OregonStartups.com News

Want to Create a Good Presentation? Tell a Story

Garr Reynold's post Presentation Zen: Robert McKee on the power of story summarizes some of the major points screen writer Robert McKee makes about the power of story telling, as described in McKee's book "Story: Substance, Structure, Style and The Principles of Screenwriting", and in an article he wrote on the topic in the June, 2003 issue of the Harvard Business Review (you can order a PDF of the article here.)

"A big part of a CEO's job is to motivate people to reach certain goals. To do that she must engage their emotions, and the key to their hearts is story." The most common way to persuade people, says McKee, is with conventional rhetoric and an intellectual process that in the business world "...usually consists of a PowerPoint presentation" in which leaders build their case with statistics and quotes, etc. McKee says rhetoric is problematic because while we are making our case others are arguing with us in their heads using their own statistics and sources. Even if you do persuade through argument, says McKee, this is not good enough because "...people are not inspired to act on reason alone." The key, then, is to aim to unite an idea with an emotion, which is best done through story. "In a story, you not only weave a lot of information into the telling but you also arouse your listener's emotion and energy."

Don't Quit Your Day Job

A recent Forbes article, Don't Quit Your Day Job - Forbes.com described the benefits of keeping your day job while working on a new venture.

You can't count on bankers or angels to get your venture off the ground. So maybe you should shoehorn it around a 9-to-5 career Samuel Tharp spends 50 hours a week as a vice president at ZoomInfo, an Internet search service that helps companies find information about prospective employees. After work Tharp, 39, returns to his Acton, Mass. home and spends two hours on another job: He is the founder of year-old Otrib.com, a service that helps people plan funerals, send death notices and write tributes to those who have passed away. In April Otrib had 25,000 unique visitors who spent 15 minutes, on average, on the site.

...

Not so long ago an Internet venturelet like Otrib might have seen a swarm of venture capital firms, or at least some commercial banks offering high-priced loans. Nowadays such financiers want to see businesses with revenue, customers and a logo solidly in place before they commit capital. "It's a betting game," says Jeffrey Carr, executive director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at New York University. "The things that used to be differentiators are now requirements. It's harder to stand out."

Good point - you need traction these days to get funding. The problem is that it's hard to make headway on a startup when you're spending 40+ hours per week on a day job! If there were just more hours in the day...

How to Evaluate a Product Idea

Tony Wright recently mentioned a post from last December that Evan Williams made on How to Evaluate a new product idea. If you're trying to narrow down that long list of ideas you have into the one the you just have to pursue, Evan's post provides good food for thought. His top-level items:

• Tractability: How difficult will it be to launch a worthwhile version 1.0?
• Obviousness: Is it clear why people should us it?
• Deepness: How much value can you ultimately deliver?
• Wideness: How many people may ultimately use it?
• Discoverability: How will people learn about your product?
• Monetizability: How hard will it be to extract the money?
• Personally Compelling: Do you really want it to exist in the world?

Post Mortem of a Failed Startup

From Information Arbitrage: Monitor110: A Post Mortem, Roger Ehrenberg walks through the 7 deadly sins committed by failed startup Monitor110. The 7 sins, in summary:

• The lack of a single, "the buck stops here" leader until too late in the game
• No separation between the technology organization and the product organization
• Too much PR, too early
• Too much money
• Not close enough to the customer
• Slow to adapt to market reality
• Disagreement on strategy both within the Company and with the Board

It's worth reading the full post on how things like "too much money" decreased the odds of success.

The Importance of Entrepreneurship for Job Creation

As reported in the 2008 State Technology and Science Index from the Milken Institute:

Job creation statistics bear out the importance of entrepreneurship in the U.S. economy. In the second half of the 1990s, businesses with fewer than 100 employees created 75 percent of all new jobs in the United States. Moreover, 15 percent of the fastest-growing new firms accounted for more than 90 percent of net new job creation. Source: Chris Edwards, “Entrepreneurs Creating the New Economy,” ed. Joint Economic Committee Staff Report (2000).

