As many of you know, I'm running the Kenyon Innovation Greenhouse program this year, an entrepreneurship education program supported by Kenyon College and the Burton D. Morgan Foundation. This spring, we have a number of great events planned. Currently, SCORE is running a series of business launch classes Tuesday evenings, continuing through the month of February. A $10,000 business plan competition for students is underway. On February 17th, at 6:30pm in Gund Gallery on the Kenyon Campus, we will have Adam Swartzbaugh, Executive Director of GENESIS Network, Founder of Kid Launch and 1st Lieutenant, US Army. Adam is one of those people whose resume will make almost anyone feel slothful. He and GENESIS have built schools on the Burma/Thailand border, helped dig wells in Haiti, worked on conflict
Getting big once you've gotten started is no easy task. Jeff Bussgang discusses the lessons accumulated by seven great CEOs who grew their companies rapidly and successfully.
When people transition out of demanding careers and into an entrepreneurial situation, the workload often increases while the income falls. Here, the NYT talks to several people who started their own businesses and are living the dream of long hours and economic uncertainty.
Michael Driscoll writes about how to leverage the Big Data technology stack over at O'Reilly.
Simon Wardley considers the multi-product, multi-capability competitive strategies for Salesforce.com, Amazon, and Microsoft over at his weblog. He'll be speaking at the upcoming OSCON about how to use incumbents' strategies against themselves. I wish I could make it out there; it sounds like a really useful talk.
Mark Suster has had one of the best insights into the changing landscape of the venture capital industry I've ever seen: Amazon's technology platforms made it really cheap to build a tech company, and that changes everything: I still think it was Amazon that created this category not the other way around. Where open-source computing gave us a 90% reduction in our software, Amazon gave us a 90% reduction in our total operating costs. Amazon allowed 22-year-old tech developers to launch companies without even raising capital. Amazon sped up the pace of innovation because in addition to not having to raise capital to start I also didn’t need to wait for hosting to be set up, servers to arrive, software to be provisioned.
Are we in the incipient phase of a new tech bubble? Steve Blank and Ben Horowitz debate the issue in the Economist. Big IPOs, big early stage valuations, tight labor in Silicon Valley point toward yes, but if the valuations are still anchored to reality, that points to no. It's good that the question is getting asked and talked about this time around.
Scott Belsky of Behance collects the wisdom of several leading management gurus on how to select, keep and optimize the use of your advisors. Figuring out how to use highly experienced people as a resource, getting the best value from them and to them, and keeping them engaged takes a very sophisticated hand.
New publication available from Windcastle: Startup Stacks, which discusses the value of having a snap-together set of strategies in place for effective organizational growth for early stage companies. Read it here.
Windcastle Venture Consulting is excited to announce the launch of their new Web Site!
