mediascience's posterous http://mediascience.posterous.com Most recent posts at mediascience's posterous posterous.com Tue, 27 Mar 2012 00:27:00 -0700 A VC: The Startup Curve http://mediascience.posterous.com/a-vc-the-startup-curve http://mediascience.posterous.com/a-vc-the-startup-curve
Media_httpwwwfuturela_sgpad

Where are we...

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1037311/RE_Pic.jpg http://posterous.com/users/he6XH5WLGjRJE mediascience mediascience mediascience
Wed, 13 Jul 2011 01:24:00 -0700 Top 5 Reasons Entrepreneurs Fail - CapLinked http://mediascience.posterous.com/top-5-reasons-entrepreneurs-fail-caplinked http://mediascience.posterous.com/top-5-reasons-entrepreneurs-fail-caplinked

Are You Mark Zuckerberg, Colonel Sanders, or John DeLorean?

Nobod

y likes to talk about failure. It’s not fun or sexy. We live in a culture that worships success, no matter how you get there, and is disgusted by and afraid of failure, no matter what the reason. This is especially true of entrepreneurs. We live in age that believes in overnight success. The mythology of Mark Zuckerberg starting a business at nineteen, immediately succeeding, and becoming a billionaire by age twenty-five is now considered a template for millions of young aspiring entrepreneurs.

Of course it is a cruel myth for anyone to believe that kind of success can be replicated. People would actually have a greater chance of winning the lottery. Most entrepreneurs fail. Sometimes they fail many times before they ultimately succeed. Only a few entrepreneurs have ever become billionaires before the age of forty, and so far only one person in history has achieved what Zuckerberg did at such an early age. That puts the odds at hundreds of billions to one. If anybody likes those odds, we have to play poker together some time.

Here are a few more real life entrepreneurial stories. Colonel Sanders didn’t start Kentucky Fried Chicken until he was sixty-two years old. If you don’t believe that, check Wikipedia. Many entrepreneurs never succeed even if they try over and over for an entire lifetime. Do you remember Jon DeLorean? His car company was sort of like the Tesla of thirty years ago. He was arrested for selling cocaine. Why? So he could raise money to save his dying company. Even the enormously successful Elon Musk had run out of cash before Tesla went public. Rupert Murdoch was out of cash in 1990. He survived because Marvin Davis loaned him money. Stories of extremely delayed success, nearly losing it all, or outright failure are not what people want to hear, but they’re important. As much fun as it is, nothing is learned from easy success. Failure and near failure is how people learn.

All of this begs to the question everybody running a business or thinking about starting a business wants to understand: Why do some entrepreneurs succeed while most of them fail? Here are a few key reasons.

1)     Excessive optimism – Entrepreneurs have to be optimistic to succeed. However, too much optimism is also one of the most common reasons they fail. Entrepreneurs need to remember that only the paranoid survive. As much as you need to believe in your own success, at the same time you must never forget all the things that can go wrong and plan accordingly.

2)     Inflexibility – Entrepreneurs need to be stubborn. They are often surrounded with people, even their loved ones, who tell them to give up and go get a job rather than trying to build something. Nevertheless, the inability or refusal to change and pivot kills many entrepreneurs.

3)     Lack of creativity – A good entrepreneur learns from and often copies what others are doing if it’s working. As long as you aren’t stealing anything, that’s just good business. However, if you have none of your own ideas and are simply a copycat of what others are doing, you aren’t creating any value. Your business has nothing about it that is special, and your customers and others in the market will know it. A commodity business with no unique value proposition is much more likely to fail.

4)     Greed – A good entrepreneur should be greedy and not just for money. Entrepreneurs should have a big appetite for risk, glory, fame, misery, power, and fortune among other things.  However, many entrepreneurs allow their greed to get the better of them. They allow it to blind their judgment and make bad decisions that destroy their businesses or themselves personally. The best entrepreneurs know how to balance their greed with discipline, prudence, and humility.

5)     Bad luck – Yes, a successful entrepreneur must be lucky. This is just a basic fact even as it may be offensive to many people who think that you have to make your own luck and everything that happens people deserve. As nice as that is to believe for some people, it isn’t true. Luck is usually the single most important factor that distinguishes the most successful entrepreneurs from those who just do ok and survive. It is extremely rare for an entrepreneur to achieve great success without luck, and there is no way for anyone to control that variable. This is why many successful entrepreneurs are superstitious.

