Entrepreneurial Discovery

Business School Entrepreneurs

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 22:15:00 +0000

In the beginning

Jul 14th 2009

From Economist.com

With traditional jobs difficult to come by, MBA students are increasingly looking to start their own businesses. We talk to three business-school graduates about what it takes to succeed

Aloysius Fekete, Chief Executive Officer, MaxBips

Business school can give you many of the useful attributes you need to be a successfulentrepreneur, says Aloysius Fekete, chief executive of London-based start-up MaxBips. But it can’t give you the only essential one: desire. “You just need that bug,” he explains. “That’s what drives you. Business school doesn’t necessarily give you that. But it does allow you to see the possibilities—and realise them—in a way that is more difficult without that experience.”

Taking some time away from corporate life also gave Mr Fekete the space to think clearly about what it was he wanted to achieve. “I did a two-year [MBA] programme, which was important because I needed that amount of time to re-programme myself,” he says. “[Becoming anentrepreneur] is a big step, a big risk to take. Yes there are skills you learn that are part of your toolkit. But there are also different ways of thinking.”

Indeed, risks don’t come much bigger than starting up a financial services firm in the middle of a banking crisis. But after graduating from the Schulich School of Business at York University in Canada, Mr Fekete moved to London and set up MaxBips, a website where small- and medium-size enterprises (SMEs) auction their surplus cash to banks. The bank offering the most favourable terms wins.

The financial environment has been a challenge for MaxBips. When the Bank of England dropped its base rate to 0.5%, it took the wind out of the sails of anyone looking for a decent rate of interest. Nevertheless, the company is flourishing because, like many a successful start-up, it has identified, and then plugged, a gap in the market. “Many SMEs hold their surplus cash in their current accounts, which these days earn 0% interest,” explains Mr Fekete. “The managing director of a company needs to do everything he can to maximise the efficiency of its cash management because the return on their surplus cash can make the difference between a profit- and a loss-making year.”

Furthermore, he isn’t shy over making bold claims about influence that he and his fellow entrepreneurs can bring to bear in the recession. “Frankly I think we will be the saviour of the economy,” he says. “There isn’t credit in the system to fund growth, so what will get us out of this is entrepreneurs coming in and finding new efficiencies for SMEs to do their business and finding better ways for business to run.”

Of course, a lack of credit doesn’t just affect existing SMEs. It is also an obvious barrier to starting up a business. It is therefore more vital than ever that entrepreneurs keep their costs as low as possible. The good news, says Mr Fakete, is that this is becoming easier to achieve. “There is a revolution happening in business and people are realising they can run their businesses much more cheaply. The internet is the enabler here. The internet has been around in commercial form for 10 or 15 years, but it has really yet to be integrated into how businesses function. Yes we all have computers but have we really changed the way we do things as businesses? There are so many things out there that can reduce your cost base in terms of internet technology; it is easier to run a virtual distributed workforce and a lot of services now like network support come a lot more cheaply.”

“Frankly I think we will be the saviour of the economy”

Despite coming from North America, the spiritual home of the entrepreneur, Mr Fakete says he has been surprised at how pain-free it has been to start up a business on the other side of the pond. “I’ve heard remarks that it’s not so easy to start a company in the UK, and perhaps that was the case five or ten years ago,” he says. “But my case has been a positive one. I really do get the sense that there is a growing and vibrant entrepreneurial community in London and there is a real desire to foster that. Starting a company was very easy from a red tape point-of-view.”

Despite this, he still recognises differences in culture. “From a funding point-of-view the States has a more well-developed venture-capital community. And there is also no stigma of having started a company and failed in the US—in fact it is looked upon somewhat positively; I’ve had the comment [from a venture capitalist] that he wouldn’t consider funding someone who hasn’t started at least one company and failed.” As he starts out on his first entrepreneurial venture, it is not a theory Mr Fakete is keen to test.

Ian Dailey, President and Co-Founder, Husk Insulation

Like so many MBA students, when Ian Dailey enrolled at the University of Michigan’s RossSchool of Business he knew that he wanted to start his own business at some point. He just didn’t expect it to happen so quickly.

“You will hear this from a lot of students,” he says. “The university has a high enrolment in the entrepreneurs’ club, but most take a look at the loans they have taken out [to pay for their tuition] and the uncertainty involved in setting up a business and they end up taking corporate jobs. I was in the same boat too. You may have aspirations to be an entrepreneur, but on-campus recruiting becomes such a big thing and everyone’s getting jobs left and right and you get sucked into that world of corporate presentations. But that never seemed right for me.”

