Category: entrepreneurship

Insights for Entreprenuers

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Yesterday I caught up with Fiona Boyd who is an incredibly successful internet entrepreneur who started and sold www.artshub.com.au

She gave me some great insights into entrepreneurship and here are some of the sound bites I was so compelled with I had to write them down.

“When asking for input into your business or startup, never ask for more that 2 pieces of advice. Ask them for advice which is both perceptual and low cost.”

‘Think about your business in terms of the sequence of events. This is more important than the model itself.”

“The right words, in a certain order, make people do stuff.”

“Free creates lose caboose behavior. Think of your business like a nightclub. Free entry makes us feel as though what’s inside isn’t as valuable as when there is a cover charge.”

‘What can you do to bring the money forward? It might be as easy as asking your customers.”

‘What are the steps to money? How can you reduce the number of steps?”

Absolute gold as far as startup blog is concerned. Fiona has also written a book called ‘Niche Content Millionaire’ which I’m guessing (I haven’t read it yet) is full of awesome ideas…. simply because she has the runs on the board and has done it.

Startup blog says: Only take advice from those who have the done what they espouse.

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Quote of the Year

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

“We’re living in a hyper accelerated era where advances in technology have doomed our culture. Before anything interesting can develop it’s blogged to death, marketed and raped until the next hot thing comes along, then repeat process”

Annon – As found in the comments section of www.nowtoronto.com

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The paradox of leadership

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

In large companies there is a paradox of leadership. The paradox is closely related to the fact that

‘The skills that help someone get to a leadership position, are the opposite of the skills required once the person arrives.’

Most often employees and decision makers are stooged by the person self promoting, than the person who does the real leadership stuff. In large corporates the sycophants usually win, not the leaders.

In startup land we have the opportunity to lead others because management isn’t holding us back from leading. What we must do is remember all the bad managers we had because of the ‘Paradox of Leadership’ and not be like them.

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Traffic Directors

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

There is nothing less valuable in startup world than people telling you what to do, while they are doing very little themselves.

Traffic Directors I call them.

These days information and ideas are cheap. The thing of great value is when people start and finish projects. It’s so valuable simply because it’s so rare. In fact that’s true leadership.

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Marc Andreessen – The story of the snakes

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

Here’s a great entrepreneurial story from the great Marc Andreessen:

Marc Andreessen co-founded Web browser company Netscape, whose IPO launched the 1990s dot-com stock boom. Now he and business partner Ben Horowitz–who worked together at Opsware, a company sold to Hewlett-Packard in 2007 for $1.65 billion–have started their own venture capital shop, Andreessen Horowitz. They’ve raised an initial, $300 million fund.

King Cobra Snake

I’ll tell you about the first executive staff meeting that we had, when Jim Barksdale became the CEO of a new company called Netscape.

So, Netscape was founded in April 1994. Jim Barksdale, who had been the head of McCaw Cellular and Federal Express before that, became the CEO in early 1995. At that point, Netscape had just released its first products.

The revenue was already growing extremely fast. We were hiring people left and right, and it was just generally chaos. It was one of these companies where people were running around, doing all kinds of stuff, and it was hard to tell what was happening. And there was generally a huge amount of confusion.

Jim showed up at the first executive staff meeting and said, “OK, I want you to listen very carefully to what I have to say.” He said, “We have three rules here at this company now. Rule No. 1 is when you see a snake, kill the snake.” In other words, when you see a problem, and there’s something that needs to be fixed, just go ahead and fix it. Don’t screw around. Don’t delay. Don’t overanalyze it. Just fix the problem. And we said, “OK, Jim. We got that.”

And then he said, “Rule No. 2 is, don’t play with dead snakes.” He said, “When a problem has been solved, or you have taken an approach on something, do not revisit it. Simply move on down the road.” And that one was very helpful, because I think as a company at that point, we had a pattern of touching dead snakes.

And then the third thing he said was, “Often, the biggest opportunities start out looking like snakes … look for the points of disruption.” Look for the things where something is going wrong, because that may indicate a major opportunity. And that was essentially the operating manual for the company for several years.

You know, it lodged in our brains.

—Via Rebecca Buckman.

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Incentives

Posted on by Steve Sammartino

One of my favourite business phrases is this:

Incentives shape behaviour.

Incentives shape the behaviour of all the people involved in our business value chain. And these incentives we create are also holistic in the sense that they go well beyond money. But before we go designing some kind of incentive program, we are better off thinking about what’s in it for all the people involved. People including but not limited to:

Our Employees

Our Shareholders

Our Suppliers

Our Retailers

Our Customers

Our Community

Our Government

Let’s focus for a few moments on our suppliers. Our usual predisposition here with suppliers is to get the best deal possible. The cheapest supply price. To negotiate hard. And if we do this we’ll make more profit. The flip side of course is that our supplier makes less profit. Maybe we’ll be one of their least profitable customers? In this case what kind of service are we going to get? How will they help us if things are urgent? Will they be as reliable as we need them to be? What will they tell the industry about us as a customer of theirs? In fact negotiating the best deal may just give us a disadvantage which is greater than the price benefits. It’s not such a great incentive for our suppliers and may lead to breakages in our business value chain. It’s smart to leave something in it for the other guy.

As Startups we should ask ourselves the following question….

Are we creating a system in which the people above will have an incentive to help us succeed, or will they simply be indifferent?

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