Shark Tank has done a lot to raise the level of wishful thinking in America. Many people believe that if you find the right ten slides, or the perfect 30 seconds, you’ll be able to extend your hand and a check will float from the ether and drop into the palm of your hand.
Oh, that this were true.
Posted in Op-ED, Peter Mehit
Tagged entrepreneurs, investors, millennials, start ups
The office environment is an incredibly important aspect of any business. Get it right and you should have a happy and productive team of employees. Get it wrong and you can expect morale levels to drop and productivity to lessen, especially when moving into a badly designed new office space. Especially important for creative startups with new business ideas and concepts to innovate.
For this reason there are a number of key factors of your new office you need to get right when drawing up the designs. It can be beneficial to use professional services such as those from Office Principles to get a well-designed new office. Or if you create it yourself remember to consider the following areas closely.
Posted in Tools and Information
Tagged design office space, office environment, office space, start ups
Quitting school to operate a startup is all the rage these days. Billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel even has a special fellowship that encourages young people to do that.
Most startup-minded students quit college, not high school, following in the footsteps of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg.
But teenagers are getting into tech at earlier and earlier ages. Writing apps and participating in hackathons are standard ways of getting internships at hot employers like Google and Facebook.
I wholeheartedly agree and believe this to be true whether your product is digital or physical. The drive for immediacy and minimalism can paralyse creativity, this is especially true to products driven by art such as clothing. When a woman buys a £2,000 dress from Mary Katrantzou, she is not just buying a piece of clothing, she is buying into the artistic vision of the designer.
I’ve heard people wonder if we’re in a bubble with regard to startups. Is it as bad as the 2000 dot-com bubble? Might it actually be worse? I thought it would be worthwhile to look at the available data to see if we can figure this out with more than just a personal opinion. So I asked our engineering team at Google Ventures to dig into the bubble question and find out what the data say. In this post, I’ll share what I learned.
Back in the late 1990s, venture capitalists got very excited about the Internet. A whole lot of money was poured into some companies that failed rather spectacularly, and a lot of people lost a lot of money.
Fast forward to 2015. If you read the headlines about multi-billion-dollar valuations for companies like Uber (one of our portfolio companies), Airbnb and Dropbox, it’s easy to see why some people are feeling antsy. Is everyone irrationally excited about new platforms and economic models in the same way folks were excited in 1999? Or is this different? There are two sides to the case.
Posted in News and Views
Tagged Airbnb, Dropbox, Google Ventures, start ups, tech bubble, Uber
Women cradle newborn babies in their arms and dangle soft toys in front of older infants on colorful mattresses, all in a room in a Tel Aviv high-rise strewn with strollers and oversized bean bags.
It’s not a play facility. It’s the location of Google Inc. (GOOG)’s first baby-friendly school for startups. Called Campus for Moms, the program involves a series of nine weekly classes designed to give women on maternity leave a boost toward opening their own ventures in a country whose economy is dependent on innovation.
“The course helped me realize that this is who I am,” said Nira Sheleg, a 37-year-old mother of two who founded Wizer.me, a teacher-resource company, during the program. “I am an entrepreneur, not just a mom with an idea. Now I have a support group, and the mothers around me are amazing.”
Forget about the politicians in Washington and don’t count on Corporate America to get our struggling economy going — it’s America’s entrepreneurs that will prove to be the saviors. American entrepreneurs, through their creativity, innovation, and willingness to embrace risk, are the real engines that power our economy.
So often we look to the huge, multinational corporations as the drivers and guardians of our economy when the truth is the millions of small businesses across America deserve the credit. A strong, vibrant economy is the result of America’s entrepreneurs embracing the risk of self-reliance and venturing out to create their own opportunities. New small business startups create over three million new jobs each year. The solution to getting this country back on its feet and moving in a positive direction won’t happen because of the government. It requires the fruitful minds and determined drive of everyday citizens who enthusiastically embrace risk and begin the entrepreneurial journey.
Want to be part of the solution? Here are four ways that entrepreneurs can help revitalize our sagging economy:
Posted in News and Views
Tagged business owners, entrepreneurs, small business, start ups
Why do some start-ups succeed and others don’t? Here’s a hint: It doesn’t have to do with if an idea is good or bad. Indeed, the successful entrepreneurs are able to run with amazing concepts and pivot other when needing. There are a few more tried and true principles that can contribute to the success of your new company. Among other things, these are four things remarkable start-ups have in common.
1. Founders are insanely passionate about the idea. Don’t start a business without passion. You won’t be able to see it through if you are not really into your idea. Founders of most successful start-ups started searching for solutions to a problem they cared about and made it their focus.
“You have to be burning with an idea, or a problem, or a wrong that you want to right. If you’re not passionate enough from the start, you’ll never stick it out,” Steve Jobs has said.
Founders with great passion tend to inspire others to greater success, and they look out for those traits in new hires. According to best-selling authors and workplace strategists Kevin and Jackie Freiberg, passion enables innovation and creativity and makes employees want to stay in their jobs and contribute, even when they’re not feeling their best.
While many startup businesses are filled with bright-eyed company evangelicals, the reality is that the odds are against you. Harvard Business School researcher Shikhar Ghosh found that 75 percent of all startups fail, which means that new companies have to rise up with caution if they plan to survive the first few years. This translates to running on a budget even when your productivity and sales are booming, ignoring deadly business fads, and taking fewer risks.
These dire statistics shouldn’t scare entrepreneurs away from new business ventures, but they should help us rethink our current approach to startup management. With new tech companies blossoming and wilting in cities like San Francisco, Seattle, and Cambridge, it’s easy for startup founders to get discouraged. Take a look at these massive mistakes new companies make and learn to avoid them early.
The changes mean small business owners borrowing $150,000 will no longer have to come up with $2,550 in upfront fees at the time the loan closes.
Posted in News and Views
Tagged 504a, 7a, Loans, sba, small business finance, start ups
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