Things changed for Mr Dailey after he encountered Professor Richard Laine from the university’s materials science department. He got to know the professor while serving an internship at Michigan's Office of Technology Transfer, which licenses products that have been invented within the university. On returning to the MBA programme and a class on new venture creation—essentially a business-plan writing course—he was searching around for a suitable idea for a case study. Professor Laine sprung to mind. “Since I had the relationship with the professor I approached him and he said: ‘I’ve got this thing that’s been on the back burner for a couple of years but I think it’s really promising—take a look.’”

What Professor Laine had developed was a way of converting an agricultural waste by-product, heading for landfill, into the core material for high-performance insulation panels that can be used in buildings and refrigerators. The resulting business plan was so impressive that Mr Dailey, along with four of his classmates, entered it into a university competition. They duly won, collecting $15,000 in cash in the process.

“I just try to fool myself everything will be OK. I don’t know of a better way to deal with it. But that’s what it takes to be an entrepreneur. You just have to have faith that it’s going to work out.”

Immediately Mr Dailey was faced with a dilemma: to carry on searching for a corporate job, or to make real a venture that he had only envisioned as an academic exercise. In the end, the collapse in the MBA jobs market helped cement his decision. “Anyone is going to find it more difficult to make that leap if they have got a $150,000 [job] offer from a consulting company or an investment bank,” he explains. “So in the absence of that the decision became a lot easier.”

The next problem was how to finance the start-up, which he named Husk Insulation. With venture capitalists smarting from the economic downturn, the team stumbled across a solution. With Michigan’s business-plan competition already in the bag, they packed their presentations and set about a rock-star-like tour of similar contests across America. “We said ‘OK, we’ve really got something here,’ and then we started entering into business-plan competitions all over the country. And we won at Carnegie Mellon, second place at Colorado, won a competition sponsored by Dow Chemicals and then most recently won the MIT clean energy prize competition.”

The MIT prize alone earned them $200,000. In all the team won $280,000, enough to give them all the capital they needed to start up the business. “The competitions took us from February to the middle of May, and that was my primary activity at that time—school took a back burner. But you learn so much during these competitions that it is just a fantastic educational experience in its own right. It is not a matter of doing a dog-and-pony show where you’ve got the same presentation you give over and over again—your business plan becomes a living document. We’d present it one day, get questions which frankly we didn’t have an answer to, and be up half the night re-working it to make it better.”

Since making the transition from business plan to live venture, Mr Dailey is yet to reap the personal rewards of his labour. Husk Insulation may be projecting revenue of $30m a year by 2014, but for the time being the company is absorbing every bit of spare cash. “I still don’t have money to spend on me,” he says. “It’s got to go to research, it’s got to go to travel, it’s got to go to a million other things before it’s going to go into my pocket.”

Such hardship is difficult enough at the best of times. But for an MBA graduate, there is the additional worry of servicing the debt accumulated paying for study; at Michigan tuition fees alone are over $41,000 per year. Mr Dailey remains sanguine, though. “Frankly I just try to fool myself everything will be OK. I don’t know of a better way to deal with it. I think you just have to remain flexible—you can cram down your loan payments so you’re paying just a little over interest so they don’t seem insurmountable. I tell myself in a couple of years I’ll be in better shape. But that’s what it takes to be an entrepreneur. You just have to have faith that it’s going to work out.”

Daniel Callaghan, Managing Director, MBA & Company

Daniel Callaghan says entrepreneurialism is in his blood. His family boasts a proud history of self-made men. Unlike them, though, he is the only one to have gone to business school first.

Having graduated this year with an MBA from IESE, in Spain, he saw what he believed to be a gap in the market and started MBA & Company, an internet platform that allows companies to find MBAs for short-term, freelance consultancy roles. The firm is particularly focused on small- and medium-sized enterprises, which are not only faring better than their larger counterparts in many instances (see article), but also often slip through the net of business school careers services.

But while starting a business has an obvious appeal for MBA students, as high-paying corporate jobs dry up, the rules have changed since the last great entrepreneurial era—the dotcom bubble of the early 2000s. Most notably, finance is far harder to come by. Subsequently, says Mr Callaghan, investors are only being tempted by start-ups that are cheap to get off the ground. “A high start-up base will very much damage your chances because people just don’t want to take that risk,” he says. His own finance is coming predominantly from “angel” investors—rich individuals that in many cases have been nurtured by IESE.

“You can’t learn the courage and conviction to keep pushing your business on”

The business model is particularly timely. With fewer students landing their dream roles, MBA & Co has a more talented pool of MBAs from which SMEs can draw. “Our business model does very well in a counter-cyclical market because it becomes all about cost savings and looking for a more flexible labour force, while maintaining the quality of the work [firms] produce,” says Mr Callaghan. “It is almost like labour arbitrage. Some of our students were due to start work at McKinsey or Bain in September, but had their job offers pushed back to January. So our clients are getting a guy for €40 ($56) an hour who would charge €300 [in a year’s time].”

