Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Smile. Smile. Smile. Smile. It lifts our mood, it’s contagious, it relaxes us. On the phone, if you talk while smiling, your tone smooths the edges (this is something I need to work on). Here’s another thing smiling does in a group meeting or interview: it implies a subtle kind of confidence that’s very powerful. Below is a video of Brad Feld in an interview discussing how a start-up raises money. Watch the first three minutes. Observe his body language and gestures. In particular, Brad’s facial expressions and tone of voice (especially when contrasted to the interviewer as her tone comes off as stilted). And even more specifically, observe his smiling, which is natural and fluid and very effective at creating an atmosphere of genuine exchange.

I wrote an essay for the U.S. State Department on high tech entrepreneurship and what policies and cultural attitudes in America enable the creation of new businesses. It’s written primarily to be translated into other languages for various U.S. embassies overseas. (Here’s the Russian and Arabic versions online already.) As a result the sentences are short and simple.

Excerpts:

America’s cultural attitudes are even more important to its entrepreneurial success. In the United States, if you have the courage to start a business, you are celebrated and you are encouraged. You are seen as an innovator, a pioneer, a successful rebel. If you fail — and there’s a good chance you will if you start your own business — most Americans will shrug it off as a learning opportunity. There’s no shame in failing. Families, schools, and the media alike share this acceptance of failure.

In one sense, in the United States you have a permanent fresh start. Youth, in particular, are seen as beacons of innovation and creativity. As an aspiring young entrepreneur, I benefited from these attitudes. I became proud of my individuality and pursued my ideas without embarrassment.

…

In the United States, the most successful entrepreneurs look different. Google, one of America’s powerhouse technology companies, was co-founded by a brainy Russian immigrant who did not care much for media attention. He earned a PhD in computer science at a top university. He studied how mathematical formulas could improve search engine results. Oracle, another powerhouse technology company, was founded by a college dropout who grew his company with aggressive sales strategies. He has become a media celebrity. All successful American entrepreneurs don’t look or act like real estate mogul Donald Trump; in fact, few do. Instead, successful business owners find the right path for themselves.

Before you can embark on a new project, you need to believe you can do it. In order to believe you can do it, you need have to some self-confidence. In order to have self-confidence, I think you need to do one or both of the following:

• Accumulate small wins. Successfully take baby steps. So if you want to write a book, for example, you first write and publish an article that gives you confidence in your writing ability.
• Expose yourself systematically to the techniques and habits of those who have already done it. In other words, demystify the accomplishment. If you want to start a company, read tons of first-hand accounts and talk to entrepreneurs to understand step-by-step how they did it. This will de-mystify the achievement, not allowing you to attribute John Doe’s success as some “magical talent” that’s been with him since the womb (a typical excuse).

By the way, self-confidence — telling yourself, “I believe I can do this!” — is only half the job. The other litmus test before starting something is, “Does this excite me?” Both must check out positive for the project to succeed.

How else do you cultivate the self-confidence that will allow you to set forth towards an ambitious goal?

(hap tip to Cal Newport for helping spark and think through this idea)

Super successful entrepreneur Paul Berberian just wrote a blog post about how he’s closing up shop on his latest venture — Zenie Bottle. To those of us who’ve been following Zenie Bottle it seems like just a week ago the company launched. Paul acknowledges how brief the ride has been. And he echoes something I’ve written about which is when you realize you’ve made a mistake, act immediately to correct it. Paul and his partner realized the company had some fundamental problems and they were going to run out of cash. They moved right away:

So yes, we barely got going but after two miles into the 1000 mile trip, we lost the road.

Once we made the decision, we took immediate action. When I say immediate I mean within the next ten minutes. Steve and I walked out of the conference room and immediately sat down with the employees and walked them through the decision process. We then took stock of what we had. Great people, some cash, physical infrastructure, office space, a cool web site for sharing photos, 22,642 bottles and a fun story element that never launched. One way to wind down (not the preferable) is to simply run out of cash, liquidate whatever assets are remaining, let go of all the people and tell the investors that it didn’t work. That didn’t feel very minty-fresh to us. We determined that we had to find a deal for each of the various elements of the business if we were going to preserve any hope of returning some money to our investors.

Wouldn’t it be great if every entrepreneur whose idea didn’t go according to plan wrote postmortems like this?

Paul Berberian is responsible for some of my fondest memories in Colorado. We went to the US Air Force Academy together. And one sunny day last March I sent Paul a one line email saying, "It’s quite a nice day out" and three hours later we were in his small airplane from Boulder to Cheyenne, and for a brief moment I was the sole pilot!

Thanks for sharing your experience, Paul. Onto the next idea!

Recently, a newly-hired VP of Marketing briefed the board of directors on his marketing plan for the year. He demonstrated a strong grasp of the the company’s goals, market openings, competitive landscape, etc.

Everyone was impressed.

Since this was a technology start-up, everyone also knew that anything could happen. The world could change overnight. The company had a high chance of failure no matter how good the strategy — this was a start-up, after all.

The VP of Marketing concluded his presentation with a line that acknowledged this uncertainty: I may be wrong, but I’m not confused. In other words, I’m placing bets, they might not pan out, but it’s not because I don’t understand what’s going on or aren’t aware of the various options.

Great line.

(as told to me by someone on the board)