Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his Internet start-up fell through. He was 35.
It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3 a.m., out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. "I realized I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company," he says.
Exhausted and demoralized, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. A momentary blast of hope—but no, just a message from a fan, something he had been getting more and more of lately. This one was from some guy in Sweden, a fellow software entrepreneur, and it was the usual "Evernote has changed my life" sort of thing. Libin almost missed the last line: "If you ever need any money let me know."
Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: "It just so happens we could use some cash. How much did you have in mind?"
The answer came right back: "Would half a million dollars be enough?"
Sunday, March 25, 2012
Say Hello to Your New Brain on Evernote, Company of the Year | Inc.com
Saturday, March 24, 2012
Schumpeter: The view from Liverpool | The Economist (Justification why Econ Dev is a scam...)
Alas, the entrepreneurial flame is easier to put out than to light or relight. Governments across the world are determined to promote high-growth companies and the other accoutrements of an entrepreneurial society: can it be long before Kim Jong Un announces a North Korean venture-capital fund? But a collection of policymakers and academics assembled in Liverpool by the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes enterprise, all made it clear that this is easier said than done.
Policymakers have proved inept at promoting enterprise. For one thing, politicians focus on short-term election cycles and tend to junk their predecessors’ policies, good or bad. But there are also two bigger reasons. The first is that policymakers confuse promoting enterprise with promoting small businesses, regional development or job growth. In fact, serious entrepreneurs want to create big businesses, not multiply small ones. They don’t give a fig about regional development. And they habitually disrupt established patterns of employment rather than simply creating new jobs on top of the old.
The second is that policymakers are obsessed by Silicon Valley. The Russians claim to have built a clone of it near Moscow. Latvia aspires to create its own venture-capital industry. Universities everywhere are building high-tech “incubators”. Yet there is little evidence that the model is transferable. Most incubators are a bit like roach motels: would-be entrepreneurs check in but never leave. The venture-capital industry is in trouble in Silicon Valley itself, given the high rate of failure of start-ups, and is unlikely to flourish in Latvia. Rohit Shukla of the Larta Institute in California says policymakers should stop obsessing about clusters (which are usually the product of accident, not planning) and embrace global networks instead. The rise of the internet, the growing importance of emerging markets and the proliferation of networking organisations like the Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE, a group with members across 14 countries), all make it easier to link talent with opportunity around the world.
if indeed Northeast Ohio has a true entrepreneurial economy (which I beg to differ with the same as I do with the existence of a so called "entrepreneurial ecosystem") "Cleveland-Style" economic development and Ohio politics, which are in bed together, will destroy it.
Sunday, March 18, 2012
The "Small Steps" It Takes to Build a Multibillion Dollar Business - Forbes
Now, says Leonard A. Schlesinger, president of entrepreneurial mecca Babson College and former COO of Limited Brands, “people don’t fail. They pivot.” If the original business concept isn’t working, the entrepreneur tweaks it, until he or she gets it right—or realizes it was all wrong in the first place and tries something else.
In Just Start!, a new book Schlesinger coauthored, he looks at how serial entrepreneurs who built businesses with revenues ranging from $200 million to the billions—actually behaved when starting a business. And, contrary to the popular image of entrepreneurs as swashbucklers who routinely take crazy risks, many turned out to be pretty careful and analytical. “What surprised me, quite honestly, is the fundamental difference between the myths we structure for entrepreneurs and the reality,” he says.
The first thing serial entrepreneurs do when starting a business, the authors found, is to take a small, “smart step” toward something they desire to achieve. Next, they stop and reflect on what that action accomplished. Finally, they decide if they still want to move forward, given what they have deemed to be their “acceptable loss”—or, as Schlesinger put it recently— “how excited you are about an idea against what you have in time and money.” With each step they take, they go through the process again until they either bail out, shift in another direction or succeed. Of course, they act quickly. Moseying through the steps doesn’t work in a fast-paced, global economy.