But perhaps the most pressing question is why Mr Callaghan felt the need to go to abusiness school to become an entrepreneur, given that the other successful tycoons in his family had determinedly dodged them. What was it that IESE added that the rest of his family lacked? “It’s the technical and financial skills—the ability to have a conversation with professional investors—and the presentation and document-writing skills. These are the things that you can learn at business school. The things you can’t learn are the courage and conviction to keep pushing it on.”

Random reflections about the Internet ...

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 15:12:00 +0000

... for those Entrepreneurs that still eschew technology ...

It is a clear reality for every contemporary individual that we live in the era of the "flat world". As Best Seller author Thomas Friedman affirms, our world has become a global village where geographical boundaries are no longer seen as barriers for the free flow of talent and for the seizing of opportunities beyond nations. Our humanity has reached one of its peak moments in terms of collaborative work and global problems solution seeking, a reality where networking is one of the strongest leverage points. Would such a description of the current state of the world be ever possible without conceiving the role that internet plays?

There are several evidence pieces that support the fact that the internet invention has been a powerful landmark that has led to our current state of development as humanity and therefore, to the increase of the quality of our lifes. Looking at it from an economical perspective, it`s hard to imagine the concept of globalization without thinking of the Internet as an instrumental tool. Remote awareness of demand and supply of products, efficient performance of electronic (Internet based) commercial transactions, and in general the arise of all kind virtual connections of human talent that do not need to be physically present to identify opportunities and work together around them, are just few examples on the irreplaceable benefits that the Internet enables.

But the internet not only impacts collective systems as economy and society. Looking at the individuals and understanding them as a "self", it is also easy to zero in on marked aspects on how Internet is a resource to develop a person`s potential and therefore lead the individual to a happier life. Internet is an endless avenue and knowledge bank for people to look for information and develop ideas to pursue their personal passions and dreams. People can join social networks that provide the kind of experience and perspective that people need to take decisions and probably, without the Internet they would never have access to those. It´s never been easier and more time-effective to find solutions before than "googling" from the web. On the other hand, Internet has also made entertainment cheaper and therefore more accessible to all kinds of people. With a simple Internet connection and through legal means you can access to resources like movies and music, for instance, and at a much lower price than traditional alternatives.

Internet simply has led our world to a democratization of opportunities, on a collective and personal level. Denying the benefits of working together as human beings is denying the benefits that Internet has for our society as aldo deniying the impact that it has in the quality of our life as citizens of this world.

An Entrepreneur hidden under a consultant´s clothes

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Fri, 28 Aug 2009 01:52:00 +0000

Yesterday I assisted to the final presentation of a project of what we call at Endeavor an "eMBA". The Endeavor eMBA program allows MBA students (normally people between their 1st and 2nd MBA year, mainly from US-based business schools) to come over to the emerging countries where Endeavor is and work on certain projects with Endeavor Entrepreneurs over the summer.

Indeed, we had 5 eMBAs working with Colombian Entrepreneurs this summer, yet one reflection made by this particular eMBA on his final presentation yesterday caught my attention. This eMBA happened to be an Entrepreneur himself - he founded and still has a company back home, he just moved abroad for 2 years to do his MBA and after his studies he will come back to keep running and growing the business. From the beginning I found his background very interesting, because (and even if it´s not a rule) the majority of "eMBAs" are professionals with real consulting or investment banking background, which in my opinion is a kind of experience that makes the development of research and analytical projects easier. So, the "Entrepreneur - eMBA" at the end of his presentation of a very well done Marketing Plan that he carefully built for almost two months for the host Entrepreneur, said funnily: "I never have done something like this, not even for my own company ... I might now do something like this for me"

I just loved how through this genuine comment he revealed his true entrepreneurial essence: empiricism and practicity over theory and analytical thinking. He truly has always had the skills to design such a well argumented marketing plan, as the one he did for the company he´s working for as an eMBA, though in his day to day as an Entrepreneur, he never got to sit down and do something like this, for his own benefit.

Now, don´t get me wrong. It sounds as if I am affirming that every and each Entrepreneur on this earth is empirical and lacks of analytical thinking. That´s not true. But my reflection is much more about how so many times the risk taking attitude that Entrepreneurs have - that allows them to take desicions without the sufficient planning and yet be sucessfull taking them - wins over the importance of sit back, and strategically envision what you really want to go for and how exactly.

I guess the magic is about finding the middle point. A very well managed (effective, action oriented, participative, flexible) planning process in my opinion has more chances of impact positively that to hinder the growth of a venture. What do you think? The answer sounds a bit obvious, almost stupid, though the interesting thing is that I know a good number of Entrepreneurs for whom it won´t be a fact.

