Tag Archives: start-ups

How Raleigh Can Learn From Chile

In the May issue of Entrepreneur Country, Joe Haslam of Stratemic Capital enlightens readers about the start-up scene in Chile. Most Americans know Chile for its rich produce, not its economic strength in South America, and definitely not for the ecosystem that has been created for entrepreneurship that is paying off handsomely.

Going back to the 1970s, Chile has taken a progressive stance on key economic decisions. Milton Friedman and a number of his associates from the University of Chicago inspired free market systems that have been customized by local conditions. Nicolas Shea and Vivek Wadhwa in the past decade have sought to make Chile a destination for entrepreneurship. Shea attended Stanford University and set about to do a Southern hemisphere version of Silicon Valley. Wadhwa challenged the start-up model of some groups who provide office space near a university and hope for something wonderful to happen. Instead, he advocates a people-centered approach:

To create a tech center like Silicon Valley, you need to first attract smart entrepreneurs from all over the world. Then you have to create entrepreneurial networks; instill a spirit of risk-taking and openness; and build mentoring systems. You also need to provide seed financing to start-ups. The money is easy; everything else requires a change in culture that usually takes decades.

Wadhwa and Shea launched Start-Up Chile at the beginning of 2011. Here’s the concept:

  1. Anyone from anywhere can apply
  2. Winners would be required to move to Santiago, Chile
  3. A one-year visa is provided to facilitate entrepreneurship
  4. $40,000 in seed capital is offered as a prize
  5. The Chilean government would NOT take an equity stake

When Haslam met with the director of Start-Up Chile and a representative from CORFO, the government agency tasked with improving competitiveness in global markets, he asked a lot of questions about how the program was put together. They admitted that bureaucracy had to give way in recognition of results.

  • The website for the contest received more attention than the official national tourism site. 
  • Visitors of the program spent about as much in tourism dollars as the awards themselves.
  • Well-known entrepreneurial icons are “dropping in” on the Chilean scene these days.
  • 1600 applications from 70 countries.
  • 220 foreign start-ups in Chile now, employing 180 locals and 143 abroad.
  • $8 million in VC money has been raised by the first batch of award winners.

Chile has realized some important economic development principles. Notably:

  1. Start-ups are a strong job creation tool.
  2. Large companies are more costly to attract and retain.
  3. Diverse populations experience economic growth.

Earlier this past week, we blogged about Pittsburgh’s Experienced Dreamer contest to attract entrepreneurs to town.  Whether the locale is Santiago, Pittsburgh, or Raleigh, the principles work. We need to do all that we can to foster entrepreneurship–it just may be the key to a healthier world economy!

On a purely local note, Innovate Raleigh has followed some of the steps in the blueprint. We need help from Raleigh Wake Economic Development, mentoring organizations like EntreDot, and fresh sources of seed capital. Additionally, more collaborative workspaces like some of the incubators in our area (Cary Innovation Center being an example) will help foster the natural network nurture necessary. We can do this–but it requires “all hands on deck!”

 

 

Too Young to Merge?

The folks over at Under30Ceo provide a great service to young entrepreneurs in discussion after discussion about the top issues faced. In one of today’s articles, The Daunting Task of Merging Companies as a Young Entrepreneur,” Jordan Guernsey (founder of Molding Box) discusses how youth can be both an asset and a liability in merger negotiations and assimilations. He also speaks candidly about how valuable a merger can be under the right circumstances. His point/counterpoint:

 

Why Age Can Be an Entrepreneur’s Problem

Obviously, with experience comes expertise. I’d pick a dentist with 30 years of experience to do my root canal over a recent college grad still clutching his diploma. The same philosophy applies to young entrepreneurs. They commonly lack the knowledge and experience necessary to developing a successful startup.

Another common age issue stems from what I like to call “The Good Old Boys Club.” This club is comprised of traditionally minded career entrepreneurs who have been in the business for years. It’s intimidating to think of discussing mergers with these types of individuals. This is because established entrepreneurs view upcoming young professionals as needing to prove themselves. It’s a rite of passage. Basically, young entrepreneurs are forced to break down this wall and build a sort of trust in the entrepreneurial community by showing what they can achieve.

Why Age Should Be an Entrepreneur’s Advantage

It can be frightening for young guns to approach an established company with merger opportunities. However, my experience has shown that young entrepreneurs can actually have the upper hand in these situations. For example, young professionals are still willing to take on huge risks for huge rewards! Their spirits have not yet been broken by failed ventures, and they are willing to take a gamble with mergers. Great ideas generally don’t come from cynical entrepreneurs.

