Move Over Facebook: Where Millennials Are Flocking to Next And How to Reach Them. Innovators push the boundaries of the known world. They're change agents who are relentless in making things happen and bringing ideas to execution. As someone interested in trends among the millennial generation, there was one particular statistic that caught my eye and continues to pop up on the radar: Only six percent of 12- to 17-year-olds who use the web want to be friends with a brand on Facebook, according to a Forrester 2011 report. Circumstantially, this was supported by a millennial conference I attended when a panel of college students all raised their hands when asked if they were thinking about logging out of Facebook for good.
While it wasn't a scientific study, the observation spoke volumes as to where Facebook may be heading. And now, fairly recent research backs it up. In the past Facebook has denied this trend is occurring, but in its third-quarter earnings call this month, the company finally acknowledged the fact the social network site is waning among youths. Do You Have The Courage To Survive And Thrive As An Entrepreneur? To be an entrepreneur you have to be willing to jump into the deep end. And that takes courage. But courage is just the beginning. At a fundamental level, most entrepreneurs need to repeatedly overcome adversity and pursue opportunities with very limited resources. My path as an entrepreneur has been marked by the adversity I’ve experienced in my own life and the struggles I’ve witnessed in the lives of others. As I get ready to launch my next two ventures, I wanted to share what I think are the five most essential principles (pulled from many of my previous posts here on Fastcompany.com) that I believe are must-haves for any entrepreneurial journey. 1.
The Traveling Companion Nobody succeeds in a silo. The people we surround ourselves with make the difference between failure and success. Equally important is to avoid people who bring us down, waste our time, take us backward, and have no interest in our suffering. 2. 3. 4. Creating a unique product and a unique brand isn't enough. 5. 5 Ways to Be a Badass Leader, James Bond Style. Thanks to the James Bond franchise, we've all daydreamed about what it might be like to be an international man or woman of mystery. The suits. The swagger. The sweet ride. Although you probably won't be able to build your tradecraft chops at the CIA, entrepreneurs can pick up a few lessons from the intelligence community. I've interviewed a number of human intelligence specialists and gathered five key ways you can step up your leadership skills, spy-style. 1.
Find the synergy between your objectives and those of valuable potential connections. Related: Move Over James Bond. 2. Pay attention to which phrases elicit an engaged response -- leaning forward, widening eyes, raised eyebrows, subtle nodding of the head, a flash of a smile. Also, be on the lookout for phrases or even names that elicit a negative or disengaged response -- leaning back, narrowing of the eyelids, crinkling of the nose or a protruding jaw. 3. 4. Entrepreneurs have to be just as versatile and flexible. 5. How Funding Works - Splitting The Equity With Investors - Infographic. A hypothetical startup will get about $15,000 from family and friends, about $200,000 from an angel investor three months later, and about $2 Million from a VC another six months later.
If all goes well. See how funding works in this infographic: First, let’s figure out why we are talking about funding as something you need to do. This is not a given. The opposite of funding is “bootstrapping,” the process of funding a startup through your own savings. There are a few companies that bootstrapped for a while until taking investment, like MailChimp and AirBnB.
If you know the basics of how funding works, skim to the end. Every time you get funding, you give up a piece of your company. Splitting the Pie The basic idea behind equity is the splitting of a pie. When Google went public, Larry and Sergey had about 15% of the pie, each. Funding Stages Let’s look at how a hypothetical startup would get funding. Idea stage At first it is just you. Co-Founder Stage Registering the Company The Angel Round. Business and Economy - mobile wiseGEEK. The Art and Science of Company Valuations (Infographic) Instagram, Spotify, Square, Pinterest, and the list goes on: It's starting to seem like billion-dollar startup valuations are a dime a dozen. But how does a young company get a billion-dollar price tag? The below infographic by San Francisco-based startup organization Funders and Founders details how a startup is typically valued. A valuation is simply an estimated value of a company and is often based on assumptions about a startup's potential.
It's not an exact science, explains Anna Vital, the author of the infographic in a blog post. A company's valuation is important because it can determine the percentage of the company that should be given to an investor in exchange for cash, Vital says. Related: How Instagram Went From Idea to $1 Billion in Less Than Two Years Click to Enlarge+ Catherine Clifford is a senior writer at Entrepreneur.com.
357: Read Fiction and Be a Better Leader by HBR IdeaCast. Quick Practical, Tactical Tips for Presentations. In the past I’ve given some tips for handling meetings effectively, covering topics like: - How not to let your meeting go down a rat hole; - Dealing with the elephant in the room; - Dealing with skeletons in your closet; - How to make meetings discussions, not “pitches” - A tale of two pitches (I eventually invested in the first company that pitched) Today’s post is a subtle one about positioning yourself in a presentation.
This might be a VC meeting but also might just be a sales or biz dev meeting. It’s any meeting where you are in a small room and are being called on to present on some form of overhead slides 1. Sit closest to the projection screen – Many times a week I have entrepreneurs who do presentations for me and often I’m with some or all of my colleagues. From witnessing all of these presentations I can tell you that there is a right place and a wrong place to sit. 2.
I’ve lately been attending meetings with our shareholders (called LPs or limited partners). 3. 4. 5. 6. 6 Leadership Styles, And When You Should Use Them. You don’t need an MP3 player, a turntable, or a CD player to listen to Tristan Perich’s new album, Noise Patterns. All you need is a pair of headphones—"not earbuds," says the composer—and a willingness to hear music in noise. The 34-year-old Perich’s compositions push the border between white noise and electronic music, frequently straddling the two as if the static on your old television started emitting a strangely beautiful pattern of sound. But Perich doesn’t just compose music: His music is the instrument itself. He composes sound in code, carefully stringing together each 1 and 0 to transform numbers into a symphony. Perich, who studied math, music, and computer science at Columbia and received a masters from NYU's fabled hacking-meets-art Interactive Telecommunications Program, has spent the last dozen years of his life exploring the frontiers of one-bit sound, transforming those lines of 1s and 0s into a living art form.
A recorded excerpt from Noise Patterns. 10 Questions Every New Entrepreneur Should Be Able To Answer. Inc.com. Starting a Business: The Idea Phase. You know you want to start a business, but what do you do next? Here's how to find the perfect idea for your business. Many people believe starting a business is a mysterious process. They know they want to start a business, but they don't know the first steps to take. In this chapter, you're going to find out how to get an idea for a business--how you figure out exactly what it is you want to do and then how to take action on it. But before we get started, let's clear up one point: People always wonder if this is a good time to start their business idea. The fact is, there's really never a bad time to launch a business. Estimates vary, but generally more than 600,000 businesses are started each year in the United States.
Everyone has his or her own roadblock, something that prevents them from taking that crucial first step. But unless you're a technological genius--another Bill Gates or Steve Jobs--trying to reinvent the wheel is a big waste of time. Just Do It!