In preparing for battle I have always found that plans are useless, but planning is indispensable

- Dwight D. Eisenhower, U.S. President

From theory to practice (or the common wish to own a restaurant)

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 01:51:00 +0000

How many of us have ever thought of starting/owning a restaurant?

Setting up a restaurant is maybe one of the most common ideas one can ever have, when it comes to imagining what kind of business would be "fun" to set up. Though - how many of the individuals that ever think about it, ever take a first step to making it a reality? Very, very few ... and that´s ok. If launching and running a restaurant would be so easy, I guess the "magic" or "sexyness" of doing it would be probably gone.

It seems like I am not an exception to the rule. Since a couple of weeks my housband and I decided to give a try to the plan of opening a restaurant in Bogotá and invited a group of friends to join the effort.

How do you do it when you (and your partners) hava a full time job and at the end of the day you are not an expert in the business? Well, we came with the idea of hiring a full time project manager for two months to help us "hands on" to design a business plan. Yes, a business plan Scary word for an entrepreneur. But certainly a needed exercise. Sure we do not want fo fall into the mistake of "too big thinking too early" but if we want to jump into something new, we better reduce (read well: reduce, not eliminate) the chances of failing.

That`s the news.

October shall be the final decision taken (if we move on doing the "real" investment and opening the doors to the public).

The critical ingredient is getting off your butt and doing something. It's as simple as that. A lot of people have ideas, but there are few who decide to do something about them now. Not tomorrow. Not next week. But today. The true entrepreneur is a doer, not a dreamer - Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari and Chuck E. Cheese's

Perceptions of Entrepreneurship across time and culture ...

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 22:03:00 +0000

Picture taken from Revista Dinero

Does the perception, the view or even the attitude towards "entrepreneurship" vary from culture to culture? Was "being an entrepreneur" less valued before?

As you have maybe perceived in some of my previous posts, I am rather of the school of thought of entrepreneurship is a universal and timeless concept– in few words: no matter where and when, there have always been and will always be entrepreneurs. Period. Even though almost nobody doubts that entrepreneurship is a reality, this does not necessarily mean that the way entrepreneurs are seen in different cultures is the same, as also does not mean that at different points of time in recent history the role of entrepreneurship in the society has been the same.

Let´s focus first of time. Recently I was reading an interview made by a Colombian business magazine to Mr. Bo Burlingham, editor of Inc. Magazine, one of the most influential publications on entrepreneurship. Bo affirmed that only few decades ago the figure of an “entrepreneur” was not really appreciated: in the 50s, 60s, & 70s it wasn´t a compliment being called “entrepreneur”. Entrepreneurs were considered weird, strange people, without a clear social value, because at this point of time the dream was becoming a loyal employee of a big corporation. During the 80s, at least in North America, entrepreneurs as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Ted Turner started to revert this perception, until the point where still today they remain icons for personal and professional success. If this was the pace for entrepreneurship acceptance in North America, don´t want to imagine what´s left for the rest of the world.

Let´s focus now on culture. Having lived in 5 different countries in past years (Germany, Austria, Brazil, The Netherlands and India) I guess I never stopped before to analyze deeply how each culture saw entrepreneurs. Though now that I think back it´s pretty easy for me to remember:

[I make the disclaimer that the following were my personal experiences and perceptions between 1998 and 2006, and do not necessarily represent realty]

- Germany & Austria: It was not particularly cool to be an entrepreneur. I even was on a conversation with someone that affirmed that being an entrepreneur was kind of irresponsible, cause at the end of the day “you had no real job” and that did not provide any financial security for your family. Being an entrepreneur was a B Plan for those not capable enough to get a traditional job. I must admit that at this point of my life I was not as aware and passionate for entrepreneurship as I am now, that´s why those type of comments did not really mean much for me. But today, thinking back, they really amaze me.

- Brazil: Entrepreneurship was rather a “bohemian” concept, not necessarily having a negative connotation. It was linked to “people that want to change the world”, which despite the romantic aspect of it, was very inspiring. I believe in Brazil is where I started to fall in love with entrepreneurship, in concept and practice …

- India: Entrepreneurship was at its highest expression. Formal and informal entrepreneurship, social and business entrepreneurship, there was a bit (or a bunch!) or everything, it all was blended into the culture. Entrepreneurship was fast, dynamic and well, it was rare not finding someone not related to his/her own business. I worked in India with an entrepreneur and it was an great experience, he was really money/profit oriented, I remember him always saying “This is not an NGO, we have to sell and make good business”.

Have you experienced something particular in other cultures regarding entrepreneurship? Have you ever talked to you grandparents about what in their time meant to be an entrepreneur?