Why become an entrepreneur when success is so uncertain? The most important reasons to become an entrepreneur aren’t success, money, fame, power, or glory. The entrepreneurial life is about being your own boss, doing what you love, and creating value. Hopefully if you create enough value, the money, fame, and glory will follow. Regardless, nobody can take away from you the enjoyment you derive from what you do. If you’re just in the game for the hope of hitting it big, you shouldn’t be in the game.

    

Which ones will get us?...NONE (they missed out hubris...)

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1037311/RE_Pic.jpg http://posterous.com/users/he6XH5WLGjRJE mediascience mediascience mediascience
Mon, 09 May 2011 06:05:00 -0700 Top Ten Lies of Entrepreneurs: Guy gets it right - Signal vs. Noise (by 37signals) http://mediascience.posterous.com/top-ten-lies-of-entrepreneurs-guy-gets-it-rig http://mediascience.posterous.com/top-ten-lies-of-entrepreneurs-guy-gets-it-rig

Abhi 09 Jan 06

>> “Gartner says our market will be $50 billion in 2010.”

As a small company, there is limited bottom up research we can perform. We have to rely on external resources like Gartner and IDC to make certain projections.

Don’t VCs or any other rational set of people need numbers to quantify the potential return?

I may be extremely passionate, but if the market size of my product is limited, why would any one care?

How are projections like fortune telling? Projections are just that, predictions. Based on what we know today, this is likely to happen. Projections have to be updated regularly, based on new knowledge.
You can look at someone’s projections and understand the amount of effort they have put into understanding the product and the target market.

If someone uses 2002 data to make projections about handheld devices in 2010, that is inaccurate. Though, 2003 projections can be compared with 2005 actuals and you can see a trend and reasonably predict 2006/2007 numbers.

I love Point 6 about where the game is won...

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1037311/RE_Pic.jpg http://posterous.com/users/he6XH5WLGjRJE mediascience mediascience mediascience
Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:33:00 -0700 How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up? | Recruiting & Job Search, New York City Start-up blog by Marc Cenedella http://mediascience.posterous.com/how-can-i-tell-if-i-am-failing-at-my-entrepre http://mediascience.posterous.com/how-can-i-tell-if-i-am-failing-at-my-entrepre

How can I tell if I am failing at my entrepreneurial venture or start-up?

There’s an old joke about how to make a small fortune in angel investing: start with a large fortune and invest it in angel rounds.

I guess you could say the same thing about how to fail at an entrepreneurial venture: start a new company and then do everything that could be reasonably expected of you.  And that’s how you fail.

The world is not set up to make your venture successful, and in fact almost everything conspires against you and your new company.

Because there is no natural constituency for the entrepreneurial venture, there is no way, reasonably, you can expect yours to survive. Customers aren’t clamoring for new vendors, employees aren’t looking to make half as much for their hard-earned skills at a firm that has a 50% chance of dying every day, and investors aren’t interested in taking risks or putting money into pipe dreams.

The conceit that a new venture has a shot of winning at all, under any circumstances, was unknown throughout history, is still laughable across the globe, and remains rare even here in the United States.

And that’s why it takes a special person to succeed.  Notice I said “special”.  Not charming, philanthropic, beloved, clever, popular, persuasive, capable or handsome.

“Special”.

You know, I’ve attended several dozen “entrepreneur breakfasts” here in New York City hosted by various internet luminaries or fellow entrepreneurs over the past eight years since I started TheLadders.  Entrepreneurs can make good use of the dose of inspiration that comes from sharing, in the camaraderie of the breakfast table, the stories of challenges overcome, obstacles conquered, and victories won.

And while it’s never easy to tell which businesses and which people will win big this time around, it’s pretty easy to tell who is going to fail.

It’s the polite, patient, purposeful people.

Being an internet entrepreneur requires a certain antic disposition, a degree of self-immolation, and a dorkish obsessiveness with seeing the digital bits line up in a row.  Not just an enjoyment, not just a desire, but a gut-level craving, an existential need, to see the machine come to life.  That burn that flares so intensely in the dark of the night that it awakes you: to  stare at the ceiling, to wonder expansively, to turn every part of the creation over and over and over in your head as the clock flicks the minutes into the small hours.

Many, perhaps all, who come to entrepreneurship want the fame or the fortune or the fellowship, but it is only the ones who need it badly enough that will suffer through.

I remember sitting next to one very, very nice woman at one of these entrepreneurial breakfasts in 2007.  She had a great idea and a clever execution for an advice site — something like Daily Lit for the self-improvement set.

