recommended by terry o' reilly

January 30, 2008 | WSJ | By NICK SCHULZ.

Opportunities for Entrepreneurship in Later Life
Rogoff, Edward G
Generations; Spring 2007; 31, 1; ProQuest
pg. 90

March 17, 2003 | WSJ | By PAULETTE THOMAS | Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

Entrepreneurs' Biggest Problems -- And How They Solve Them
Among the ingredients for success: flexibility, realism and passion

Mark Goldstein, a Pittsburg immigration attorney

October 14, 2003 | WSJ | By PAULETTE THOMAS | Special to THE WALL STREET JOURNAL.

April 13, 1987 | Fortune | By Monci Jo Williams REPORTER ASSOCIATE Susan Caminiti.

April 13, 1987 | Fortune Magazine | By Jaclyn Fierman REPORTER ASSOCIATE Christopher Knowlton.

The key distinction here is the Justificationist focus of large organization managers and the falsificationist focus of venture
fund managers...Mihnea Moldoveanu

4/20/2010 @ 12:53PM |1,298 views
The Future of Entrepreneurship Looks Bright
Vahan Janjigian Vahan Janjigian, Forbes Staff

July 22, 2006 | WSJ | by REED ALBERGOTTI.
The tinkerers who helped build America haven't disappeared -- they're right next door. Our search for small-town patent hubs found surprising innovations from coast to coast.

Summer 2006| The Journal of Private Equity | Alex Proimos and Wayne Murray

Only a very small proportion of investment proposals attract venture capital. This is because entrepreneurs and venture capitalists (VCs) have differing opinions of when a venture is ready for external investment or considered “investor ready.” These differing opinions result, primarily, from the emotionally committed entrepreneur who fails to see the venture from an investor's point of view. The result is a large number of unfunded and disappointed entrepreneurs and frustrated VCs. This article investigates these differences in opinion, and finds that, though entrepreneurs are aware of the fundamental investment criteria used by a VC, they are comparatively overconfident in their assessment of the overall investor readiness of their venture. Investor readiness is determined by examining the technology, market, and management readiness—and gut feel—of a new venture. In response to the findings, the article discusses numerous solutions to increase an entrepreneur's chance of receiving financing from a VC.

Winter 2002 | Journal of Private Equity | by Noel J. Lindsay and Justin Craig

March 16, 2012 | Kaieteur News | Editorial

2004 Philip Stern @ pstern@sternthinking.com or 416.588.0000

14 Apr 2004|Wall Street Journal Online | By Christina Cheddar Berk

By: Rick C. Wade
Posted: October 10, 2011

James Altucher
Saturday, January 28th, 2012

By Naomi Starkman November 11, 2011

Investment opportunities

In order to build a successful food hub, start-up capital is often needed to renovate facilities for aggregation, storage, packing, light processing, and distribution.

In addition, working capital is necessary for business management systems to coordinate supply chain logistics. Financial support is also needed for enterprise development training and technical assistance to increase grower capacity to meet wholesale buyer requirements.

“As with any infrastructure-heavy project, a food hub will likely require several different forms of capital to launch successfully,” said Elizabeth Ü, Founder and Executive Director of Finance for Food, and author of the forthcoming book, Finance for Food: A Sustainable Food Entrepreneur’s Guide to Raising Mission-Aligned Capital.

Ü noted that a food hub might need to structure a variety of points of entry to appeal to potential investors, who may have different risk tolerances, time horizons, and investment amounts. She said,

A little creativity can go a long way; in addition to USDA grants and traditional loans, there are several innovative investment models that food entrepreneurs are using to raise capital, including revenue-sharing agreements, advance sales, and crowdfunding. The challenge is finding a good fit between investment terms and the values of both the food hub management and each investor.

The USDA sees food hubs as ripe investment opportunities and is currently funding nearly 30 percent of the food hubs it surveyed. Preliminary analysis shows that food hubs have great economic potential and are a sound investment. The USDA is preparing a more comprehensive resource guide for food hubs to be released later this year. The guide will feature a mix of government and non-government resources available for food hub development.