Furthermore, those just entering the entrepreneurial world can offer fresh perspectives, and are not held down by The Good Old Boys’ way of thinking. This acts as their competitive advantage over entrepreneurs who have already been around the block. Utilize this fresh viewpoint to see potential merger opportunities that others may have skipped over. If a business strategy doesn’t work out, young entrepreneurs still have the energy and tenacity to bounce back quickly.

In order for a merger to work for you, you must have polished skills in forging alliances and making good decisions quickly. The pressure to grow and expand makes a merger look appealing. The “gut check” is whether you are willing to give up some control in order to meet your growth objectives.

Molding Box acquired another company in order to offer additional services desired by customers. With a legacy of 10 years of operations, the acquired company brought instant credibility.  Other young ‘treps should not underestimate the value of perception.

Make sure that your cultures and values are well-aligned, however, or you may end up worse off than pre-merger as the transaction has to be reversed.  A target with a strong leadership team and solid brand equity can be a tremendous asset in your own search to establish “street presence.”

“Let no man despise your youth.” It’s an old saying, but very relevant to the young entrepreneur.  You prove you belong when you make good strategic decisions-regardless the age!

 

Start-Up Key: Sell to Educated Customers

Tom Tunguz of Redpoint Ventures has a WordPress blog I follow, Ex Post Facto. While many of the posts are over my head in terms of technology terms, his posts on carving out a market advantage always catch my attention. Today’s post, “How to Pick Your Start-Up’s Market,” makes the point that the Goldilocks Principle is key–picking a market that is right-sized; neither too big nor too small.

Tunguz credits the Blake Masters blogs, and Peter Thiel’s summary classes in particular, with illustrating what others have learned through expensive market plays. In “The Last Mover Advantage” class, Thiel argues that:

Too small a market means no customers, which is a problem. This was the problem with PayPal’s original idea of beaming money on palm pilots. No one else was doing it, which was good. But no one really needed it done, which was bad.

Markets that are too big are bad for all the reasons discussed above; it’s hard to get a handle on them and they are usually too competitive to make money.

Tunguz attempts to explain major internet successes by combining Goldilocks with Last Mover:

  • Google – last mover in search and search ads. The search market was roughly half of the $8B market– not too big, not too small.
  • Facebook – last mover (at least for now) in social media. Social media ad market was less than $1B when the company started.
  • Dropbox – near last mover in consumer storage. The industry was considered unprofitable by investors given Mozy and Carbonite’s trajectories and was at most $2B at the time the company started.
  • Apple – near last mover in portable music players and computers. What a turnaround we’ve seen.

Common across all these examples is significant market growth driven by one company who brought much better product design, strategic management and effective sales processes. It’s easy to point to the product differentiation – later founders used previous product generations and built something significantly better. But it’s also easy to overlook the importance that sales had on most of these companies.

  • Google had a team which mechanized closing and on-boarding large search partners growing the revenue base dramatically.
  • Dropbox focused significant fractions of their engineering team on optimizing conversion-to-paid funnels. And they maxed out the refer-a-friend program.
  • Apple built the best retail experiences which today drive a huge, but undisclosed fraction of sales.

Significantly, Tunguz goes on to say that each of the example successes were selling to a market that someone else had educated. It is important that the target customers already knew both the Problem and the Solution the product(s) were created to address. In each case, others had been first-to-market, but were not offering premium products. With a premium product and an educated consumer, the start-up enjoys favorable pricing and better selling scenarios. Who wouldn’t want those factors in their favor, right?

Avoid 5 Positioning Mistakes

When a company is trying to get off the ground, it is critical to send the right message to the right audience in the right way at the right time. However, entrepreneurs with fantastic products or services often ruin their chances at making the sale, securing the revenues, and building credibility by being inexact in how they position their offering.

Admittedly, it is challenging to create and refine a value proposition when there are so many other demands on your time.  Frequently, entrepreneurs work on concept, design, and other technical details without giving earnest heed to the value of top-notch marketing. Is this because marketing is seen as a discretionary expense? Is it because the typical entrepreneur has bought into the “build it and they will come” idea? For whatever reason, the decisions regarding market penetration strategy are poorly executed and offerings positioned poorly more often than not. If you’ve never applied the premise that “you never get a second chance to make a first impression” to business, do so now! Your company’s success depends upon it!

Start by determining within your team what success will look like and how it will be measured. Take time to ferret out what, exactly, you are offering, how it solves a unique problem, and how your approach to the market is both unique and appealing. Once you have ironed out some of these influential factors, take the time to think about your intended target and the nuances of explaining your offering in such a way that you “rise above the noise” of distraction and become intriguing to them.

