A VC in Vacationland
Seeking the next gen supply chain technology breakthroughs
recent posts
- The Role of Generative AI in Supply Chain Investment Strategies
- AI’s Impact on Supply Chain Investment Strategies
- The ‘New Normal’ is now the ‘No Normal’ in Supply Chains
- SRR—Sustainability, Resilience, Risk Management: The Latest Supply Chain Buzzwords & Investment Opportunities
- 3PLs–Investing in the Next Generation of Outsourced Supply Chain Solutions
about
Category: Managing start-ups
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Image via CrunchBase According to TechCrunch, raising funds for a small business can be a daunting task for any fledgeling entrepreneur. Whether it be from friends and family or from the general public, finding investors, setting terms of the funding, assigning equity and filing compliance documents is a challenge. Enter ProFounder, a stealth startup that…
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Image via Wikipedia Calculating founder ownership shares as new funding is taken into a start up can be a tricky proposition. Here is a useful treatise by Jon Fisher in the subject: "In the beginning, the startup’s founders own 100 percent of the company. If the founders can raise their own funding and grow the company from…
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Image via Wikipedia Small companies often have difficulty raising growth capital. Duh, you say–just look at my credit card balances. New Orleans-based Receivable Exchange won the 2010 Wall Street Journal's Most Innovative Technologies competition in the e-commerce category for its on-line marketplace where small and medium businesses can auction their receivables. Lack of access to traditional financing…
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Image via Wikipedia The EepyBird founders are viral marketing geniuses. Besides being great entertainment…think on-demand Mythbusters….EepyBird has used traditional media, especially TV (Early Show, CNN Webby Awards, Modern Marvels), to build a large web following. They do live performances, corporate events, video sponsorships, among other options as revenue producers to fund their crazy experiments in…
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Image via Wikipedia "An opportunist is someone who meets the wolf at the door and shows up the next day in a fur coat" –Kemmons Wilson, as quoted in Half Luck, Half Brains: the Kemmons Wilson, Holiday Inn Story, by Robert Kerr. Kemmons Wilson gave new meaning to the word perseverance. A serial entrepreneur, with the…
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Image via Wikipedia In the mid 1970s, I spent some time in London, working with my Data Resources partners to build a European auto and transport consulting practice. It was an interesting time in the UK–industry competitiveness was at a new low, Margaret Thatcher had just become Leader of the Conservative Party, but not yet Prime Minister and the…
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Image by dbking via Flickr Anyone who has seen Tom Hanks in Apollo 13 will remember the mission commander Gene Krantz uttering this line as the Mission Control people in Houston were looking for a way to get the astronauts back to earth. It turns out that no one ever really said exactly that line in Mission Control. The…
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Image via Wikipedia In the past, start ups have often kept all core aspects of their business in house, preferring to directly control outcomes. While laudable, the model may not be cost-effective. Many companies in my portfolio and that I advise have outsourced development teams which code at much lower cost than in house teams. New options…
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Image via Wikipedia There are some simple rules to follow when out-licensing patents and/or intellectual property (IP) from another entrepreneur, university or patent holder: Take a Snapshot of the IP–business processes, technologies and products evolve over time, but the patent/IP associated with them should defined in a static space at one point in time, based on the original patent/IP descriptions.…
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Image via Wikipedia My friend, Roger Jones, has taught me a lot about how to best manage a business. Here are his thoughts on communicating in business. They are very valuable insights: "If you think about it, the majority of business is based on communicating using logic, the language of the 'mind'. That's delivering information,…
A VC in Vacationland 