The Venture Edge

No one ever said that starting a business was easy, right? Well, starting a business is actually the easy part. It's the keeping it going and growing part that is difficult.

 If there is one common theme among all the stories I've heard entrepreneurs tell about their ventures (and my own experiences as well), it's that you have to get the team right or you'll struggle--or worse--fail. I could talk all day about teams but I want to focus on a major issue that leads to big problems: an incomplete or mismatched team DNA.

You know the old saying about the three most important factors in real estate--"location, location, location."   Could the same be said for where you start your business?  Fortune Small Business and the Kauffman Foundation certainly think so.  This month they once again brought out their "Best Places to Launch" report and the findings just might surprise you.  It did me because California, where Peter and I are, is nowhere to be found on any of the lists that include the top 50 cities in small, medium, and large categores. 

It's not often that I disagree with Peter, and actually I'm not really disagreeing with Peter.  I'm disagreeing with one of the entrepreneurs he cited in his most recent post.  The entrepreneur, Justin Kan of Justin TV, claimed that "90 percent of start-ups fail because the founders get bored, discouraged, or something else, and they move on to other things, not because of some catastrophe."  Well, I don't know where he got his statistics but let me give you the top five reasons new businesses fail.

I've said it before and I'll say it again.  The surest path to a healthy economy is through innovation and entrepreneurship.  Apparently Sramana Mitra, technology entrepreneur and columnist for Forbes, agrees with me.  In her latest book, Bootstrapping: Weapon of Mass Reconstruction, which, by the way, is self-published, she showcases 12 successful entrepreneurs who made it to the top by bootstrapping at the start.

We all love a good story--a great plot, compelling characters, a challenge that the protagonist has to overcome, and an ending that makes us feel satisfied.  Stories serve many purposes--to explain, to entertain, to inspire--but for entrepreneurs stories help to craft an identity that gives the new venture legitimacy in the eyes of investors, competitors, partners, and customers.  What I mean by this is that for entrepreneurs to secure the resources they need to launch and successfully operate their businesses, they have to be viewed as legitimate members of the business community and that doesn't happen easily. 

One of the hot topics in business today is executive or management compensation.  With Congress firmly convinced that businesses and their shareholders can't make wise decisions about how to compensate their people, a number of compensation reforms are being floated that have a common theme--government telling businesses how and when to compensate their employees. 

I just returned from Sioux Falls, South Dakota where the non-profit institute that I co-founded with Tim Stearns has been running a Technology Accelerator Program over the past 8 weeks.  The goal is to get 7 new technology companies through the last mile of development and launched. This week we held a deal -dating event where the entrepreneurs pitched their businesses to a series of investors. 

Have you recently tried to get a domain name for your new company?  If you haven't, let me fill you in on the facts.  The chances of your getting the name you want is zero and zip.  Sorry, that's the truth. Unless you're going for something a bit nonsensical such as Zooomr, or Oooooc, you going to find a veritable wasteland of possibilities. 

I hear too many people complaining that it's tough to make money with the economy in a deep slump.  Well, some very ingenious people. with what could only be described as wacko ideas, have managed to make money, in some cases A LOT of money.  I guess it's true that there's a sucker born every minute, because whatever you want to sell, there does seem to be someone in the world crazy enough to buy it.  Take a look at some unlikely businesses that have made money for the people who founded them.  Then ask yourself---why didn't I think of that?