How To Make The Worlds Easiest $1 Billion With all the banks paying back the TARP money, some folks are assuming that the great Wall Street bailout is finally coming to an end. But of course it isn't! Taxpayers are still guaranteeing all big bank bonds (Too Big To Fail) and subsidizing huge bank earnings and bonuses with absurdly low interest rates. But instead of bellyaching about it, you might as well just smile and cash in. So here's how to make the world's easiest $1 billion: STEP 1: Form a bank. STEP 2: Round up a bunch of unemployed friends to be "bankers." STEP 3: Raise $1 billion of equity. STEP 4: Borrow $9 billion from the Fed at an annual cost of 0.25%. STEP 5: Buy $10 billion of 30-year Treasuries paying 4.45% STEP 6: Sit back and watch the cash flow in. At this spread, you should be earning at least 4% per year on your $10 billion of capital, or $400 million. You'll have made $400 million in a single year! Don't be greedy. Now, you've already made at least $150 million, so it doesn't really matter what happens next.
Fairytale Destinations Is it a dream or is it for real? These places will make you wonder whether you step into the land of magic and fantasy or still firmly stand on the ground. With unearthly nature, unreal landscapes or fairy tale architecture, these destinations will take you far away from your humdrum reality. Picturesque Colmar in France, considered the most beautiful city in Europe, looks like it came straight out of a fairy tale. As if being the wine capital was not enough, Colmar, with its pretty squares, fountains and canals, is also called the "little Venice" (la Petite Venise). The Lord of the Rings' scenery of Faroe Islands truly makes you believe the archipelago is inhabited by hobbits and elves. Saksun, Faroe Islands. Castle Neuschwanstein in Bavaria, Germany in autumn. It is not a sugary Disneyland construction, although it looks like a fairy tale palace occupied by some capricious princess. If there was a fairy tale about the enchanted land of clay, its setting would look like Cappadocia.
How the Stock Market and Economy Really Work - Kel Kelly "A growing economy consists of prices falling, not rising." The stock market does not work the way most people think. A commonly held belief — on Main Street as well as on Wall Street — is that a stock-market boom is the reflection of a progressing economy: as the economy improves, companies make more money, and their stock value rises in accordance with the increase in their intrinsic value. A major assumption underlying this belief is that consumer confidence and consequent consumer spending are drivers of economic growth. A stock-market bust, on the other hand, is held to result from a drop in consumer and business confidence and spending — due to inflation, rising oil prices, high interest rates, etc., or for no reason at all — that leads to declining business profits and rising unemployment. The Fundamental Source of All Rising Prices For perspective, let's put stock prices aside for a moment and make sure first to understand how aggregate consumer prices rise. Forced Investing
How Training Employees Can Boost Sales - VerticalResponse Column by Janine Popick, Inc.com "Female CEOs" October 16, 2009 When I started VerticalResponse we had just four employees. With such a tight knit group there wasn’t really a need for company or product training. We all knew everything that was happening, who our customers were, how our product worked, and how to sell it. But what happens when a company starts to grow and the tight knit group starts to unravel? I can tell you that we waited way too long to start formally training our new employees, and for a while it showed. One day I witnessed one of our salespeople who had been with the company for a few months selling something we didn’t offer. I take our training program very seriously. It’s never too early to start your own training program in your company. Create a document that the employee can be walked through and refer back to.
- StumbleUpon Mahendra Ramsinghani: What Every Entrepreneur Can Learn From Facebooks Early... On January 4, 2011, Mark Zuckerberg woke up to some good news. TIME magazine named him the "Person of the Year" and had his photo on the cover. The same day's Wall Street Journal featured a story on MySpace, Facebook's once formidable competitor, and its dramatic downsizing. Entrepreneurs dream of such fame, not to mention the total decimation of competition. Can you get users to beat a path to your door? Economics 101 tells us that when supply rises above demand, value evaporates. Can you get VCs to beat a path to your door? Can you block out noise from competition? That's enough competition to make even the toughest entrepreneurs throw in the towel. Can you build value and yet keep the keys to the kingdom?
