Entrepreneurship

My close friend Ben Casnocha and Reid Hoffman’s new book The Start-Up of You is officially out. And – it’s #1 on Amazon. Not just in some obscure category like Business & Investing: Small Business & Entrepreneurship: Entrepreneurship, but #1 in all books on Amazon. That’s awesomely cool. And well deserved. I met Ben about a decade ago. He came to Mobius with his dad to talk about his company Comcate. I think he was 14 or so at the time. I fell in love with him in the first meeting and have been a friend of his ever since. He’s been involved in many things that I’ve worked on, including being an early TechStars mentor and we generally get together for a few days (with my wife Amy) every year or so. It’s been a blast to be part of Ben’s transition from precocious young high school entrepreneur to best selling author (and I expect – after Sunday’s New York Times comes out, a NY Times Bestselling author.) ...

Every company I’m involved in keeps track of numbers. Daily numbers, weekly numbers, monthly numbers. Ultimately, all the numbers translate into three financial statements – the P&L, Balance Sheet, and Cash Flow Statement. While these numbers are sacrosanct in the accounting and finance professions, they are lagging indicators for most startup companies. Important, but they tell the story of the past, not what is going on right now. I’ve formed a view that every young company should be obsessed about three magic numbers. Not two, not five, but three. Before I explain what those numbers are, I need to tell a story of how I got to this point. ...

I had a great breakfast meeting at the Cambridge Marriott with Michael Schrage , a research fellow at MIT yesterday morning. We had never met before and I loved the conversation – his brain was bubbling with ideas that are relevant to many of the things I’m interested in, he challenged some of my thinking, and we had a deep and awesome conversation about open source hardware, makers, and MakerBot . ...

I’ve been a big supporter of the Startup America Partnership since its inception at the beginning of last year. The organization is now a year old and is starting to really have some impact. I’m psyched about the groundwork they’ve laid down and their plans for 2012. One of the initiatives I’ve been very involved in is Startup Colorado which we launched a few months ago. I also gave my first Startup America webinar today to a bunch of entrepreneurs who are members of Startup America Partnership about fundraising. And there’s a lot more coming to entrepreneurs who are members of the Startup America Partnership. ...

For a number of years, my partner Jason Mendelson has been teaching an extremely popular course at CU Boulder Law School with Brad Bernthal titled Venture Capital – A 360 Degree Perspective . While it’s a course taught in the law school, it’s (not surprisingly) become popular with the MBA students at CU Boulder. Brad Bernthal, Phil Weiser (the Dean of the CU Law School), and I have been talking about a new course to complement VC 360 called Entrepreneurship, Innovation, and Public Policy. We’ve decided to take a crack at a cross-campus course (law, engineering, and business) that focused on contemporary issues around entrepreneurship, would be a great introduction to any student who wants to immerse herself in entrepreneurship, and would enable us to create some unique content around this topic. ...

As entrepreneurship in Boulder continues to grow, Boulder Digital Works is offering a new course with Robert Reich (co-founder of OpenSpace, OneRiot, and the Boulder New Tech Meetup) called StartUp: Learning Entrepreneurism. This is the first BDW course open to anyone in the Boulder community to join BDW’s graduate students. StartUp begins with the premise that entrepreneurship, rather than being the result of genius and magic, can be learned. StartUp takes the students through the actual conception, development, and launch of an original product or service during the semester. This course puts students inside the mind of the entrepreneur and immerses them in the daily leadership and innovation challenges of the startup environment. While its primary focus is the startup and what it demands, this course is also a clinic in thinking, decision making, and mental agility that will benefit any area of business – not just startups. ...

Many of the companies that we invest in are the leaders in their respective markets. Often they create the market. Sometimes they appear out of no where and dominate. And sometimes they are in a brutal fight every day with another company or two for market leadership. We don’t care which case it is – we just want to be investors in the companies that are #1 or #2 (and have a chance to be #1) in their markets. ...

On my run yesterday in Central Park, I was thinking about the characteristics of some of my favorite companies. Suddenly a phrase popped into my head about what ties all of these companies together – they are the silent killers. When I look at the Foundry Group portfolio , we’ve got a bunch of them in it. They don’t spend a lot of time trying to get written up in TechCrunch. They often aren’t based in the bay area. Their CEO’s don’t run around bloviating about what they are going to do some day. ...

I read Jonathan Livingston Seagull for the first time in 1975 when I was about 10 years old. I’ve read it several times over the last 35 years, but probably hadn’t read it in over a decade. My first business partner, Dave Jilk (now the Standing Cloud founder / CEO), gave it to me as a birthday gift last week. I just read it again and it was as powerful, inspiring, and enlightening as I remembered it. I’m often asked what books I’d recommend to an entrepreneur (especially an aspiring entrepreneur). There are two: Jonathan Livingston Seagull and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance . ...

My friend Paul Kedrosky – who spends some of his time as a Senior Fellow at the Kauffman Foundation – has a thoughtful short video (as part of the Kauffman Sketchbook series) on where entrepreneurs get their money. While it’s easy to get confused and think that VCs are the center of the financing universe, Paul reminds us that most entrepreneurial companies are funded by the entrepreneur’s savings, cash flow, credit cards, friends, and family. ...