Perhaps you have noticed the recent explosion of online start-ups. With capital requirements lower than ever for start-ups, venture capital funds have turned into accelerators that now spread the same pool of money across numerous young start-ups. International barriers to entry have been decimated by the Internet meaning aspiring entrepreneurs from all over the world [...] →
Why is it that some companies are able to scale to International and financial acclaim, while others get mired in competition and struggle to stay alive? There are many obvious explanations of course such as finding good Product/Market fit (creating something people will pay for), and being competitive in terms of cost and value. But [...] →
Tonight I attended an event for Startups at CalTech. The event began with presentations given by several founders and wrapped up with a key note speech by Bill Gross. For anyone who does not know, Bill Gross is a legend in the startup community. He founded IdeaLab in Pasadena, which has incubated over 100 companies, [...] →
I spent a lot of time studying entrepreneurship in 2011 and there were a number of great tidbits of advice that I collected along the way, that didn’t necessarily make it into a blog post of their own. As I reflect on a year now gone, I picked my favorites for this top 10 list: [...] →
When looking at successful businesses, it is easy to dismiss success and say they simply got lucky. But to leave it there is to dismiss the dilemma with a problem and not seek the solution, which apparently is part of the problem. Years ago while I was studying Psychology at the University of Washington, I [...] →
Perhaps the biggest challenge to entrepreneurship is coming up with the idea. Like many would-be entrepreneurs I’ve been accused of having too many ideas (bubbles) and always popping those bubbles, before they ever see the light of day. This tendency comes as a result of having experienced the pain of a failed business attempt. I [...] →
Web 3.0 has begun and its not what you think. I don’t think many people realized what Web 2.0 was until we were at the height of it, and already seeing the capabilities that had been set out years before it. But imagine if we had all realized in 2001 what was possible and all [...] →
Small business has entirely different needs and expectations from technology than larger enterprise. Okay, that is an obvious statement, right? So then why are small businesses always so surprised to learn about the cost associated with custom projects? First, a Little Background There was a time 10 years ago, when the company I [...] →
Anyone who has watched Google’s product releases over the past 5 years knows that the Silicon Valley giant has much greater ambitions than to simply be the World’s best search engine. In recent years they have effectively built and consolidated the Internet’s dominant advertising platform, and released both B2B and B2C products that span just [...] →
Two factors often attributed to success in entrepreneurship are hard work and luck. Hard work is easy to understand and doesn’t really need to be discussed, but if luck is that big of a part of the success equation, it deserves more discussion. A few weeks ago I wrote about research that looked at why [...] →