The Myth of the Fearless Entrepreneur

In Time magazine, Keith McFarland (author of The Breakthrough Company) writes (in The Myth of the Fearless Entrepreneur ) about what he's learned after 22 years spent studying performance data on more than 7,000 growth companies. Some lessons learned:

...most people who start businesses don't take big risks because they don't have a lot to risk when they're getting started.

... Columbia University business professor Amar Bhidé found that only 12% of growth-company founders surveyed attribute their success to an "unusual or extraordinary idea"; 88% reported that their success was due mainly to "exceptional execution of an ordinary idea." There's a lower risk in getting the details right.

... The evidence suggests that as entrepreneurial leaders become more successful, there is a tendency for them to become more risk averse

Are You In Over Your Head?

In an entertaining but also insightful blog post, In Over Your Head - The Life of an Entrepreneur, Jeff Bussgang talks (from a position of experience) about being in over-your-head as the CEO of a startup.

We Need to Train Entrepreneurs

A recent Business Week article hit one of my hot buttons.  (For full disclosure, I do have a bias given my day-job at OTBC.) The article described the results of a Harvard and Duke study of entrepreneurship.  According to one of the study authors:

We should put as much focus on educating our existing workforce as we do on the next generation. This means providing training in the basics of starting and running a business—and some of the finance, marketing, and management training that business schools teach—to potential entrepreneurs within the workforce.     Vivek Wadhwa,     co-author of the report "Education and     Technology Entrepreneurship".

Part of the rationale for the above statement is that most tech entrepreneurs are not 20-somethings; most have been out of school for a while:

Contrary to the popular belief that tech entrepreneurs start their companies in their teens or early 20s, we found that the average and median age of founders was 39. Twice as many were older than 50 as were younger than 25. And there were twice as many over 60 as under 20. So, we may read stories about young people starting tech companies (BusinessWeek.com, 4/17/08), but they're the minority. Most tech entrepreneurs have grey hair and experience.

Entrepreneurship courses in universities are good -- but they aren't enough.  We need to educate aspiring entrepreneurs who have been in the workforce a while about the basics of starting, funding, and running a company.  You would think that developing entrepreneurship would be a core aspect of the Oregon economic development strategy.  As far as I know, it isn't.  For example, the current plan for Oregon InC focuses primarily on technology, tech transfer at universities, and making more investment funds available to startups.  While these are all good, the assumption is that as long as the technology is there and the money is there, people will know develop a business plan, close the funding, and build a company.  If we had the entrepreneurship resources of the Bay area, that would be a reasonable assumption.  But we don't have anywhere near the number of experienced serial entrepreneurs that there are in the Bay area.  What we do have is an abundance of creative, first-time entrepreneurs.  We should help them be successful, with entrepreneurship training, mentoring, and help with networking.  The State of Oregon would do well to invest programs to do just that.

OTBC FastTrac® Entrepreneurship Program

OTBC (note: it's my day job) will be starting the 10 week FastTrac TechVenture entrepreneurship program (developed by the Kaufman Foundation) on April 15.  Three hours each Tuesday evening for 10 weeks (plus additional out-of-class work) to validate your market, develop a business plan and a funding plan -- and get an OEN business plan review.

And Stoel Rives is sponsoring scholarships to bring down the cost, making it an excellent deal.

Find out more on this page of the OTBC website.  And please pass the word to any prospective entrepreneurs or early-stage entrepreneurs with a high-tech or biotech concept who could use some help developing a solid business plan!

Evaluating the Impact of Entrepreneurship Initiatives

The NASVF published a preview of a study that will analyze the impact of the Appalachian Regional Commission's Entrepreneurship Initiative.  Some of their observations:

"Job creation" is an overused metric. It paints an incomplete picture of the outcomes of entrepreneurship development investments, and should be replaced by a more encompassing "entrepreneurship development metrics portfolio." While job creation should be reported as an outcome of program investments, a much richer understanding of impacts can come through efforts to define and capture outcomes as measured by a broad set of performance metrics. In addition to jobs created/retained and new business starts, this system should include other outcome measures such as the following:

Changes in business profitability following a capital investment
Number of incubator tenants who graduate from a facility and stay in the region
Number of business owners still in business after receiving counseling or technical assistance
Changes in sales after receiving outside technical support
Changes in attitudes following completion of training programs.