I want to finish quoting Bo Burlingham again; I believe it´s a beautiful reflection to end this post with:

“Entrepreneurship has been always with us when have aimed to move forward and have a better live, and so will be forever. Despite of that, the entrepreneurial environment is always changing, it´s a blend of social, CULTURAL, political and economical changes. For instance, governments can make entrepreneurship easier or simply create barriers to make it simply impossible”.

1492: Conquest of Paradise

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 19:17:00 +0000

This is supposed to be an old movie; it was released in October 1992 for the celebration of the 500th anniversary of the discovery of America. I never heard of it before last weekend though, that I randomly stopped by the video store to ask for any movies related to Columbus, and in general, the preparation of his endeavor to discover “the new world”.

The reason why I was looking for such a movie, is because I kept intrigued by one of the analogies I heard at the Silicon Valley Tour, pointing Queen Isabel of Spain as one of the first Venture Capitalists of the history, when she accepted financing Columbus on his “crazy” project of reaching Asia through a new, never tried before route.

I´m not a movie expert. Also I am aware that movies many times are not as good as books to describe history. Though, I loved the movie … and I think it´s a wonderful piece to use and display, if anyone wants to set up a workshop to explain what entrepreneurship is.

Key moments of the movie to capitalize on:

- The first time, that the project of Columbus was presented to the University of Salamanca, it was harshly rejected. The “experts” did not believe in his not proven, risky proposal, so it did not even reach the stage of being eligible to be presented to the Queen. Even if he had a crisis, he did not stop believing. Lesson: Entrepreneurs never give up. They´ll find many “NO”s on their ways, but that won´t be a reason to quit their dreams.

- He kept fighting, and fighting and despite of the previously described rejection, he reached the Queen. How? Networking … even at that time networking was a key tool for things to happen. A sailorman that knew Columbus and somehow was attracted by his project (and wanted to make part of it), approached him and introduced him to a banker, which had “contacts” with the Queen and was willing to enable a direct meeting with Columbus. Basically, the Queen owed this banker money, so she could not refuse the favor of meeting Columbus. Lesson: Networking matters.

- Columbus was a genuine seller. The movie showed a great first conversation between Columbus and the queen, where you could really see how good he could sell what he wanted to do and how Spain could benefit from that. Beyond that, he was charming enough to make the Queen feel comfortable in his presence, and well, in general, make her just love him. At the end of the day it was clear that the Queen did not necessarily believe in the project, but she believed in him. As a today´s Venture Capitalist would do, Queen Isabel bet on Columbus, she took the risk. Lesson: The entrepreneurs as individuals, their charisma, and their ability to inspire others, is the engine of the entrepreneurial activity. The business is just the platform for the entrepreneur to show its geniality.

- Columbus was a starter. He was maybe the only man of that time that could dare to find the Indies the way he did. But once the “new world” started to be conquered, he showed not to be the best man to rule this new land. The movie shows all kind of crisis he confronted managing the first colonies, even if the Queen upgraded him to Vice-king. I would even say he did not even enjoy running these islands (Columbus discovered first some islands, not the continent), he looked miserable, his heart and mind were focused on moving on, sailing further until he could reach the continent. But he couldn´t, cause the “logic” said that since he was the leader of this new world discovery, so nobody else could be the governor of this new land. Lesson: "There are 3 kinds of people: people that start companies, that grow companies and that run companies - not all entrepreneurs are ready to make this transition".

- At some point of history, nobody recognized and valued Columbus work. The movie shows an amazing scene about this. After the new colonies were “a mess”, under Columbus administration, the high administration of the Kingdom of Spain just decided to send a replacement for him, someone that really had the profile to run the colonies. They did not only decide this without even consulting or announcing Columbus, but parallel to the arrival of the new governor, they arrested Columbus, blaming him for incompetency. The bad news for Columbus were not leaving his position as governor, he textually said “it was a relief for him, because now he was free to sail away and reach the continent”. What broke his heart was hearing that while he was so busy ruling the colonies, the explorer and cartographer Amerigo Vespucci, another Italian, was the first person to reach the continent. When he came back to Spain, all the “flowers” of the new discovery, were given to Amerigo. Colombus was a random person, “the guy that could not rule the new world”, but nobody acknowledged that because of him, this entire discovery started. The movie showed though, that Columbus gained his position back in the history, thanks to his son Fernando, who years after and before his father died, started to write his biography. Lesson: "Humanity/society isn´t many times ready to recognize real entrepreneurship”

Well, Amerigo Vespucci did an amazing thing actually – he demonstrated that the New World discovered by Christopher Columbus in 1492 was not the eastern appendage of Asia, but rather a previously-unknown "fourth" continent - and that was huge. With all the right this new world was called AMERICA. Still while watching the movie, one has the feeling that Columbus should have been the one responsible for doing that … he deserved it.