BY PAUL RODGERS Business Editor rodgersp@jamaicaobserver.com

Friday, January 27, 2012

December 2 | - The Washington Post |By Vivek Wadhwa.

Dec. 21, 2011 | Bloomberg Businessweek | by Vivek Wadhwa, director of research at Duke University's Center for Entrepreneurship, discusses the start-up technology industry. He talks with Cory Johnson on Bloomberg Television's "Bloomberg West." Emily Chang also speaks. (Source: Bloomberg)

DEC 18 2011 | The Atlantic | DARREN DAHL - Dahl is a contributing editor to Inc. magazine and a business writer in North Carolina

DEC 17 2011 | The Atlantic | Marc Freedman.

By STEVE LOHR
December 5, 2011

The newer model for starting businesses relies on hypothesis, experiment and testing in the marketplace, from the day a company is founded. That is a sharp break with the traditional approach of drawing up a business plan, setting financial targets, building a finished product and then rolling out the business and hoping to succeed. It was time-consuming and costly.

The preferred formula today is often called the “lean start-up.” Its foremost proponents include Eric Ries, an engineer, entrepreneur and author who coined the term and is now an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Business School, and Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur, author and lecturer at Stanford.

The approach emphasizes quickly developing “minimum viable products,” low-cost versions that are shown to customers for reaction, and then improved. Flexibility is the other hallmark. Test business models and ideas, and ruthlessly cull failures and move on to Plan B, Plan C, Plan D and so on — “pivoting,” as the process is known.

A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship – The Lean LaunchPad at Stanford: Class 1
Posted on March 8, 2011 by steveblank

By ALEXANDRA LEVIT
Published: November 26, 2011

Sept. 13, 2008 | The Financial Times p18.| By James Harkin

July 23, 2011 | The Financial Times p4. | Davina Catt

Source:

Sept. 9, 2011 | The Financial Times p14. | Delphine Strauss

By STEVE LOHR
Published: April 24, 2010

By Esther Dyson|Posted Friday, Nov. 18, 2011,

a man who arrives in a village with what he claims is a magic stone. Put the stone into a pot of water over a fire, he says, add a just few ingredients—some vegetables, some old ham bones, a few spices—and soon you will have a delicious, life-giving soup with magical healing properties.

In this folk tale, the man is a trickster: The point of the story is that his magic stone is just a plain old rock. To modern eyes, however, this man is an entrepreneur. His “magic stone” is perhaps the germ of an idea, a product concept, or a marketing innovation. The entrepreneur takes the stone and adds ingredients (commodities or software), attracts people, gets them to work together, and perhaps tosses in a pinch of branding. The result is value where before there were only unexploited resources.

But that is only the beginning of the story. In the long run, the entrepreneur’s job is not to make soup, but to create a restaurant—or, better yet, a chain of restaurants—so that the magic soup can be made reliably, day after day, by a team that can work on its own without the impresario’s direction. Over time, the company will continue to evolve, improving the soup, adding other items to the menu and opening up restaurants in new markets....We can argue about the value of education, but large companies are good at offering practical business skills—turning college graduates into project managers, marketers, human-resources specialists, and the like. These jobs may not generate revenues directly, but they are part of the structure that enables people to run companies effectively and benefit from economies of scale.

JULY 18, 2001

By BRUCE BARTLETT
"The Elusive Quest for Growth" (MIT, 342 pages, $29.95) by the economist William Easterly.....Easterly works at the World Bank. But his real concern is not with his employer or with the International Monetary Fund, although he is critical of both institutions. Rather, he wants to address the whole question of economic growth: Where does it come from? What encourages it? What discourages it? How important is luck? How important is policy? The answers he gives, in certain respects, apply as much to advanced economies like the U.S., Germany and Japan as to the developing nations of Africa and Asia....
Simply giving capital to those without it -- i.e., foreign aid -- is unlikely to stimulate growth. What is really essential is knowledge, and that cannot be transmitted by writing a check. Nor can it be gained just by sending people to school. In fact, critical knowledge, the kind those Bangladeshi textile workers seized upon, is not easily identifiable in the abstract. First entrepreneurs must perceive an opportunity for profit; then a few opportunistic people will see what knowledge is required. And then more will.

