From The Seedy Underworld of Drugs and Prostitution To Entrepreneurial Success: David Sharpe’s Journey with Empower Network (Part 1)

From drugs, sex, prostitution, David Sharpe has seen it all. Hopelessly lost since his teens, a father at 15, jailed in his twenties, David has found his way back to a healthy life through entrepreneurship. Enjoy reading one of the most unusual stories we’ve done in the eighth year of Entrepreneur Journeys. Sramana Mitra: Dave,

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January 30 – 203rd 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 203rd FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, January 30, 2014, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/9:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2014: Yathes, Chennai, India

Yathes is a gift registry portal targeting the South Indian market. It aims to provide a one-stop solution for management of events like weddings by streamlining the various tasks involved such as gifting and sending invitations.

How An Entrepreneur Couple Bootstrapped to $5M: RuffleButts CEO Amber Schaub and COO Mark Schaub (Part 5)

Sramana: Did you gain traction with the brick and mortar retail stores? Amber Schaub: We did get some good success early on. Nordstrom contacted us in late 2008. Sramana: How big was your first Nordstrom order? Amber Schaub: They did a 5 store trial order, which at the time, seemed huge to us since no

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Roundtable Recap: January 23 – All Emerging Market Ventures

Today’s roundtable, once again, had huge geographical diversity, spanning presenters from Venezuela, China, India, and callers from Ireland, New York, Georgia, Virginia, etc. I always love to hear from entrepreneurs from so many different parts of the world. It’s thrilling to experience the creative energy. Coresonant First, Sridev Nair and Sunil S. from Hyderabad, India

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Thought Leaders in Mobile and Social: Sameer Patel, Senior VP and GM – Enterprise Social and Collaborative Software, SAP (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What I was trying to get to was the whole enterprise social network. The impact of social sharing behavior inside the enterprise is a relatively new phenomenon. It’s probably five years old, right? Sameer Patel: It’s actually 2006, so seven years. Sramana Mitra: Maybe seven years for the early adopters but five years

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Failed Once, Trying Again?

One of the greatest achievements of Silicon Valley has been to create a failure-tolerant culture. It allows us to experiment, learn, try again. We’re very interested in hearing from entrepreneurs who have failed with a venture but have the stamina and enthusiasm to try again. We’re interested in discussing strategy, learnings, course-corrections, etc. at our free

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Outsourcing: Ed Cross, Executive Director – Procurement & HRO at Xchanging (Part 7)

Ed Cross: When I was at Pricewaterhouse, I was heavily involved in the area of procurement project consultancy. Exchanges were much heralded and I was very supportive of them but the more I got into them, I observed that they didn’t take off. A lot of them lost ground, went bankrupt, or disappeared. There’s an

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