I posted an entry called "What You Can Learn From Hollywood" over at the American Express small business blog. I derived these lessons from the work of Scott Kirsner. He studied the movie industry and ended up writing a book called Inventing the Movies: Hollywood's Epic Battle Between Innovation and the Status Quo, from Thomas [...]
Free video chat by Ustream Chris Pirillo is on the cutting edge of live stream media. The 35-year-old web whiz knows how to generate online community by hosting videos on UStream and other websites such as CNN.com. In this interview, he discusses how he drew an audience of five million people in 2007, what you [...]
Over at the American Express Open Forum blog, I've posted a description of "Plan B" for fund raising. Plan B is 180 degrees from the usual venture-capital path. Check it out by clicking here. If you go with the usual Plan A, don't say I didn't warn you.
YCombinator is a new kind of venture capital firm that focuses on $20,000 investments to help entrepreneurs go from "idea to company." It admits two "batches" of entrepreneurs per year for a three-month period. At the end of the term, there is an open house where the companies strut their stuff to investors. YCombinator has [...]
Over at the Sun Microsystems blog I've posted my list of the five most important lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur. #1 is "Focus on cash flow." Please check out the entire posting here. More information for startups is also available here and more information for small business is here.
Just posted a book report for Yes! for my buddies at American Express. This is the best business book I've read this year. Please check out my posting here. One of the co-authors is Robert Cialdini; he is The Man when it comes to persuasion and influence. Every entrepreneur, sales, and marketing person should read [...]
Scientists in two studies at the University of Virginia discovered that softball players and golfers who had good days perceived balls and golf holes as larger than the players who had bad days. The question is, Did this difference in perception cause the player to have better days or did the day's performance cause the [...]
My buddies at Start Cooking kickstarted my career as a chef. Please click here to watch the video of my teriyaki sauce. I won't get very far as a chef, but I love the video style of Start Cooking. Companies can use this stop-action style to explain many product and services--it sure beats the usual [...]
There are approximately thirteen million CCTV cameras in the United Kingdom. They are use to monitor people for security reasons--not all the time, though. A band called The Get Out Clause played their music in front of eighty cameras, requested the footage citing the Freedom of Information Act, and put together a music video. This [...]
Launch: Silicon Valley 2008 is now accepting executive summaries. The deadline is May 9th. This conference is a very inexpensive way to get your startup in front of a highly-qualified audience of venture capitalists and journalists. It takes place on June 10th at the Microsoft campus in Mountain View, California. For more information, click here.
I hope you can join me at Envision’08 in San Antonio, Texas. The conference runs from April 23-25. Texas A&M's Center for New Ventures and Entrepreneurship created this conference for entrepreneurs. It features these keynote speakers: Stephen Covey, Peter Schutz, Ray Rothrock, Marcus Buckingham, and yours truly plus power-packed workshops. Click here to register. It's [...]
http://www.youtube.com/v/b_o5j2wgLsg This is a video of the winner of Stanford's Entrepreneurship Week innovation tournament. The challenge for the tournament was to use an everyday object to create as much value as possible. The "RubberBandTogether" team's goal is to sell the ball and donate the proceeds to the Susan G. Komen Breast Cancer Foundation. Cost? $1/band [...]
This article, called "Demystifying 'Above the Fold'" is important to read for its contrarian approach to this belief. It states that people are so intent on reading content may not notice any ads above the fold.
Entrepreneurship Week starts on Friday, February 22nd. The events are free and open to the "greater Stanford community" (which I would define as anyone who can get to the campus). Here is the agenda that features a bunch of great workshops and sessions. I can't imagine you could a better way to spend a few [...]
My friend Anastasia Goodstein is running the Ypulse College Mashup conference for companies who are trying to reach the college-student market. The conference is running from January 31 to February 1 in Santa Monica, California. Speakers include: Jake Sasseville, host, The Edge With Jake Sasseville; Jessica Barron, director, Front Page Programming, Yahoo!; Chip Ross, director [...]
This is a guest post by Scott Shane as a follow up to his entrepreneurship test. He is the A. Malachi Mixon Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Case Western Reserve University. He is the author of seven books, the latest of which is The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy [...]
A site's signup page is the second most important page on a site (the most important is the home page itself) because this is where you're asking for committment. Everyone worries about the home page (and still don't do a good job), but most companies do a poor job with the signup page. For example, [...]
Scott Shane of Case Western recently published The Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors, and Policy Makers Live By. In the book, he bursts many of the bubbles of entrepreneurship in America. Says he, “People start businesses based on the myths we tell ourselves about entrepreneurship and then are hurt when confronted [...]
I used to take an adult hockey class. Each session started with all of us facing the boards and skating backwards on the instructor’s whistle. We were all supposed to stop on a second whistle; then the instructor grouped students by how far they had skated in the limited time. (This is a picture of [...]
Google announced the winner of the Adsense Story Contest today: Hometips. This is a site that features free content concerning home improvement, remodeling, repair, redecorating, and do-it-yourself projects. For example, here are tips for hanging Christmas lights. According to the owner, Don Vandervort, the revenues generated by Google Adsense went from paying for coffee to [...]