Don’t make any of the 5 mistakes below when launching your business. Not surprisingly, targeted investors, employees, and customers often evaluate you before they commit.  You can enhance the chance that you will earn the commitment you deserve if you follow the advice of David Scholtze of Ariadne Capital. Writing in Entrepreneur Country a couple of months ago, he described “The 5 typical problems I keep seeing in misaligned propositions”:

1) Thinking big and forgetting the baby steps that get you there

The real market opportunity is won one sale at a time are you constantly refining your sale or slapping it out there? Go-to-market is about aligning your achievable market to your vision, are you building credibility?

2) Spread too broad and lack focus

Fix-all solutions are hard to buy or too good to be true, is your proposition tight? Tight propositions mean new services can develop in parallel, are you giving too much away in solving too much?

3) Forget that your audience don’t know your product

Even high tech can be simplified beyond technology into enablement, can your mother understand the proposition? Don’t assume your market knows the problem like you do, are you selling from a common starting point?

4) Defining the proposition as a nice to have not a solution

Too much emphasis is put on the extra benefits, are you selling lots of benefits or a solution to a specific problem? People feel the need to over validate with external information, are you forgetting the original “spark” that led to the solution and how you solve the problem?

5) Don’t align the message to the solution

Proposition pitches try to be catch all and complex people buy simple, are you selling a solution or a service? People are looking to solve a problem, does your product proposition enable champions and evangelists?

Once you understand, plan for and execute along these principles, you can create a strong market position.  This means you can challenge your sales team, empower your marketers and “wow” your investors. Only good things can happen from there…

 

Fear Need Not Keep You From Success

 

As an entrepreneur, you must be able to stare fear in the face and be an overcomer. But how? Jaime Tardy (on http://www.under30ceo.com) interviews millionaires to find out how they successfully dealt with their own fears. Excerpts from her takeaways appear below:

You Don’t Have to Be Fearless

You don’t need to be fearless! You just need to overcome it just enough to take action in spite of it. Millionaire Frank McKinney, who calls himself a real estate daredevil and creates $30 million dollar dream homes, said this about fear:

‘Realize there is a force at work subconsciously in your mind that is tempting you to say no. That’s the primary difference between my career and most others, especially in real estate, that I don’t let the fear that is there stop me.’

Recognize the Fear

Before you can get past that fear, the first thing you need to do is recognize it. It’s very easy to ignore fear. If you have tried to recognize it yourself and can’t seem to make your head go there, ask a friend for help. Ask them to pay attention and see if they can figure out what fear you have, in general conversation or when they are asking you questions about it specifically. Getting to the root of that fear–and realizing it is there–is the first step!

Putting Your Fear in Perspective

One millionaire’s mentor shared a story to put fear in perspective about a woman who had her children kidnapped, and the kidnappers were going to kill her children. Now that is true fear. Most of the time in business we fear things that might come true. Or we have fear because we need to step out of our comfort zone and risk something. The next time you are feeling fear, replace it with feeling grateful that you don’t have a life or death situation. Your business risk is not life threatening for you or those you love. Bankruptcy is not life threatening. I’ve interviewed millionaires that lost it all and came back to succeed.

Action Item: Put Fear in Perspective

The next time you feel that fear, put it in perspective in your mind. Imagine how small your issue truly is in the world. It seems big to you right now, but it’s not as big as you think.

Lean on Your Mentors

Another great tip I’ve heard from many millionaires is to find a mentor. Mentors have been where you are and faced the fear you are facing. It’s easier to get past it with their support, and expertise. Armando Montelongo, host of Flip this House on A&E, said:

‘I had the question, Can I really do this? Can this really happen? Is this pie in the sky? But I looked to my mentors for advice and started doing exactly what they told me. It helped me to almost immediately overcome the fear.’

Action Item: Lean on Your Mentors

If you already have a mentor, be honest with them about your fear. They have probably heard it before. It might feel a little vulnerable at first, but that is a good thing.   If you don’t have a mentor yet, find one! You don’t have to pay for one either.

Taking Action with the Fear

It’s not the fear that is the problem; it’s the inactivity that is. So focus on just taking whatever action you need to take in spite of the fear. The inaction will end up costing you a lot more in the long run than the “safety” you received from not doing it. 

Action Item: Commit in Advance

One technique to use to get past your fear is to make it feel farther away. Look at your calendar and pick a date that seems like a far away date. It might be a month for you or even three months. It’s far enough away that it doesn’t seem that scary. But once you commit to it and tell others you will feel obligated to do it. You don’t want to look like a fool if you don’t do it! So you do it anyway, even with the fear. 

Action Item: Logically Counteract It

Another action item you can try is to logically counteract the fear. Imagine you are listening to a great friend of yours talk about their fear. What would you say to them?

Fear is natural in entrepreneurship. Learning how to face it and use it to your advantage is key to your success. Hope these tips help!