All of the old rules have changed. Ten years ago, in order to get clients, you just looked for them...called them up...made an appointment, etc. Now you can't get anyone on the phone...and if you do happen to talk to a business owner, they are not interested in any sales appointments. My IT business almost faltered because I was trying to make the old rules work.
Found Meetup.com and started networking, which saved my business. I now work through the NY Entrepreneurs Business Network to help other startups start up.
Granted, paper work, absurd laws, government and oil, pharma and food are blocking us -- but we can do business with each other if we know each other. We can do this while we are working to change our environment from one of suppression to one of freedom.
Paul Hales
Utah
1/26/10
7:01 PM
A major contributor to America's debt is our consumption of fossil based fuels. If we were able to not only curtail the amounts used each year but start mass producing electric cars that are fueled by renewable energy such as wind, geothermal, solar etc.. we would not only be cleaning up our environment in the U.S but reducing our dependence on the import of oil as well. If America is able to emulate what China, of all places, is starting to do with their investing in Green energy, then our citizens would have more jobs producing the power, building the vehicles and batteries, and probably lessening our health costs at the same time. The new electric Tesla vehicle goes from 0 to 60 MPH in 4 seconds. That is similar to a Corvette so loss of power should not be an issue. I am pursuing the mining of rare earth metals that are required for Green Energy. Small part in a big play.
Brett Barndt
NYC
1/25/10
6:01 PM
Great to see finally people talking about entrepreneurship with a fine toothed comb. Too much simplistic ideological focus on tax rates, and monetary policy and the needs of the mere owners of money as the only important factors of production have crippled our economy and economic prospects for some time.
I am glad to hear someone at least finally talking about the human inputs that alone make possible turning ordinary money, favorable tax rates and interest rates into anything like a new business.
We've also got to get the unfair political advantages bought by entrenched going concerns who block capital formation around innovation that threatens their out of date business models too! This is major in the energy sector now, where unfair advantages distort IRR calculations for alternative energy, biggest one being the military subsidy taxpayers pay to oil and extractors all over the world to ensure their property rights in foreign hostile, but nevertheless cheap, labor countries, as well as transportation through pirate zones.
None of those real costs turn up in any pump price. Leaving them out therefore distorts IRR calc for kilowatt hour comparisons for new energies. These subsidies and low effective corporate income tax rates also explain the super normal economic rents enjoyed by what is basically a monopoly industry of oligopolies, oligarchs, and their attendant military servants, with no real competition in sight (Well done guys? You won this one. But, we're waking up and we're mad!).
That little problem never gets mentioned in these speeches in the Beltway. Surprise surprise. Don't tell me these people don't know the unintended or maybe fully intended consequences of the whole-system that feeds them.
Those consequences totally disadvantage new entrants in every sector of our economy that has now been overly concentrated into too few corporate shrinking brains' hands. IFIF.org, Businessweek, and Newsweek have all within the last year run articles about 10 yrs of market failure for capital to form around new innovations already funded on campuses by Federal basic R&D $$$ for decades.
While toothless anti-trust appointees by last President (and this President hasn't done anything to fix it either)have made a few people rich, they have stifled innovation to create new opportunity for everybody else. These rankings show that in painful detail.
I don't agree about Professors becoming entrepreneurs. They don't know how to run a business, and I've seen too many at important schools I won't mention piss away valuable money, time, and patents when keys were handed over to them. They don't know how to make the right hires, don't have the industry contacts they need to make deals, and little comes of it! The big licensing money for Federal R&D recipient universities has always come from Detroit and the military sector. Not from Professor run start-ups.
Let them and their students create patents, and let real business people build diverse teams that can convert ideas on paper (even patent paper) into products and sell them to paying customers. I agree that hard sciences can create patents, but even by choosing science, they self select the personal skills and attributes they will have for life, which are not the ones needed to build run and market a complete enterprise.
They are rarely sales people, rarely people people and most of their work is never validated by insight or market research about sellable products in the first place. For all but special high tech products bought by fellow geeks on the cool factor, start-up technologies have to go through a time consuming and costly iterative process lead by people with sales and marketing skills more than science. These people skills, listening skills, workplace knowledge, and conceptual skills are what is needed to figure out what exactly is the sellable product those patents can become, and how it is going to be sold into already entrenched markets. Read Amar Bhide "Venturesome Economy" about the many many many skillsets it takes up and down any enterprise to convert science into business. That conversion is the hard part, where there is a shortage of skills with the right chemistry, especially as our high schools and universities seem to be failing to create truly generative creative minds these days, as definitely was the case in the past. That is the athletic part. The elastic brain part. And that is the part where everybody screws up!
This is work most VCs don't even know how to oversee correctly, since the profile of VCs has changed significantly over the last 15 years to be less experienced operators, to more MBAs with just finance training.
And certainly BODs of established companies prove themselves to be disincentivized by Wall Street quarterly earnings seasons for getting involved in any of this kind of work. Read Clayton Christensen about how time and time again experienced executives at expensive companies ignore the signs and never get on the band wagon for new innovations until the shareholders money has whittled down to nothing! And worse for the wage earners involved!
There is so much to learn to make into more common knowledge, and so many myths to bust. But those myths are well protected by incumbents of both industrial and money nature who try desperately to keep newcomers out of the secrets!
