Can Entrepreneurs Be Made? Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant.
They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.” Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Scott Cook, Entrepreneurial Skills Article - Inc. Article. There are at least three reasons you should know Scott Cook, and one reason you probably don't.
And it's that last one that might be most important. Cook is the founder of Intuit, the company that brought you the personal and business financial tools Quicken and Quickbooks--and as Intuit's CEO for the better part of 20 years, since its launch in 1983, he built the company into a $1.7 billion enterprise. He should be more famous than he is. Not just for the fact of Intuit's success (you know other companies that grew bigger and faster), but for how Cook achieved it and what his particular entrepreneurial journey represents. Not to mention the ways his company's creations have changed how so many of us manage our financial lives.
In 1983, when he took his start-up leap, Cook was already ahead of two curves. Free Money Finance: Trying to Earn More Money? Stop Wasting Your Time. This is a guest post by Ramit Sethi of iwillteachyoutoberich.com.
His book, "I Will Teach You To Be Rich ," comes out next week on March 23rd. One of the problems with starting a new business is that you have an infinite number of choices for ways to start earning money. For the last few weeks, I've been working with someone named "Nicole," a freelance writer who offered to help me interview some of my readers and collect money stories for my blog. She offered to work for me in exchange for advice on building her freelance business. How come I'm not earning enough money? Our conversation was a great example of the troubles that many entrepreneurs face when starting their businesses, so I thought I'd share some simple techniques that Nicole and I came up with to focus her on earning more money. Nicole's problem First, the back story: Nicole had emailed me a few weeks earlier, offering to do research and freelance writing for me in exchange for advice and possibly paid work. Ask HN: Sources to determine "reasonable compensation?" for web CEO's.
Blog Archive » But Seriously. Thanks everyone who told me how much you enjoyed the Whiner Jerkins PowerPoint.
It was a lot of fun to make. I think everyone needed a laugh for a moment. Some people seemed to think I was trying to deliberately insult Sequoia or VCs in general. Not so. I think Sequoia’s advice is pretty logical, in fact, it’s largely the stuff you hear at Y Combinator. I have always viewed the "get popular now and worry about making money later" ethic with trepidation.
On the other hand, build something like Draftmix or TicketStumbler and you can make a fortune from only 100,000 unique visitors a month which, as far as I can estimate, won’t even put you in the Alexa top 50,000. It did get me thinking a bit about the typical VC-backed ethic though. Let’s suppose a VC invests $10 million in your company. Now let’s assume we double the standard deviation to $50 million. (Sorry about the goofy stretching, but the graphing xls file I found didn’t allow me to alter the axis properly. Like this: Like Loading... Start a business, not a startup. Startups can bring new ideas to market.
They can give people a chance to change the world on their own terms. They can create something where nothing existed before. There is no doubt that they are exciting things to be a part of. But, as much as the tech world tries to treat them as special, we don’t believe startups are special. They aren’t born out of big bang moments where the laws that govern other businesses don’t apply. From the moment they go live, startups are as real as any other business. At the atomic level, all businesses need to generate revenue to pay their bills, grow their business, and stay in business. Suggesting startups — specifically tech startups — don’t need to look for revenue opportunities now is akin to spoiling a child and shielding them from the outside world: They’re far less prepared when they eventually have to leave the house for the first time.