Without a proper understanding of such things, a good deal of damage can be done.

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ
Published: November 12, 2011

The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

Apr 01, 2001 | Profit . Vol. 20, Iss. 2; pg. 55 | Mike Delfre.

A one-industry town built on steel, Sault Ste. Marie, Ont. is not exactly an entrepreneurial hotbed. But it didn't used to be that way. Sault Ste. Marie began just over a century ago as a place where native trade flourished. Eventually it attracted entrepreneurs such as Francis Clergue, who built an industrial empire on the area's natural riches.

Entrepreneurialism seems to have vanished in recent years, as generations of Soo residents grew accustomed to holding jobs that someone else created. For years, Sault Ste. Marie has meant Big Steel. Like most people who grew up in single-industry towns, Saultites appear to have some difficulty recognizing the opportunities in a "knowledge-based" economy. We have checked our brains at the gate for so long.

While my entrepreneurship pitch often meets with glazed eyes, we've tapped into a high degree of latent interest in business creation. There is no shortage of ideas, or the desire to be rich. What has been lacking is a comprehensive process to nurture fledgling entrepreneurial spirits and turn ideas into action. Now that we have a process that seems to work, we have noticed a growing number of inquiries and more talk about business creation. In time, the need to "sell" entrepreneurship may be a thing of the past.

August 3 2005 18:49 | Financial Times | Fergal Byrne.

The pitch is the business plan distilled to its essence: a 10- to 20-minute presentation followed by a question-and-answer session. In some cases, particularly when facing venture capitalists, the Q&A can take place during the pitch....“The business plan is the all-encompassing thesis on why the business is a good opportunity, the pitch is the entrepreneur’s defence of the opportunity,”...
The odds of pitching success are not high: one study of Canadian business angels, for example, suggests almost three-quarters of opportunities were rejected at this stage before the business plan was given serious consideration.
(1) Passion wins hearts and minds.
(2) Less is more. A pitch needs to be concise to whet investors’ appetites. Guy Kawasaki, from Garage Venture, encapsulates his approach in his “10/20/30 rule”. He recommends entrepreneurs present no more than 10 slides, speak for no more than 20 minutes and write in 30-point font size. “The brevity forces an entrepreneur to purify his or her pitch.
(3) Become the product. Entrepreneurs need to apply the same discipline to sell themselves as they do to sell their product,
(4)Solve a problem – segment the market. Products need to solve a specific problem. Too often investors see ideas that are “solutions looking for a problem” or solutions trying to address too many problems.
(5)Master the domain – be candid. Answering investors’ questions during the Q&A is a vital part of the screening process. Entrepreneurs need to respond intelligently, to show they can read people, listen and interact...It is vital that presenters do not become defensive or aggressive during the presentation but respond in a calm, conversational manner.

Apr. 25, 2005 | Financial Times pg 16.| by Paul Tyrrell

Everyone wants to run their own business. But many fail to prepare thoroughly before scrambling on to the bandwagon. Among the television hopefuls, the most widespread and humiliating trait is a failure to appreciate that an entrepreneur's personal qualities are just as important as their ideas.

It is a salutary warning. Venture capitalists and business angels have always been more inclined to back a great team with a mediocre idea than a mediocre team with a great idea. They attach a lot of importance to what they term "scar tissue" - evidence that the person has learned from experience.

"People who are enamoured of their own idea can be great, but only if they listen really hard,"... "Nothing goes to plan, so you're looking for people you can trust off-plan." ...Entrepreneurs are more likely to succeed if they can come up with an idea that exploits their experience. This is particularly clear in product development situations - for example, where an engineer takes the knowledge he gains at a large company and uses it to set up a rival.

