Archive for the ‘Start up’ Category
- Characteristics of great companies
Pin these to your board! via Fred Wilson
- Exhude Enthusiasm
Mike Dempsey’s design business tips make great startup tips.
- Making it real
“we’re going in there and beat the shit out of each other and we’re going to make it real”
Well. That shouldn’t take long, should it? How “The Fighter” shot 35 days worth of fight scenes in only 3 days.
- Benjamin Franklin’s Daily Schedule
America’s most influential Founding Father kept a tough daily schedule. Startup material! A daily reminder for achieving greatness.
(via Nick Bilton)
- Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work.
Chuck Close:
“The advice I like to give young artists, or really anybody who’ll listen to me, is not to wait around for inspiration. Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work. If you wait around for the clouds to part and a bolt of lightning to strike you in the brain, you are not going to make an awful lot of work. All the best ideas come out of the process; they come out of the work itself. Things occur to you. If you’re sitting around trying to dream up a great art idea, you can sit there a long time before anything happens. But if you just get to work, something will occur to you and something else will occur to you and something else that you reject will push you in another direction. Inspiration is absolutely unnecessary and somehow deceptive. You feel like you need this great idea before you can get down to work, and I find that’s almost never the case.”
Applies to startups too!
- Startup sales
The three most important things to do with a sales lead [are] to qualify, qualify, qualify. Mark Suster
- Want to start a startup? Learn how to hack!
From Paul Graham: Want to Start a Startup March 2005.
If you work your way down the Forbes 400 making an x next to the name of each person with an MBA, you’ll learn something important about business school. After Warren Buffett, you don’t hit another MBA till number 22, Phil Knight, the CEO of Nike. There are only 5 MBAs in the top 50. What you notice in the Forbes 400 are a lot of people with technical backgrounds. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Ellison, Michael Dell, Jeff Bezos, Gordon Moore. The rulers of the technology business tend to come from technology, not business. So if you want to invest two years in something that will help you succeed in business, the evidence suggests you’d do better to learn how to hack than get an MBA.
- Startups love bubble gum :)
For those of you that don’t subscribe to Toronto Life, the brillian Jeff Brenner and Peter Kieltyka are on the cover of the November issue. Congrats guys!
- Small Business Forum 2010
Are you ready for Toronto’s entrepreneurial event of the year?
Join Chris O’Neill of Google Canada, Austin Hill of Brudder Ventures, Leila Boujnane of Idée Inc., Nancy Peterson of Homestars, Darren Anderson of Vive Nano, Erin Bury of Sprouter, Mike McDerment of Freshbooks and many, many others at the Small Business Forum – Toronto’s entrepreneurial event of the year!
On October 19th, more than 2,000 entrepreneurs, prospective entrepreneurs and small business owners will attend Enterprise Toronto’s 10th annual Small Business Forum. This year’s theme – finding and retaining customers!
When: Tuesday, October 19, 2010 8:00 AM – 9:00 PM
Where: Metro Toronto Convention Centre
255 Front St W, Toronto, ON, Canada
- Everything matters
NY Times interviews Howard Schultz: a spot-on chat
Q. What is your advice to an entrepreneur who asks you: “I’m just starting a company. How do I create a culture?”
A. I would say that everything matters — everything. You are imprinting decisions, values and memories onto an organization. In a sense, you’re building a house, and you can’t add stories onto a house until you have built the kind of foundation that will support them. I think many start-ups make mistakes because they are focusing on things that are farther ahead, and they haven’t done the work that has built the foundation to support it.
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