Search Engine People recently had a fairly comprehensive look at what it takes to succeed on the Internet.

Tip number 1: Do what you do best...

Seems like a no-brainer, but often times when companies start out they want to be a one stop web shop. Durng our early days we took on project management, design, development, whatever to get capital rolling in. The issue is that once your core services begin to grow you are still stuck handling services that are outside of what your company focus may be, diluting your time.

The article goes on to talk about things like training, transparency, talent, service, and even bookkeeping. While it doesn't go into great detail, it's an excellent outline of what to consider on the road to success online.

Michael Sanibel had a helpful blog post recently on government grants. He looks at all the basics:

• What is a grant?


• Who can qualify?


• How do you apply?


• What types of grants are available?


• What are the advantages and disadvantages of getting a grant?


• Why would a grant application not be approved?

As a former grant writer I can tell you that there's always been money out there if you know how to (skillfully) ask for it. Now there's more than ever before. But that won't last...

Sanibel's piece includes a list fo resources to help you find grants. Take a look at the piece.


© Tom Adamson

Business has always been at least partly about networking. More and more, it has come to be about social networking. I wrote recently about the need to focus your efforts in social networking. I came across this piece not long ago by Christopher Rollyson on how business relationships can, in his words, be accelerated by using multiple social networks.

I am increasingly seeing cases in which people have accelerated relationships by connecting in multiple platforms, and this is growing in importance in client work.

He goes on to take about why he might use a particular social network for some things with some clients and some other social network at a different time.

I like to think of LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others as "venues" because they are places that have defined characteristics that facilitate certain kinds of interaction. Like restaurants or bars, they imbue meetings with a social context that can add or detract from the meeting. You already use dozens of (offline) places every month to meet clients. Similarly, various "social networks" are more appropriate for engaging clients, depending on' personalities, the business at hand, etc.

This means keeping up with what Rollyson refers to as "multiple presences" on the web. At the start, that can seem overwhelming. But the truth is that it is becoming the norm for many people.

Personally, I have a social network that is almost entirely dedicated to people who get served at my physical work place. Then I have another platform (Facebook) with a more eclectic crowd - some colleagues from my place of work, some other professionals in my field, personal friends, old friends from high school I haven't seen in, well, decades in many cases, and a few relatives. Then there's Twitter, where almost everyone I follow is a professional in my field whom I will likely never actually meet. But a number of my relationships show up on more than one of those platforms, and the cross over usually serves some purpose.

Rollyson's article is worth reading.


© danksy

I came across a interesting piece last week from Small Business Trends: Entrepreneurial Lessons From The Experts. It was a list of simple observations about the life of entrepreneurs in general. Author Lisa Bourne was lucky enough to get Copyblogger's Brian Clark, John Jantsch from Duct Tape Marketing and Atlas Web Service founder Michael Gray to contribute to her knowledge of the subject.

Of course, these are generalizations that don't apply to every entrepreneur, but evidently most of them wish they'd made the jump to the world of entrepreneurship earlier in life.

Entrepreneurs tend to view themselves as unemployable; they work for themselves because, well, the have to. Hand in hand with that, another observation was that entrepreneurs tend to value their personal freedom more than the average Joe.

There were other observations - things like being bold enough to thrive in a recession, or having a particular approach to efficiency that leads to eliminate time wasters in their daily routines. It was a thought provoking piece, and you can read it here.

It's easy to be a pessimist when things really are bad. But the truth is that opportunity doesn't fly as a passenger on the wings of today's economy. It charts its own course...

I saw a piece recently at YoungEntrepreneur that reflected on a short list of companies that were started during a recession. Why would someone do that - start a business in the middle of a recession? For the same reasons they ever start a business. They see a need they can meet and they like the challenge that exists whether you start a business in good times or bad times.

Among the businesses the blog post mentions: Microsoft, which was started during the recession of Jimmy Carter's presidency.

Makes you stop and think, doesn't it...

Around the beginning of May I saw two different pieces of news on the NVCA that have hung around in my mind as I've read through other piece of economic news. The first piece, at Red Herring, simply outlined some suggestions the NVCA made at its annual meeting in Boston at the end of April. The suggestions were aimed at the larger financial industry in the US for the benefit of whoever might be listening. A few days later Chris Bulger at PE Hub described (rather thoroughly, I thought) what he sees as two blind spots in the NVCA's view of life at the moment. And while he never actually mentions them, one would assume that he had the NVCA's suggestions in mind.

The NVCA's suggestions were straightforward enough. NVCA chairman Dixon Doll pointed out that only six companies went public in 2008. From the standpoint of the VC industry, a company going public (selling stock) is the mechanism for creating enough cash to allow the company to pay a venture capital firm some return on their investment in the new company. So the meager number of IPOs last year means that most VC funds aren't getting a return on their investment at the moment; their money is tied up in start up companies that are behind schedule for going public and (in the current economy) may fail. Red Herring summed up the NVCA's suggestions:

Mr. Doll asked that "both the private sector and the government address the breakdowns that have occurred within their respective systems," to solve "a situation that has become untenable..."