All of the old rules have changed. Ten years ago, in order to get clients, you just looked for them...called them up...made an appointment, etc. Now you can't get anyone on the phone...and if you do happen to talk to a business owner, they are not interested in any sales appointments. My IT business almost faltered because I was trying to make the old rules work.
Found Meetup.com and started networking, which saved my business. I now work through the NY Entrepreneurs Business Network to help other startups start up.
Granted, paper work, absurd laws, government and oil, pharma and food are blocking us -- but we can do business with each other if we know each other. We can do this while we are working to change our environment from one of suppression to one of freedom.
A major contributor to America's debt is our consumption of fossil based fuels. If we were able to not only curtail the amounts used each year but start mass producing electric cars that are fueled by renewable energy such as wind, geothermal, solar etc.. we would not only be cleaning up our environment in the U.S but reducing our dependence on the import of oil as well. If America is able to emulate what China, of all places, is starting to do with their investing in Green energy, then our citizens would have more jobs producing the power, building the vehicles and batteries, and probably lessening our health costs at the same time. The new electric Tesla vehicle goes from 0 to 60 MPH in 4 seconds. That is similar to a Corvette so loss of power should not be an issue. I am pursuing the mining of rare earth metals that are required for Green Energy. Small part in a big play.
Great to see finally people talking about entrepreneurship with a fine toothed comb. Too much simplistic ideological focus on tax rates, and monetary policy and the needs of the mere owners of money as the only important factors of production have crippled our economy and economic prospects for some time.
I am glad to hear someone at least finally talking about the human inputs that alone make possible turning ordinary money, favorable tax rates and interest rates into anything like a new business.
We've also got to get the unfair political advantages bought by entrenched going concerns who block capital formation around innovation that threatens their out of date business models too! This is major in the energy sector now, where unfair advantages distort IRR calculations for alternative energy, biggest one being the military subsidy taxpayers pay to oil and extractors all over the world to ensure their property rights in foreign hostile, but nevertheless cheap, labor countries, as well as transportation through pirate zones.
None of those real costs turn up in any pump price. Leaving them out therefore distorts IRR calc for kilowatt hour comparisons for new energies. These subsidies and low effective corporate income tax rates also explain the super normal economic rents enjoyed by what is basically a monopoly industry of oligopolies, oligarchs, and their attendant military servants, with no real competition in sight (Well done guys? You won this one. But, we're waking up and we're mad!).
That little problem never gets mentioned in these speeches in the Beltway. Surprise surprise. Don't tell me these people don't know the unintended or maybe fully intended consequences of the whole-system that feeds them.
Those consequences totally disadvantage new entrants in every sector of our economy that has now been overly concentrated into too few corporate shrinking brains' hands. IFIF.org, Businessweek, and Newsweek have all within the last year run articles about 10 yrs of market failure for capital to form around new innovations already funded on campuses by Federal basic R&D $$$ for decades.
While toothless anti-trust appointees by last President (and this President hasn't done anything to fix it either)have made a few people rich, they have stifled innovation to create new opportunity for everybody else. These rankings show that in painful detail.
I don't agree about Professors becoming entrepreneurs. They don't know how to run a business, and I've seen too many at important schools I won't mention piss away valuable money, time, and patents when keys were handed over to them. They don't know how to make the right hires, don't have the industry contacts they need to make deals, and little comes of it! The big licensing money for Federal R&D recipient universities has always come from Detroit and the military sector. Not from Professor run start-ups.
Let them and their students create patents, and let real business people build diverse teams that can convert ideas on paper (even patent paper) into products and sell them to paying customers. I agree that hard sciences can create patents, but even by choosing science, they self select the personal skills and attributes they will have for life, which are not the ones needed to build run and market a complete enterprise.
They are rarely sales people, rarely people people and most of their work is never validated by insight or market research about sellable products in the first place. For all but special high tech products bought by fellow geeks on the cool factor, start-up technologies have to go through a time consuming and costly iterative process lead by people with sales and marketing skills more than science. These people skills, listening skills, workplace knowledge, and conceptual skills are what is needed to figure out what exactly is the sellable product those patents can become, and how it is going to be sold into already entrenched markets. Read Amar Bhide "Venturesome Economy" about the many many many skillsets it takes up and down any enterprise to convert science into business. That conversion is the hard part, where there is a shortage of skills with the right chemistry, especially as our high schools and universities seem to be failing to create truly generative creative minds these days, as definitely was the case in the past. That is the athletic part. The elastic brain part. And that is the part where everybody screws up!
This is work most VCs don't even know how to oversee correctly, since the profile of VCs has changed significantly over the last 15 years to be less experienced operators, to more MBAs with just finance training.
And certainly BODs of established companies prove themselves to be disincentivized by Wall Street quarterly earnings seasons for getting involved in any of this kind of work. Read Clayton Christensen about how time and time again experienced executives at expensive companies ignore the signs and never get on the band wagon for new innovations until the shareholders money has whittled down to nothing! And worse for the wage earners involved!
There is so much to learn to make into more common knowledge, and so many myths to bust. But those myths are well protected by incumbents of both industrial and money nature who try desperately to keep newcomers out of the secrets!
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