Positive Leadership: Entrepreneurial Advice

Positive Leadership: Entrepreneurial Advice

Positive Leadership: Teaching Young People to be Entrepreneurs

An entrepreneur since childhood, Cameron Herold wants parents and teachers to recognise -- and foster -- entrepreneurial talent in kids.

For 20 years, Cameron Herold has been coaching entrepreneurs on five continents, helping them build their companies. He started BackPocket COO to coach and mentor young, fun companies -- and help them make their dreams happen. Herold was a leading force behind one of the most successful new business ventures of the last decade, 1-800-GOT-JUNK?. He was Chief Operating Officer for nearly seven years. Prior to that, he was VP of Corporate Development at Ubarter.com.

Positive Leadership: Teaching Young People to be Entrepreneurs

Positive Leadership: Entrepreneurial Advice

Business advice from Sheldon Adelson, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Richard Branson, Charlie Munger, Donald Trump, Warren Buffet, Jim Pattison, Charles Koch and Sunil Mittal

Positive Leadership: Entrepreneurial Advice

Positive Leadership: Control is for Beginners

Carl Størmer is the founder of Jazzcode.

As Carl shows us in this video, by jamming with two people he’d never practised with before, sometimes you just need to let go. A jazz musician needs to stop controlling and start trusting his band members’ competency and artistry. This trust, the willingness to let go and allow for space, allows band members take risk (that’s what a jazz solo is!) and try something new and different — while being supported by their band-mates. Without that support, you get a chaos of sound. With too much control, you don’t get jazz.

Carl’s wife, Ane, sums up this attitude with her own adage: “Control is for beginners.”

Spontaneity and relinquishing control provide enormous advantages, even if it takes a certain kind of non-practice to feel comfortable with it. Jazz musicians know that. Innovators should learn that as well… because sometimes, control really is for beginners.

 

Positive Leadership: Control is for Beginners

Positive Leadership: Turning Your Great Idea into a Viable Product

Positive Leadership: Turning Your Great Idea into a Viable Product

Positive Leadership: Coming Up With Innovative Ideas

Zipcar founder Robin Chase shares how she comes up with her ideas, and explains the importance of starting with a "minimum viable product" when launching a business.

Positive Leadership: Coming Up With Innovative Ideas

Positive Leadership: Learn How to Embrace Failure and Focus on Your Customers

Garth Saloner is Dean of the Stanford Graduate School of Business. He says that small business owners of today should be keeping their eyes on their peers while never taking their eyes off their customers.

Positive Leadership: Learn How to Embrace Failure and Focus on Your Customers

Positive Leadership: Execution is Everything!

The Stanford Graduate School of Business View from the Top Series hosted venture capitalist John Doerr in a question and answer session where he helped enlighten students on such topics as start-ups, healthcare and jobs in emerging markets. 

Doerr, general partner at Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, emphasised that "The best entrepreneurs are the ones who really go the distance with their companies, who are always learning."

Doerr serves on boards in the areas of Internet technologies and greentech, including Amyris, Bloom Energy, Essence Healthcare, Flipboard, FloDesign Wind Turbines, Google, iControl, mCube, Renmatix and Quantumscape. He also works with Groupon, Twitter and Square.

Positive Leadership: Execution is Everything!

Positive Leadership: Advice for #Entreprenuers in Building a #VC Friendly Business Model

This excellent discussion with Stanford University Professor Haim Mendelson explores the best approach for putting together a business model and how to use it for new business development opportunities.

Learn why the business model is a blueprint for planning, and then building, new businesses that include startups or a new line of business within an established company.

Positive Leadership: Advice for #Entreprenuers in Building a #VC Friendly Business Model

Positive Leadership: Winning Entrepreneurs

What are the most important characteristics of winning entrepreneurs?

They must have a strong desire to compete and win, an intuitive understanding of marketplaces and how to serve them, and a deep understanding of technology and how it can be used to serve marketplaces. Those three things are fundamental. A fourth is high integrity and decent behavior. If you don’t have that you will have a short run at success but you won’t make it long term. Also, we have never met a successful entrepreneur who didn't have zeal.

Positive Leadership: Winning Entrepreneurs

Positive Leadership: How to Build a Great Company from Scratch

Steve Blank, serial entrepreneur, Founder of E.piphany and Stanford consulting associate professor, says team building is an important skill for entrepreneurs. 

