Amir Banifatemi is founder of K5 Accelerator, which is based at ChapmanCollege’s e-Village. He has extensive experience developing start up and growth companies in many different markets but focuses primarily on healthcare, internet and media technologies. While he is focused keenly on developing value, he also has an eye toward projects that have significant technological breakthroughs and significant social and economic impact.
Mehit: You’ve been quoted that the center of gravity in OrangeCounty has been around real estate and finance resulting in a very careful and staid culture. What would you like to see changed?
Amir: I would try to improve a certain number of things, one of those would be more collaboration. I think the history of OrangeCounty and how people are disbursed does not promote synergies. Unfortunately, distance makes it difficult for people to meet and collaborate on projects, except on big projects.
Further if you look historically, at San Francisco or other places, when people get out of college, where do they go? They go to Hewlett Packard or the Fairchild or Intel but what do they do here? They go to a real estate company or title company. The appropriate employment environment is lacking.
Finally, people are focused on cash today instead of cash tomorrow. Your attitude, your investment of time and resource in collaboration and how you view society and community are different if you looking at cash tomorrow.
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Many small business owners and entrepreneurs pride themselves on being able to wear several different hats and juggle many different balls at the same time. But is this really something to brag about?
Identifying the Signs
As the leader of your organization, it may not be wise to spend your time micromanaging all the details that go into running your business. Your time could likely be better spent on big-picture strategy such as casting vision and direction for the company. Here are five signs that you need to hire an assistant so you can spend more time on tasks that add value to your business:
Other deal trends continued to point to investor caution and negotiating leverage. The percentage of deals with participating preferred provisions increased from the prior quarter across all deal stages. The data also saw an increase in the utilization of pay-to-play provisions in Q3. In another signal of investor caution, we witnessed the percentage of tranched transactions reaching 20.5% of deals in the quarter, a marked increase from the prior quarter.
THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES:THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES:THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES:THIS WEEK’S HEADLINES:
IRS data suggests that, globally, U.S. nonfinancial companies hold at least three times more cash and other liquid assets than the Federal Reserve reports, idle money that could be creating jobs, funding dividends or even paying a stiff federal penalty tax for hoarding corporate cash.
Do the ‘Job Creators’ really need more cash? – Ed.
Dispatches From The Front 