The thing that makes me happy is that at least my country is called COLOMBIA, in honor to Columbus (in Spanish “Colón”).

Feel free to see the movie review of 1492 at IMD: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103594/

NETworking or NOTworking? - and other Silicon Valley stories

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 18:04:00 +0000

Taken from gapingvoid.com

I want to start this post highlighting this amazing quote I found recently on gapingvoid.com: "BLOGS AREN´T DEAD, PEOPLE ARE". It´s amazingly simple and logic, but at the same time it was amazingly harsh for me to read it ... "Man it means I´m dead ... my creativity is dead, my capacity to share experiences is dead since I do not blog since a good couple of weeks"

Anyways, after couple of minutes I recivered from my paranoia and well, FYI, I´m not dead!

I was busy doing NETworking, ehemmm, and NOTworking as well!

I was for a week abroad, half of it on a very short vacation and half of it participating in an amazing Immersion Tour of Endeavor in Silicon Valley (SV).

At Facebook, San Jose (CA)

The experience was just amazing, it felt like being in the "mecca" of entrepreneurship and capitalism, well in some aspects, it still is.

We had the opportunity to witness interesting and content-rich panels with all sorts of Venture Capitalists (VCs) of the Bay area that were willing to tell Entrepreneurs lessons on how the industry works and how to raise money effectively.

Another big block of the tour were of course the company visits ... we visited companies that today are icons for all of us, such as Google, Facebook, eBAY, PayPal and Eletronic Arts. Of course we saw what we all expected to see ... "thousands of crazy, diverse-looking employees living in wide campuses within a very unique, free, wild organizational cultures". However even if that was cool, won´t deny, I must say that was not what amazed me the most. What was unique of the experience was reflecting on how small these organizations started (just as any other entrepreneur) and how someone believed in them, invested in them, how the chose the right people to manage and envision the business and ... eureka! how they turned to be what they are now. It was a powerful lesson on THINKING BIG, on TAKING RISKS. Failure is not one of the options, but if it happens, it´s well embraced and powerful reason to stand up again.

At Electronic Arts

Well, since I´m a quotes person, I leave you with some of the most interesting quotes or expressions or terms I heard in the tour from VCs, Entrepreneurs and employees from some SV-based Companies:

"In Silicon Valley one new company is born every hour"

"We work on technology because we want to change the world" - COO Facebook

"Silicon Valley - Wild West approach to risk"

"DISRUPTIVE INNOVATION"

"Queen Isabel of Spain - one of the first Venture Capitalists of history" - Bill Draper making the analogy since as we all know the Queen financed Columbus, one of the greatest Entrepreneurs ever

"Demographics Vs Psicographics"

"It´s not the strongest of species that survive, not the most intelligent, but the ones most responsive to change"

"You´re the heart of our existence" - Venture Capitalist Bill Draper refering to Entrepreneurs

"Being a VC is all about making money without working. The job is about identifiying great business ideas and put in the right management"

"Self-actualization", "Identity refreshment"

"VCs serve Entrepreneurs, it´s a service"

"I do not do HR, I advice the leaders of the organization to do HR, I empower the business leaders to do their job" - VP HR PayPal

"People want to work for winners, people want to for something that is going somewhere" - VP HR PayPal

"The culture of you organization tomorrow is who you are recruiting today" - VP HR PayPal

"If you are scared with the crisis right now, maybe you should not be an entrepreneur"

"There are 3 kinds of people: people that start companies, that grow companies and tha run companies - not all entrepreneurs are ready to make this transition"

"5 words an Entrepreneurs does not want to hear from an employee: - IT IS NOT MY JOB - be ready to look for people that are willing to go beyong its resumee"

"You do not need to be in high-tech to make a lot of money"

"Finding one´s calling by looking at one´s purpose and it´s impact - not at the tasks we do"

"The ultimate time to differentiate ourselves (as companies) in the the times of recesion/crisis"

"VC money is not a commodity, it comes with a partner that makes it special"

"Fun is a very important element when building a culture"

"Sucess is failing repeatedly with ENTHUSIASM"

"It´s all about IQ that generates IP" - IQ= Intelligent people who generated Intellectual Property!

"The (Silicon) Valley isn´t anymore the only thought leader ... we need to re-create the valley in other places"

"A great business leader deeply understands the motivations of his/her employees, investors and of course, customers"

Unemployment - who´s to blame?

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Sat, 30 Aug 2008 13:18:00 +0000

This morning I got to read that the unemployment rate in Colombia in July 2008 was 12.1 %, growing by 0.9 % compared with last year´s rate for the same month. Working at Endeavor and having "# of employees hired" as on of the key indicators of the companies we support, the growing figure can´t stop concerning me ...