Startups are about putting together an orchestra. It's not about playing a single instrument.

Positive Leadership: How to Build a Great Company from Scratch

Positive Leadership: Charisma

Venture capitalists have a rule of thumb - bet on the leader, not the idea. 

Some people seem naturally high in charisma, but there are ingredients that can be cultivated: A genuine interest in people. Listening to their needs and concerns, and showing that you will help them achieve their goals. Treating people as though each is special and deserves attention. Remembering details about them. 

In today's troubled world, entrepreneurship is sometimes treated as the new religion that will save the economy and build world peace. The analogy to religion is appropriate, because there's always an element of faith in innovation and entrepreneurship. 

Charisma can be a decisive factor.

Positive Leadership: Charisma

Positive Leadership: When Starting a Company, Get Your Values Right

As a start-up gets off the ground, it has a short-lived opportunity to decide how it wants to do business. With each new hire company culture becomes more entrenched and somewhere after two dozen employees, it tends to cement. 

Establish a set of genuine values before your start-up gets too complex. 

Articulate a coherent philosophy about who you are and how you will work. Also be clear about who you aren’t and what you won’t do. This will make decisions easier and ultimately improve results. Rather than analyzing each new decision afresh, you’ll have a common foundation from which to make them. If you don’t do this deliberately when your organisation is young, the culture will (often rigidly) form itself. Companies that do not appear to have strong core philosophies, or that abandon them, tend to wander. 

Your philosophy is your corporate constitution and one of the most valuable pieces of IP you'll create.

Adapted from “Four Things to Get Right When Starting a Company” by Bruce Gibney and Ken Howery - http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2012/05/four_things_to_get_right_when.html

Positive Leadership: When Starting a Company, Get Your Values Right

Positive Leadership: What to look for in a CV

Vinod Khosla, the Sun Microsystems co-founder, now a venture capitalist, talks about his obsession with hiring the right people.

"A high school dropout who's done a lot is better than a Stanford PhD who has done a similar amount, because he's driven further" with fewer credentials, says Khosla. He does think schooling really helped him, but mostly because he explored different disciplines rather than sticking with the same field.

An interesting sit-down with an interesting man that quickly skates on to other topics.

Positive Leadership: What to look for in a CV

Positive Leadership: How to Build a Business

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg talks about her experience in building two of the largest tech businesses in Silicon valley - 'Think Big, Hire Big, Plan Big!'


.

Positive Leadership: How to Build a Business

Positive Leadership: How to Write a Successful Elevator Pitch

Positive Leadership: How to Write a Successful Elevator Pitch

Positive Leadership: Thinking Like a Gold Medallist

Elite athletes encounter many of the same mental challenges that successful entrepreneurs face on a daily basis, according to JoAnn Dahlkoetter, a sports and performance psychologist in San Carlo, Calif. She should know. In addition to coaching business leaders, Dahlkoetter currently counts five Olympic gold medallists as her clients. She finds that many of the same strategies athletes use to outwit mental obstacles work in business as well. Here's her advice for overcoming three of the most vexing psychological challenges, whether you're a start up or established entrepreneur looking to grow.

Challenge No. 1 - Negative thinking. Slumps happen in athletics, business, and life. Start asking positive questions when you find yourself thinking: I'm not good enough. I can't do this. Nothing is going right. Try: What's good about this situation? What tools and resources do I need to move in the direction I want to go? Asking yourself better questions can help you move forward. Perhaps the big client you lost wasn't the best fit anyway, and now you have the bandwidth to service a bigger, better customer. The more you actively turn around negative thinking, the easier it gets to see opportunities in adversity, Dahlkoetter says.

Challenge No. 2 - Exhaustion. Just as athletes experience injuries and burnout, even the most resilient business owners can get fatigued from putting so much into their businesses. In addition to the sage advice of eating healthfully and getting enough sleep, Dahlkoetter says it's critical to plan breaks ranging from a few hours where you disconnect to a few days away. If that's not possible, take a "mental vacation." Get to a place where you'll be uninterrupted for five or 10 minutes. Breathe deeply and visualise yourself relaxing in a beautiful setting, like at the beach. Sound weird? Research has long shown the positive effects of meditation on stress levels and health. In fact, a new study from the University of Washington found that regular meditation can increase concentration and make you more productive.

