Paul Allen – Keynote Speaker, Tech Visionary, Soar.com & Ancestry Founder
I love basketball. But my career pretty much ended in 9th grade when I was 5\’2\” tall and had glasses–and though a pretty good shooter, I got cut from my junior high basketball team.
Finally I got my growth spurt, and was about 5\’10\” as a senior where I tried out for my high school team. I made first and second cuts, but was the final person cut from the team and I\’ve never fully recovered.
I like the story of Johnny Appleseed. Sometimes I feel a bit like him,
planting seeds (starting companies) and watching them grow.
As I told a good and wealthy friend yesterday, I think I will be
tempted in the future, if my harvest ever comes, to stop doing startup
companies myself, but instead, to just teach and write and blog about
all the ideas that I think should happen.
I currently have a list of about 50 ideas that I believe could turn
I just noticed that a fairly large selection of quotes from business leaders has been added to the StrategyTree.com wiki. The beauty of a Wiki project is that any individual can add content and make the Wiki grow and become a useful resource.
I want to thank the person(s) who created this section and encourage
others who have collected inspiring quotes from business leaders and
entrepreneurs to add them to this growing collection.
I continually get questions from students and startups such as: Which
email solution provider should I use? What is the best affiliate
program to launch? What about payment processing? What is the best
low-cost or free web analytics software?
These are tough questions for anyone to answer because most of us, even
internet veterans, have tried only a handful of solutions in each
category (email, affiliate, analytics, payment processing, etc.) and
often have deep experience with only one.
And today there are literally hundreds of available solutions, from
Many entrepreneurs can\’t afford to pay $200-300 per hour for legal
help, especially with simple things like incorporating and simple
contracts. There are many online libraries of legal docs, including
some that exist and generate revenue because of Google AdSense.
Today I found a consulting agreement on www.lectlaw.com and used part of it for a new contract. Lectlaw.com has 40,000 pages indexed by Google. If you run this query:
it returns an okay consulting contract.
Thanks to Ryan Money (Junto 2005), I got a copy of the handouts Will and Amy used in today\’s UITA breakfast.
Keys to Management Success – Will West, Control4
Hire right.
In fact, hire people that are better than you are. If you don\’t you
can\’t grow an exceptional organization. Do this right, and 80% of your
job is done. Do this wrong, and you\’ll sink.
Be yourself. Don\’t try to be the manager you read in a
book. Use those learningÂ?s to mold your approach, but don\’t try to
become someone else. You aren\’t, and you probably won\’t do it well.
Create passion. Retention, extra hours, loyalty to the
business, etc. are all easier when your management team believes in a
vision. Help your team understand why you are going to change your
little comer of the world.
Today I decided that in order to be compelling, business plan
presentations really need to have two things: traction and trajectory.
It\’s pretty hard to convince anyone, especially an investor who is
naturally protective of his/her own money, that your idea will actually
work.
Entrepreneurs often count their chickens before they hatch. In fact, we
count our chickens before we have ever sourced the eggs. We just
believe. We just have faith that somehow it will all work out. So we
invest time and energy in our idea.
Investors aren\’t \”full of faith\” like that. Investors have wealth and
My brother Curt, founder of Folio Corp, former CEO of MyFamily.com, and
current CEO of Agilix, a venture-backed company, is fond of saying
telling how his company was going to be an overnight success…after 10
years of hard work.
I believe that the single most important key to success in an online
venture is doing the little things day after day for years and years
until you magically reach the tipping point and everyone seems to have
heard of you. In other words, persistence is required for most
successful ventures.
The reason that I love daily metrics — keeping track of all the key
operating statistics in your company day after day — is that daily
metrics tell me if we are persisting in something that is hopeless, or
if we are persisting in something that is bound to reach the tipping
point and bring us the success that we hope for.
For example, when we launched Ancestry.com\’s subscription service in
If you are an entrepreneur and want to understand how smart VCs are in terms of financial wheeling and dealing, read this summary of the Intermix Media deal by VC Bill Birnhaum.
Like many entrepreneurs, you\’re probably either great at technology or
marketing, but you leave the finance stuff to others. This can be a
costly mistake. Invest a lot of time talking to investors and
entrepreneurs to get an idea for what kind of deals and terms are out
A report shows that early stage funding is increasing.
$1.3 billion in venture capital flowed into early stage companies in
the second quarter up from $830 million in the first quarter. I keep
hearing that VCs are doing more early stage deals, but this is the
first report I have seen that bears this out.
Still, the 750 companies funded by VCs are a tiny number compared to
probably 10-15,000 that are funded each quarter by angel investors
(including friends and family, doctors and dentists and first-time and
serial angels). That is why there is such a need for FundingUniverse.com to match local entrepreneurs with local angels.
According to Angel Investing (p. 146), a book published in 2000 by two Harvard
Business School professors, "In the United States, angels invest in
Guess the film. https://t.co/1cm6JTaEDP
@clintcarlos
Have you (or the company you work for) added any G...
