9/22/2011

Tonight Eric Matthews spoke to the class.  There were several ideas he spoke of that I think are significant.  The first was his two steps to starting a business:

1. Start
2. Keep going

As simple as they are to remember, they are very difficult to do.  For me, it is not easy to start because I have so many ideas and I want to pick the best one.  Keeping going is also tough because I am easily distracted by some shiny new idea which makes the one I started look like a dead end. 

The other idea was that you should value people over ideas.  This kind of solves my above problem.  It doesn't matter what idea I choose as long as there are good people working on it.  As an introvert and control freak, this unnerves me some because I don't like to trust other people all the time. 

Expansion coming soon ...

9/20/2011

Business planning is the topic of Chapter 5.  Most of the details are oriented towards those who are seeking investors or venture capitalists and I think even some of those are too far.  Do we really need an example of what a cover page looks like?  At any rate, the process is valuable for anyone.  The text does mention that many business concepts fail because a lack of understanding by the owners of the business model.  While that is valuable, other details such as a tagline seem to be overkill in my opinion.  Another thing that I keep remembering is an interview I saw with Rob Howard, the founder and CTO of Telligent in Plano, TX.  Rob talks about how he spent many hours writing out a business plan to a set of specifications he found and how proud he was of the final revision. However, six months later, reality was nothing like what the business plan has provided for.  He also talked about how difficult it was to jettison that business plan since he had worked so hard on it.  This could be a trap for nascent ventures as well.  If they follow the business plan because they don't want to 'waste' all the time investing in creating the plan, they could be ignoring the reality of running the company.

9/15/2011

Austin Baker visited the class this evening to share his experiences of becoming an entrepreneur at a very young age.  Austin is involved in a service oriented business as opposed to my goal of having a product oriented business.  However, there were two things he said that I wrote down because they had a special impact.

• "Avoid people who have a victim mentality."

The moral of the statement is that people who feel they are a victim will constantly feel that they are owed something and might go to extreme lengths to claim what they feel has been kept from them.  Sadly, these people are becoming harder to avoid as the victim mentality is spreading in this country and in the world.

• "I know I'm on to something when people think I'm crazy."

In the RSAnimate video from several classes ago, it was mentioned how a survey was given to a group of students throughout their time in grade school.  The higher the grade, the worse the students scored on creativity and innovation.  Most likely, the students who did not score well all had the same ideas and thought that the more original ideas of the higher scoring students were 'crazy'.  Perhaps 'crazy' is just another way of saying 'outside the box'.  

I'm not sure why this is the case but I have a theory.  To me, human beings crave innovation and creativity.  We always want something new because otherwise we get bored easily.  For this reason, we value those who have not had the creative and innovative abilities 'educated' out of them.  This can also cause some envy or jealously.  Therefore, in order to make themselves feel better, those who do not innovate call the others 'crazy'.

Personally, I have violated - at my own peril - both of the statements.  So it was very motivating to hear someone who had been through the same scenarios.  Also, more motivating was how he dealt with it.  So it is possible to come back from it.

9/8/2011

Dave Barger from LunaWeb visited the class tonight.  I have known Dave for about a year so I was excited to learn that he is one of the top resources for small business building in Memphis.  What I found most interesting about his presentation was what he said about keep of top of new inventions in technology.  He said it is exhausting.  I can see how this would be this case for a service oriented business that does custom software.  To compete with others, you have to be able to offer the latest 'toys' to clients whether they need them or not.  This can be both good and bad.  First, it makes great marketing pitches.  People love to see the 'sizzle' with the animations and pretty pictures and this certainly can be appealing to the customers of clients as well to help distinguish them.  It can also be a distraction.  There must be enough attention given to the business that the client is trying to conduct.  This could be difficult when implementing new features and techniques all the time.  This is another reason why I think I am more interested in a product oriented business.  In a product oriented business I would get to choose the business goals and then I could spend more time using technology to pursue those goals as opposed to learning a new business model for every new client.  I'm not saying that one is better than the other, but rather this is helping me learn which is better for me.