Challenge No. 3 - Fear. During the Olympic Games, a decade or more of preparation and training can lead to a single competition. Entrepreneurs have that kind of pressure when they encounter business-threatening obstacles or setbacks. When fear becomes paralysing, you've got to go back to the basics, Dahlkoetter says. "Remind yourself of the skills and talents that got you to the level of success where you are now," she says. "Visualise yourself having the outcome you want over and over and over again." Then, focus on the moment. Don't think about the past or worry about the future. Instead, determine the very next thing you have to do to get the outcome you want. If you're worried about closing a big deal, make a list of the tasks that will give you the best possible advantage--studying competitors' strengths and weaknesses, writing a winning proposal, polishing your presentation--and then tackle those to-dos one by one. Taking positive action is a strong way to dissolve fear, she says.

Positive Leadership: Thinking Like a Gold Medallist

Positive Leadership: Three Pitfalls Start-Up Founders Must Avoid

Noam Wasserman, Harvard Business School professor, outlines three pitfalls start-up founders must avoid - the three Rs: relationship decisions, roles decisions, and rewards decisions.

Positive Leadership: Three Pitfalls Start-Up Founders Must Avoid

Positive Leadership: Building a Successful Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Here are ten principles for building a successful entrepreneurial ecosystem:

(1) Stop emulating Silicon Valley.

(2) Shape the ecosystem around local conditions.

(3) Engage the private sector early.

(4) Favour the high potentials.

(5) Get a big win on the board.

(6) Tackle cultural change head-on.

(7) Stress the roots.

(8) Don't over-engineer clusters; help them grow organically.

(9) Reform legal, regulatory, and bureaucratic frameworks.

(10) Ensure that there is clear leadership within the system, such that connectivity is implicit.

Each of these is critical to entrepreneurship - yet insufficient to sustain it. They key is to integrate them all into one holistic system.

Positive Leadership: Building a Successful Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Positive Leadership: Writing a Start-Up BusinessPlan

Before you send your start-up business plan ideas to a prospective funder, you should think about the Elements of Sustainable Companies and Writing a Business Plan.

Elements of Sustainable Companies

Start-ups with these characteristics have the best chance of becoming enduring companies. Investors like to partner with start-ups that have:

Clarity of Purpose

Summarise the company's business on the back of a business card.

Large Markets

Address existing markets poised for rapid growth or change. A market on the path to a £750m potential allows for error and time for real margins to develop.

Rich Customers

Target customers who will move fast and pay a premium for a unique offering.

Focus

Customers will only buy a simple product with a singular value proposition.

Pain Killers

Pick the one thing that is of burning importance to the customer then delight them with a compelling solution.

Think Differently

Constantly challenge conventional wisdom. Take the contrarian route. Create novel solutions. Outwit the competition.

Team DNA

A company’s DNA is set in the first 90 days. All team members are the smartest or most clever in their domain. "A" level founders attract an "A" level team.

Agility

Stealth and speed will usually help beat-out large companies.

Frugality

Focus spending on what's critical. Spend only on the priorities and maximise profitability.

Inferno

Start with only a little money. It forces discipline and focus. A huge market with customers yearning for a product developed by great engineers requires very little firepower.

Writing a Business Plan

Investors like business plans that present a lot of information in as few words as possible. The following business plan format, within 15-20 slides, is all that's needed:

Company Purpose

·         Define the company/business in a single declarative sentence.

Problem

·         Describe the pain of the customer (or the customer’s customer).

·         Outline how the customer addresses the issue today.

Solution

·         Demonstrate your company’s value proposition to make the customer’s life better.

·         Show where your product physically sits.

·         Provide use cases.

Why Now

·         Set-up the historical evolution of your category.

·         Define recent trends that make your solution possible.

Market Size

·         Identify/profile the customer you cater to.

·         Calculate the Total Addressable Market (top down), Serviceable Available Market (bottoms up) and Serviceable Obtainable Market.

Competition

·         List competitors

·         List competitive advantages

Product

·         Product line-up (form factor, functionality, features, architecture, intellectual property).

·         Development roadmap

Business Model

·         Revenue model

·         Pricing

·         Average account size and/or lifetime value

·         Sales & distribution model

·         Customer/pipeline list

Team

·         Founders & Management

·         Board of Directors/Board of Advisors

Financials

·         P&L

·         Balance sheet

·         Cash flow

·         Capitalisation table

·         The deal

Positive Leadership: Writing a Start-Up BusinessPlan