Research suggests that "spin-outs have a survival edge in the market over other entrants as the result of a combination of entrepreneurial flexibility and inherited knowledge"....what distinguishes successful entrepreneurs is their ability to spot commercially exploitable patterns where others cannot. Herbert Simon, winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize in economic sciences, suggests this process is intuitive: a good business idea stems from the creative linking, or cross-association of two or more in-depth "chunks" of experience - know-how and contacts.

J U N E 1 9 9 9 |The Atlantic | by Lester C. Thurow. The new rules for individuals, companies, and nations.

Rule 1 No one ever becomes very rich by saving money.
Rule 2 Sometimes successful businesses have to cannibalize themselves to save themselves.
Rule 3 Two routes other than radical technological change can lead to high-growth, high-rate-of-return opportunities: sociological disequilibriums and developmental disequilibriums.
Rule 4 Making capitalism work in a deflationary environment is much harder than making it work in an inflationary environment.
Rule 5 There are no institutional substitutes for individual entrepreneurial change agents.
Rule 6 No society that values order above all else will be creative; but without some degree of order creativity disappears.
Rule 7 A successful knowledge-based economy requires large public investments in education, infrastructure, and
research and development.
Rule 8 The biggest unknown for the individual in a knowledge-based economy is how to have a career in a system where there are no careers.

2 October 2006 | Wall Street Journal| Johan Norberg.

The people we should thank are the innovators and entrepreneurs, the individuals who see new opportunities and risk exploring them -- the people who find new markets, create new products, think out new ways to handle commodities commercially, organize work in new ways, design new technology or transfer capital to more productive uses. The entrepreneur is an explorer, who ventures into uncharted territory and opens up the new routes along which we will all be traveling soon enough. Simply to look around is to understand that entrepreneurs have filled our lives with everyday miracles.

Entrepreneurs are serial problem-solvers who search out inefficiencies and find more practical ways of connecting possible supply with potential demand.

SEPTEMBER 24, 2005 | WSJ | By PAUL A. GIGOT.

Leon Louw, the South African economist, says that in the past 30 years the world has poured $450 billion of aid into Africa, but that average per capita income is lower than it was in the late 1960s. According to the World Bank's data, 39% of sub-Saharan Africa's private wealth was somewhere other than Africa in 1990 -- compared to 3% for South Asia, and only 10% even for Latin America.

Why invest in Africa if Africans won't? "It's a very fair question, and I think part of the answer is to deal with the kinds of regulations and taxes that I've been talking about," Mr. Wolfowitz says. "I'm absolutely sure that part of the answer is dealing with the corruption factor."

sonia verma
HAVANA— From Thursday's Globe and Mail
Published Wednesday, Oct. 12, 2011

September 30, 2011, 4:25 PM EDT
The Untapped Talent That Can Juice the Economy
Efforts to encourage anyone to start a business have done little for growth. Getting skilled professionals to focus on "productive" ventures makes more sense

By Scott Shane

SEPTEMBER 28, 2011 | WSJ | By CHARLES R. SCHWAB. Every Job Requires an Entrepreneur
Someone took risks to start every business—whether Ford, Google or your local dry cleaner.

What's the potential power of the entrepreneur's simple leap of faith? The success of a single business has a significant payoff for the economy. Looking back over the 25 years since our company went public, Schwab has collectively generated $68 billion in revenue and $11 billion in earnings. We've paid $28 billion in compensation and benefits, created more than 50,000 jobs, and paid more than $6 billion in aggregate taxes. In addition to the current value of our company, we've returned billions of dollars in the form of dividends and stock buybacks to shareholders, including unions, pension funds and mom-and-pop investors.

The wealth created for our shareholders—a great many of them average Schwab employees—has been used to reinvest in existing and new businesses and has funded a myriad of philanthropic activities. We've also spent billions buying services and products from other companies in a diverse set of industries, from technology to communications to real estate to professional services, thereby helping our suppliers create businesses and jobs.