Specifically, the NVCA suggested greater collaboration within the U.S. financial system and improvements the way stock is sold and distributed in IPOs - improvements that would force some investors to hold IPO stocks instead of buying them to speculate on and flip quickly. And a final suggestion was that taxes on VC firms not be raised past the current capital gains framework.

Bulger at PE Hub made some interesting points in response. The first was that liquidity has become a major problem.

For a functioning IPO market that supports growth companies with all their natural volatility, we need trusted institutions that provide liquidity both directly (market making) and indirectly (trusted research). No one can arithmetically answer the question, "What is the right NASDAQ spread to compensate a full service I-bank for nurturing young volatile public companies?"

But the dialog around a healthy IPO market has to start with recognition of the need for liquidity providers and a willingness to foot the bill.

My impression is that Bulger is criticizing the NVCA's suggestion about forcing some investors to hold on to IPO stocks instead of flipping them for a profit on the day they're issued - but I'm not sure, and I don't want to put words in his mouth. The NVCA's suggestion, though, would seem to aggravate the liquidity issue.

Bulger's second criticism is more pointed. For an IPO market to recover, the financial institutions will have to build investor trust. The idea that the government and private sector might work together to make it easier for VC firms to encourage start ups to go public in this economy (where they might very well fail) - that's probably not something that will build investor trust. It might give VC firms a way to move the liabilities for weak start up firms off their books (and into the hands of new stockholders). But Bulger seems to be saying that that will further erode investor trust, not build it up.

Venture capital firms are probably going to have to just weather the storm, like the rest of us. Bulger seems to be saying that he's not sure they see that...

As unemployment rises and economic growth continues to decline or sit stagnant, many local governments are asking themselves how they can encourage and attract entrepreneurs. Among them, according to BusinessWeek, is Merced County in the San Joaquin Valley of Central California.

Organizations such as the Merced County Economic Development Corp. (MCEDCO) are working with individual city economic developers and the local Small Business Administration outpost to provide support and advisory services for small companies and startups. Some agencies, such as the Los Banos Redevelopment Agency, which works in the western area of Merced County, are able to provide some microenterprise loans of up to $50,000 to help people start businesses.

Small business operations run by entrepreneurs seem to be key to restarting the economy. If you haven't thought about it before now, maybe you should check to see what your local government is doing to help start ups.


© Velo Steve

Brad over at Feld's Thoughts had some interesting ideas to share recently about everybody's favorite topic: failure. More specifically, he looked at how failure impacted the entrepreneurial spirit.

Give me the experienced entrepreneur whose last company was a failure 100% of the time. The cliche "you learn more from failure than success holds true", but more importantly the dude that just came off a failure and is ready to go again is super-extraordinary-amazingly hungry for a success...

Amen.

Brad references a recent interview of Mark Pincus. Pincus adds a little insight to the issue by concluding that if you're going to fail, you should fail fast. I thought that was an interesting take on the topic. But I know it's true. Dragging it out is a waste of time and money.

The truth is that good entrepreneurs are good at starting over. And failure often tells you more about the size of the challenge someone was willing to conffront than it does about their quality as an entrepreneur.


© Joi

Nicole Wong at VentureBeat recently took a look at some basic rules to live by if you want to get your ideas (business of otherwise) off the ground. And excellent rules they are. She collected the rules by listening to presenters at a two-day conference - the 99% Conference.

If you're interested enough in entrepreneurial issues to be reading this blog to start with, you probably already knew rule number one: Engage in personal projects and things that you love. While that's a foundation for small business success, the second rule is perhaps more important to getting started in business: Share your ideas and listen to other people's.

Often people don't share their ideas liberally because they're scared other people will either steal them or criticize them, Belsky said. But he and other speakers emphasized the importance of sharing ideas, and do so quickly - because debate helps you decide which are likely to gain traction. Talking about your ideas will also increase the chances you'll see them through, he said, since you'll feel accountable to the people you've shared them with.

"Belsky" is Scott Belsky, founder of Behance.

Wong goes on an talks about some other rules for getting your ideas off the ground in some detail. You can read the whole piece here.

Scott Dig took a stab recently at explaining the plight of venture capital companies in terms of broad historic trends and I thought his take on the issue was interesting - especially when contrasted with opinions like this one over at Red Herring.

The venture capital model remains broken after never fully recovering from the dot-com bust at the turn of the century, a long-time venture capital and private equity player said Thursday.

"Nine years later, there's still no venture capital industry, as far as I'm concerned," George Siguler, co-founder of Siguler Guff & Co., told an audience at the Buyouts East conference in New York City. "Ten thousand companies were funded at the height of the Internet bubble. Now we're not seeing any [investor exits]."

Scott takes a somewhat different view on his blog than Siguler does at Red Herring. He talks about venture capital investment this way:

...as a long-term asset class, venture capital is nothing special, really. On average it performs much like any other asset class; however, it has much more risk flowing through its veins.

So how does Scott explain the current dismal state of venture capital? Regression to the mean. Just like every other financial sector (each on their own calendar or cycle), venture capital overreacts to short-term news and then under-reacts while awaiting new short term news. That, according to Scott, pretty much sums up the dot-com era and the situation we're in right now.

You can think that venture capital is dead, that it will go away and never return. But it's more reasonable to assume that the pendulum will continue to swing.


© seeks2dream-Away till Tuesday!