TechCrunch: Is Entrepreneurship Just About The Exit?

Vivek Wadhwa asks a great question on TechCrunch: Is Entrepreneurship Just About The Exit?

Vivek and I had a long discussion on this topic last weekend, and he extensively references that discussion in the piece. You have also read my recent piece, Built To Enjoy, on this topic.

Vivek offers a number of good examples. You have also read others here, especially stories of Sridhar Vembu of Zoho, and Girish Navani of eClinicalworks. At a smaller scale, Sean Broihier’s FineArtAmerica is also a very good built to enjoy business.

In general, there are many more small business opportunities out there – $5 million, $10 million, $20 million – that are not great for exits, but be excellent built to enjoy businesses, supporting the livelihoods of a vast number of people. This segment is what Vivek and I have been trying to put some focus back on.

In 1M/1M, we are relentlessly encouraging built to enjoy businesses, offering them advice on how to structure these, and what decisions to make to keep the interests aligned, so that a square peg doesn’t need to fit into a round hole.

Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 3)

SM: By the time you opened your gallery, did you already have a substantial body of work?

TM: It was a small body of work. I was doing still shots on the side during the time I did cinematography work. I also met a world-renowned oil painter, Owen Gromme. >>>

June 10 Roundtable Recording

In case you missed it, here is the recording:

Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 2)

SM: Where did you go to college, and what did you do there?

TM: I first started off at the University of Nebraska – Omaha. I was the first one in my family to go to college. My dad said I did not need to go to college and that I could stay back and work in the family business. >>>

Roundtable Recap: June 10 – Efficient Targeting

Today’s roundtable was a difficult one, as I had to tell an entrepreneur not to proceed with his business that is ready to launch. Shamoon Siddiqui presented MetroFlats.com, a vacation rental marketplace he plans to launch next month.  He says that all the vacation rental sites out there including Vacationrentals.com and FlipKey are directory services, and you cannot actually book the rental through them. I immediately asked what would keep the big vacation-listing players from quickly expanding their services to include this functionality? Nothing. I hate to discourage any entrepreneur ever, but this is a very precarious position from which to start a business.  I recommend that Shamoon take a look at the FlipKey case study on my blog to understand what FlipKey does, how and why. And how easy it would be to just insert the booking function if they had any indication from their customer base that the functionality is desired. I hope Shamoon will continue to look for another opportunity to put his time, money, and talent into.
>>>

Roundtable Starting In 30 Minutes

Today’s roundtable is starting in 30 minutes, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/8:30 p.m. IST. Click here to join.

Artist As An Entrepreneur Photographer: Tom Mangelsen’s Images of Nature (Part 1)

I ran into Tom Mangelesen in Jackson, Wyoming, while on a trip to visit Yellowstone and Grand Teton national parks. Tom has a wonderful gallery there, and as I looked at his wildlife photography I started talking to Tom’s business partner and longtime friend about the gallery. I discovered a lot of interesting aspects about the business of art, and what it takes to be an artist entrepreneur. >>>

1M/1M: Need Twitter Help

Readers, we need your help with helping spread the 1M/1M movement through twitter. We have 88 ambassadors in the 1M/1M LinkedIn group at the moment, and 95 requests to join. We also have 100+ supporters who are not actively working on the project but are nevertheless helping spread the word. Over the last four months, we have processed over 750 requests to join. Those who have become ambassadors have committed to spend five hours a week on the program. Those who cannot, but still want to help, are on our supporters list. I am sure many of you also belong in this category of supporters who believe in the mission and would like to help in small ways.

Well, you can potentially become an active promoter of the 1M/1M by using Twitter effectively.

So today, I would like to discuss a proposal for using Twitter as a much more integral part of our initiative. I have been doing a fair amount of research on this, and read two books [The Twitter Book by Tim O’Reilly, Sarah Milstein, and Twitter Power 2.0: How to Dominate Your Market One Tweet at a Time by Joel Comm]. Much of what I suggest below is based on my own experiments with Twitter, and this research. Since twitter has become such a big part of the social graph these days, I hope you will find this useful much beyond 1M/1M.

Here’s how. >>>