September 24th, 2011 | Tim Ferriss

September 22, 2011, 7:00 am
Starting the ‘Netflix of Flowers’
By JESSICA BRUDER

August 29, 2011 | WSJ | By EDWARD R. MULLER AND LARRY ZIMPLEMAN

The Kauffman Foundation recently proposed a way to do that with a set of
ideas aptly called the Startup Act. Those ideas, which would cost the
government virtually nothing, include:

• Letting in immigrant entrepreneurs who hire American workers.

• Reducing the cost of capital through capital gains tax relief for
early stage investments.

• Reducing barriers to IPOs by allowing shareholders to opt out of
Sarbanes-Oxley.

• Charging higher fees for patent applicants who want quick decisions to
remove the backlog of applications at the Patent Office.

• Giving licensing freedom to academic entrepreneurs at universities to
accelerate the commercialization of their ideas.

• Having the government provide data to permit rankings of startup
friendliness of states and localities.

• Regular sunsets for regulations and a consistent policy of putting new
ones in place only if their benefits exceed their costs.

By TIM McKEOUGH
Published: August 24, 2011
Quirky

Jul 27, 2011 | FT. pg. 10 | Luke Johnson. I used to think Mark
Z's achievement with Facebook was an inspiration to entrepreneurs. Now
I'm not so sure....I've lost count of the # of biz plans I've seen from
"digital pioneers" building the next Facebook or suchlike...The truth
is that no other company has ever expanded like Facebook. The vast
majority of start-ups do not raise formal vc - they fund their
operations via family & friends...Most winners are in their 30s or
40s by the time they make it. Experience counts in mgmt....This illusion
of instant technology wealth is new. Thomas Edison & other
inventors took yrs. to establish fortunes - and many like Charles
Goodyear, never did..... Google & Amazon distorted the financial
world... they were the exceptions....Companies generally take from 5 to
10 yrs. to break through....The best biz are not built to flip...Most
service mundane requirements, quite possibly business apps rather than
sexy consumer projects like Facebook.

JULY 23, 2011 By JONATHAN COHEN AND JOHN GIARDINO

The Empire State Can Rise Again
Upstate cities like Buffalo and Rochester were once powerhouses. They
can be again, if politicians encourage local entrepreneurship

July 12, 2011 | NYT | Tom Friedman. Reid Hoffman, has a book
coming out in 2012 called “The Start-Up of You,” co-authored with Ben
Casnocha. Its subtitle could easily be: “Hey, recent graduates! Hey,
35-year-old midcareer professional! Here’s how you build your career
today.” ....Hoffman argues that professionals need an entirely new
mind-set & skill set to compete. “The old paradigm of climb up a
stable career ladder is dead & gone,” “No career is a sure thing
anymore. The uncertain, rapidly changing conditions in which
entrepreneurs start companies is what it’s like for fashioning a career.
Therefore, approach career strategy the same way an entrepreneur
approaches starting a business.” Ditch the grand life plan.
Entrepreneurs don’t write a 100-pg. biz plan and execute it one time; be
emergent....use your netwk. to pull in info. & intelligence about
where the growth opportunities are — & invest in yourself to build
skills that will allow you to profit from those opportunities.

By Ryan Singel
May 3, 2011

October 20, 2010 by Pete Warden. The most important unsolved
question for Big Data startups is how to make money. Here's a hierarchy
showing the stages from raw data to cold, hard cash:
(1) Data. You have a bunch of files containing info. you've gathered,
way too much for any human to ever read. You know there's a lot of
useful stuff in there though, but you can talk until you're blue in the
face & the people with the checkbooks will keep them closed. The
data itself, no matter how unique, is low value, since it will take
somebody else a lot of effort to turn it into something they can use to
make $. (2) Charts. Take that massive deluge of data and turn it into
some summary tables & simple graphs. You want to give an unbiased
overview of the info., so the tables & graphs are quite detailed.
This makes a bit more sense to the potential end-users, they can at
least understand what it is you have, and start to imagine ways they
could use it. (3) Reports; (4) Recommendations.