Being a follower of Robert Kiyosaki anf finding quite logical and amazing his Cash Flow Quadrant (see it below) I can´t help reflecting randomly who to blame for a growing unemployment rate, tas least in Colombia. According to Kiyosaki´s quadrant the actors in the right side (business owners aka. entrepreneurs - and investors) are the ones that generate employment, and the actors in the left side (employees and partly self-employed people) are the ones that get hired/get advantage of the opportunities created by the other two. Well I guess it´s clear for us that he´s right.

The Cashflow quadrant

If we take the explanation of his quadrant literally, business owners and investors are the ones to blame for a growing unemployment - daahh! But, is it fair to only analyze the issue from this perspective? Definitively no.

Being currently an employee, hearing unemployment facts makes me really look for ways I can contribute, and indeed there are many and they´re all about how you can migrate through the quadrant.

1. From Employee to investor: For me the easiest (and probably the kess risky one) shift that one can make is becoming an investor. Ok, don´t get me wrong, at the beginning sure we are not talking of huge investments, probable we do not have the money for that, but investments into companies/smaller businesses are rather a matter of vision an discipline, rather than a matter of money. There is market for everything. By investing in businesses and causes, you are contributing to the growth and stabilization of those, and therefore into their ability to hire more. The mentality of many Colombian employees that fortunately have a surplus out of their personal finances, is to have it in a bank (the "paradigm" of saving) or what it even worse, spending it like hell in unnecessary things.

2. From Employee to entrepreneur: This option is not as simple as the previous one, specially because I am a believer that there are certain characteristics that are proper of entrepreneurs that even if you are the best of the employees you will never acquire. So, you might have the motivation, but not what it takes. And one should be very self-aware and be conscious of that. STILL, I know people that currently have a job, but would be amazing entrepreneurs.

And if non of the past shifts is for you, well, the least you can do is being a n awesome, extraordinary employee. If you are not part of the solution, at least don´t be part of the problem! Let´s face it, entrepreneurs can´t survive without outstanding employees, it´s just not possible. Even if they create the jobs, is the workforce who really execute the business model. But mediocre performance as employees only leads to mediocre organizations, which are the ones mandated to get our of the market, and among many other consequences, generate tour well known friend called unemployment.

Last but not least, walking aside from what current employees could do, the role of the unemployed ones is the one that needs to change. What about the shift "unemployed to to self employed or to entrepreneur?". Many entrepreneurs have been born under this situation, by need, and the impact of what they´ve done for themselves and for their societies is amazing. Actually when I think back in some of the most inspiring cases of entrepreneurs I know, they have been entrepreneurs by need. If just a 20 % of the unemployed ones would dare to endeavor an idea, a project, a company, I bet this unemployment rate I referred to at the beginning would look completely different.

Staples Youth Social Entrepreneur Competition

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 22:35:00 +0000

Join Changemakers, Youth Venture and Staples in identifying and supporting innovative ways young people are making positive change in their communites. Enter to receive feedback, find supporters, win prizes, and even secure up to US$1,000 in funding to advance your project. The competition is open to all young individuals between the ages of 12-24.

Read more one: http://www.changemakers.net/competition/staplesyv
Deadline to apply: Oct 15, 2008

Good Luck!

Olympics - a real expression of entrepreneurship

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Sat, 16 Aug 2008 15:35:00 +0000

For some reason this particular version of the Olympics I´ve much more engaged following up the event and the competitions that in the past times ... it might be the "China factor" or it might just be that given the time difference between China and Colombia it´s very convenient for me to watch late at night some of the competitions ...!

Anyways, with all the Olympics fever and the flawless execution of this year´s opening ceremony, I can help start making connections between entrepreneurship and event management. Let´s first take a look at the definition*:

"Event management is the application of the management practice of project management to the creation and development of festivals and events. Event Management involves studying the intricacies of the brand, identifying the target audience, devising the event concept, planning the logistics and coordinating the aspects before actually executing the modalities of the proposed event. The industry now includes events of all sizes from the Olympics down to a breakfast meeting for ten business people. Every industry, charity, society and group will hold events of some type/size in order to market themselves, raise money or celebrate. Event Management is a multi-million dollar industry, growing rapidly, with mega shows and events hosted regularly. Surprisingly, there is no formalized research conducted to assess the growth of this industry. The industry includes fields such as the MICE (Meetings, Incentives, Conventions and Events), exhibitions, conferences and seminars as well as live music and sporting events."

[boomtownbeijing.wordpress.com/]

"creation and development" ... isn´t it all the about being entrepreneurial?