I asked what the URL was; she said the site wasn’t live yet.

I asked when it was going live; she said, with some pride in the accomplishment, that they’d already spent 18 months on the design, copy, coding and business model, and were lining up famous names to endorse the site when it went live, which they were preparing for next year at about this time.

She asked me if I had any advice for success.

I said yes.

“Put down your fork.

Get up from your chair.

Walk out this door.

Go to your office and call all of your team together. Lock the door and let everybody know you are not opening it or leaving the office until your site is live and accepting customers.”

I suppose another characteristic of entrepreneurs is our directness : )

Well, of course, she objected: that’s not practical, it’s not considerate, we still have planning to do before we’re ready for launch, and it is essential that we be perfectly positioned because you only get one shot to go live with a consumer brand.

And you know what?

She was absolutely right.

But so was I.

You see, being an entrepreneur is unreasonable.  It is arrogant.  It is unusual.

You are asserting that, despite the presence of 7 billion other people on the planet, and a US economy that produces $14 trillion in goods and services each year, and over 100 mm white collar workers in our country, that you, little old you, have come up with an idea, a business, a company that none of those other wonderful human beings have thought to invent yet.

I mean, c’mon, there’s no denying that it’s arrogant to say that you are right and everybody else was wrong to not see the wonderful opportunity that your company is pursuing.  That they were fools to just leave the dollar bills waiting there for you to pick them up.

And part of that unreasonableness is realizing that you are in a fight for your company’s life every day.  Every day that you are not “live” is a day you’ve lost the opportunity to make an impression.  Every day that you’re not bringing in cash is a day that you’ve lost the chance to expand your payroll.  Every day that you’re not pleasing customers is a day that somebody, somewhere else, will.  Perhaps they’re not doing it as well as you know you eventually will, but the plain truth is that they are pleasing them today and you’re not.

So here’s my 3-step checklist to figure out if you’re failing as an internet entrepreneur:

1. Is the site live yet?

Yes: you’re likely failing, but at least you’ve got a chance of getting some feedback from real, live users, which may, if you’re smart and perceptive, decrease your chance of failure a little bit.

No: you’re failing.

2. Do you have free customers yet?

Yes: well, now you have a shot to establish relationships. And if you listen carefully and not pridefully, you just may have a tiny chance of hearing them correctly and improving your customer experience from awful to plausibly bearable.

No: you’re failing.

3. Do you have paying customers yet?

Yes: congratulations! You have reduced your chances of failing from 100% to 99%.  There are many more chances to fail along the way, but you have graduated to some of the more interesting ones.  Good show!

No: you’re failing.

If, when you wake up in the morning, the answer to any of the above questions is “no”, then you’re failing. Not failing tomorrow, or next month, or next year, but failing right now, today.  As you read this…. Now.

And what you need to do, what you must do, is to spend your entire day focused on changing the answers to yes.  Desperately, immediately, fully.

The very nice polite woman who had purposefully set out to make an enormous splash with her internet company did indeed get it live the next year, and her patience paid enormous dividends… to her competitors from vertically-focused advice sites.  She struggled along for a couple years and then failed.

You will too, if you’re still reading this, and not locking the door to the office…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 16th, 2011 at 7:11 am and is filed under Start-up. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

A good call to action...

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1037311/RE_Pic.jpg http://posterous.com/users/he6XH5WLGjRJE mediascience mediascience mediascience
Thu, 17 Mar 2011 01:29:00 -0700 Sleepless In Startupville: 23 Questions That Keep Entrepreneurs Up http://mediascience.posterous.com/sleepless-in-startupville-23-questions-that-k http://mediascience.posterous.com/sleepless-in-startupville-23-questions-that-k
Media_httponstartupsc_dnscj

See #17 particularly!

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1037311/RE_Pic.jpg http://posterous.com/users/he6XH5WLGjRJE mediascience mediascience mediascience
Tue, 22 Feb 2011 00:38:00 -0800 How Great Entrepreneurs Think http://mediascience.posterous.com/how-great-entrepreneurs-think http://mediascience.posterous.com/how-great-entrepreneurs-think
People chase investors, but your best investor is your first real customer. And your customers are also your best salesmen.

Some strong 'calls to action' here for how we can develop MS. Accent the doing...

Permalink | Leave a comment  »

]]>
http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/1037311/RE_Pic.jpg http://posterous.com/users/he6XH5WLGjRJE mediascience mediascience mediascience