Jun 29, 2011 SmartMoney By Anne Tergesen Older Americans Fuel Entrepreneurial Boom

JUN 1, 2011 - Imprint - Salon.com BY AARON KENEDI,
From online services to clothing lines, these grad student projects
marry artistic talent with entrepreneurship.(Read with eye for John
Corless @ Indigo)

By Luke Johnson

Published: May 31 2011

by James Surowiecki
MAY 16, 2011

May 12, 2011, 7:00 AM
Why Austin, Tex., Is a Good Place for Small Businesses
By MP MUELLER

MAY 11, 2011,�WSJ�By Emily Maltby

May 7, 2011 | NYT | By MIGUEL HELFT

May 4, 2011, 7:00 am
Business Life After Death in Rwanda
By ADRIANA GARDELLA

Entrepreneurship, Innovation by Ryan on May 3, 2011

April 5 2011 FT.com / Entrepreneurship -By Emma Jacobs

November 1, 2010 By: Monée Fields-White

APRIL 11, 2011

Apr 10, 2011 | Tech Crunch | Sarah Lacy

April 12, 2011 | Financial Times | By Patti Waldmeir and John Reed.

By Paul Kedrosky March 19, 2011 One of the puzzles Dane
Stangler & I worry over is why we're not seeing a significant
increase in the rate of entrepreneurship in the U.S.--it has more or
less flat-lined over the last few decades. Lowered barriers to company
creation, more capital, & a broader understanding of the rewards --
personal & financial -- of starting companies hasn't led to a reset
of the L.T. rate at which start-ups are created. Possible explanations?
It could be that the % of the working popn interested in
entrepreneurship and able to pursue it full-time is and will always be
constrained. People have kids, families, mortgages, health issues, etc.,
& they aren't unable to change course to a career that makes all of
those things more challenging. It may be that other sectors have
transferred entrepreneurial talent out of science, technology, &
engineering into other sectors where the societal benefits are much
smaller, and arguably even negative.

APRIL 9, 2011 By SCOTT ADAMS

How to Get a Real Education
Forget art history and calculus. Most students need to learn how to run a business, says Scott Adams.

March 23 2011 03:09

March 26, 2011 | NYTimes.com | By ADRIANA GARDELLA
Three New Books Highlight Female Entrepreneurship

* MARCH 10, 2011 Investors Desperate to Find Hits Drive Up Valuations and Attach Fewer Strings to Their Deals
By PUI-WING TAM And AMIR EFRATI

Mar. 04, 2011|Globe and Mail | Special to MARJO JOHNE
An October 2010 report by the SME Financing Data Initiative – a joint
project by Industry Canada, Statistics Canada and Finance Canada to
gather information on financing for small and medium-sized enterprises –
found that, in 2007, 85 % of female-owned small businesses that applied
for a loan were approved. By comparison, the approval rate for
male-owned small businesses was 96 %. Female-owned businesses also got
less money, receiving an average amount of $118,000, compared with
$284,000 for the companies owned by men. At the same time, female
entrepreneurs had to provide lenders with more documentation – such as
personal financial statements, appraisals of assets and cash flow
projections – than male entrepreneurs, the report found.

Lecture by Jack Dorsey, creator of twitter and square, as part
of Stanford U.'s Entrepreneurship corner.
"Instrument" your company from Day 1. The 1st thing he did in square
(and not in twitter) is write an admin control panel for their servers.
Be a story teller. Inspire your team & your customers with a
story, your idea.
In the company, act as the editor, composing the stories.
The team you build is not permanent, different players will need to
enter & exit according to their profiles, the current story &
the "required edition".
Internal comms.: Everyone in the company will have the same
priorities.
External comms: You communicate with the product, your product is
"your story for your customers".
$ in the bank: The company needs it, firstly from investors and
secondly, and more critical, from revenue.
Limit the # of details. Those that stay need to be perfect.
Finally,"expect the unexpected and, whenever possible, be the
unexpected".

Well, the obvious answer is that it all depends, but on the grounds most people wo

By Kimberly Weisul | February 1, 2011