All Revenue is Not Created Equal: The Keys to the 10X Revenue Club &... May 24, 2011: May 24, 2011: [Follow Me on Twitter] “ Don’t you know that you are a shooting star,And all the world will love you just as long,As long as you are.” – Paul Rodgers, Shooting Star With the IPO market now blown wide-open, and the media completely infatuated with frothy trades in the bubbly late stage private market, it is common to see articles that reference both “valuation” and “revenue” and suggest that there is a correlation between the two. What drives true equity value? Because of the difficulty of getting DCF right, investors commonly use a handful of other shortcuts to determine valuations. The following chart highlights 2012 forward price/revenue ratios for 122 global Internet stocks. Before we talk about why there is such disparity, it is important to highlight a few more points. What causes such a wide dispersion of price/revenue multiples? 1. If high price/revenue multiple companies have wide moats or strong barriers to entry, then the opposite is also true. 2.
Unsupported Browser Today, we are excited to share that Identified has been acquired by Workday. This is an exciting outcome for everyone involved in Identified and we want to thank our team, Board of Directors, investors, customers, advisors, families and the other countless people that have supported us over the years. Waller Capital served as an exclusive advisor to Identified in this transaction. Since we co-founded Identified out of a shared dorm room at Stanford University in 2010, we have assembled what we believe to be the best group of data scientists and engineers in the industry. And so on behalf of all of us, we are thankful to Workday for believing in us and in the possibilities of what we can do together. Sincerely, Adeyemi Ajao & Brendan Wallace, co-Founders of Identified Continue to identified.com
Business Ideas for the Self Employed Several years ago, I had a lovely long-term consulting assignment which kept me both busy and solvent. One morning I woke up and realized that it was coming to an end and I had nothing lined up. After a few moments of panic, I decided to get serious about creating my next income source. I didn’t have a great deal of time to devote to this, so I gave myself the challenge of finding a way to earn $100—an easily accomplished goal. What I didn’t realize at the time, was that I had just created a new habit that has kept my business—and cash flow—moving smoothly along. Over time, I’ve learned that there are other benefits to this simple technique. There’s an old saying, popularized by Robert Schuller, that goes, “By the inch, it’s a cinch. You can begin implementing the $100 Hour even if you now have a job or other commitments that clamor for your time. A word of warning is in order here. My local tv news just featured a booming business called Vegas Errands. . . . .
Top 10 Traits Of Highly Successful People Rating: 8.2/10 (185 votes cast) We have all read about people who are successful briefly. They win a gold medal, make a fortune, or star in one great movie and then disappear.…These examples do not inspire me! My focus and fascination is with people who seem to do well in many areas of life, and do it over and over through a lifetime. These are the people who inspire me! 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. These traits work together in combination, giving repeatedly successful people a huge advantage. This article was originally written by Philip Humbert and can be found here
Eight Questions To Ask Before You Start A Business Are you thinking of starting a web business? Starting a PPC Management agency? Setting up your own site and selling things, or building a web publishing empire? Before you start, ask yourself the following eight questions. The advantage of this Q&A is that you can quickly see if the idea you’re going to throw your money and soul into is likely to work. 1 . Define what service the business provides. Try to focus. McDonalds could, no doubt, provide up-market meals, but they focus on selling quick, cheap food. That is what they do. 2. Who are your customers? Create a mental image of your typical customer. 3. What is your unique selling proposition? If your customers can buy the same services for less elsewhere, or more easily, they will. There is a tendency to model yourself on others. This is not to say doing something wildly new or different is any guarantee of success. 4. This point is so important, it really should be number one. Businesses may have great ideas. Then the bank manager calls.
How to pick a co-founder &045; Venture Hacks Naval · November 12th, 2009 Update: Also see our 40-minute interview on this topic. Picking a co-founder is your most important decision. It’s more important than your product, market, and investors. The ideal founding team is two individuals, with a history of working together, of similar age and financial standing, with mutual respect. The power of two Two is the right number — avoid the three-body problem. One founder companies can work, against the odds (hello, Mark Zuckerberg). Two founders works because unanimity is possible, there are no founder politics, interests can easily align, and founder stakes are high post-financing. Someone you have history with You wouldn’t marry someone you’d just met. One builds, one sells The best builders can prototype and perhaps even build the entire product, end-to-end. The seller doesn’t have to be a “salesman” or “business guy”. Aligned motives required Pay close attention — true motivations are revealed, not declared. Don’t settle Pick “nice” guys
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. If you look at Diagram A above you’ll see that the presenters are sitting at the opposite end of the table from where the screen is. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. So, there you have it.