are the tools used by effective entrepreneurs to unseat market leaders.