Sure we can´t got to the extreme, it´s clear that the event management industry nowadays has so many stereotypes and established practices, standards and processes that might hardly leave room for innovation and risk, but still the concept that event management represents will always be a platform to develop and nurture entrepreneurial skills. If not, just a take a look at schools ... how many of today´s real-life entrepreneurs we know were the ones that back at college or university leaded the school events, festivals and all kind of related activities? If you have one of those kids, pay attention, you might have a potential future entrepreneur!

For now keep enjoying the Olympics and every time you sit down in from of your TV (or well, every time that you join live an spectacle there in China, if you are lucky to be there), unplug yourself for some minutes of the sport side of things, and analyze how much entrepreneurial talent must have been involved to make that happen. This reflection can bring you to amazing conclusions.

Congratulations China!

* Yes, it is from Wikipedia. I love Wikipedia, can´t deny! It´s just that you can´t use Wikipedia for everything ...!

You´re brilliant. We are hiring.

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Wed, 06 Aug 2008 18:08:00 +0000

Challenge yourself against better players and you'll become star of the team. Google's Vice President of Search Products & User Experience, Marissa Mayer, reflects upon her personal experience working with some of the finest talent in hi-tech - and points out that working with the best empowers each player to excel.

Even if the above shared video does not exclusively apply for the entrepreneurial world (and comes from a big, established company – but one of my favorite ones), it definitively addresses an issue that makes a huge difference when entrepreneurs are passing from having a “business” into building a “company”: PEOPLE. And in fact smart people.

To be a “one man show” is something very common for entrepreneurs when they are starting their companies. It happens for many diverse reasons that go from the fact that at the beginning only the entrepreneur understands (and feels passionate about!) what the business is all about, till simply not having the financial capacity to even afford a couple of full paid staff. However only companies become sustainable and transcend, when the entrepreneur is capable to build a strong team of good people that live the values and culture of the company, and that has what it takes to bring it to the next level.

The (personal/professional) EGO (a person's opinion of his or her own worth) is in this context the strongest enemy of entrepreneurs. They sometimes feel afraid of bringing on board people that for some reasons they might consider “smarter”. Big mistake. Some are afraid of loosing control, some even feel guilty for not being able to manage everything by themselves, others are simply afraid of being shadowed … we can talk hours in a deeper way about the reasons why for entrepreneurs is so hard to “let go”, but - coming back to the video – I´d invite you to reflect on the reasons why it´s important (and enjoyable!) to do it.

1. “Challenge yourself against better players and you'll become star of the team”: By interacting with good people that bring into your company unknown practices by you, YOU CAN LEARN from them! Now, it also shows the other “side of the coin”. When hiring, make sure you get people that are not only smart, but willing to build real learning environments and share their experiences (knowledge, thoughts, visions) with each other. I do believe there are billions of capable people in this world, but not all of them are ready to work with an entrepreneur – exactly because of this reason.

2. “Entrepreneur is Entrepreneur” – “CEO is CEO”: The demand of talent of companies changes over the time. At the beginning a start – up needs visionary people, with execution capacity, with no fear to take risks, sensitive to opportunities and high ability to convince and negotiate. That´s for me an Entrepreneur. But once the company grows the need for functional/technical/management qualifications and educated leadership skills increases. At that point, Entrepreneurs should be ready to invite people in that can bring those set of talents on the table. The Entrepreneurs should not strive to be CEOs just for the sake of being one. Many entrepreneurs indeed do not enjoy that job role and the responsibilities that it implies – but afraid of bringing new people in, they fall into the horrible game of doing what they are not good for, and stop doing what naturally they enjoy and are excellent at.

3. “The world needs you, not only your company”: For me a real entrepreneur (no matter if social or business oriented) is the one whose playground is the world, the society, not the companies. Companies are just platforms that entrepreneurs enable once, and take care of for a certain period of time, but then they need to get sustainable through talent that the entrepreneur should be able to bring in. Well, that´s my vision, I identify a lot with serial entrepreneurship … but I know it´s not the only way of seeing it. Leave your “babies” with smart “nannies”, and be free to keep changing the world. That makes you bigger.

A bit of self-promotion - Endeavor profiled in The Economist

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Sat, 02 Aug 2008 12:32:00 +0000

As some of you know, I work at Endeavor Colombia. Below you can find an article, also published in the printed version of The Economist about Endeavor, which also shares highlights of some of our Entrepreneurs. Enjoy!
For the online version, click here

Spreading the gospel

Jul 31st 2008 | MEXICO CITY AND NEW YORK
From The Economist print edition

An effort to promote entrepreneurship in the developing world is bearing fruit

Spoleto juggles with its strategy

EARLIER this year Mario Chady faced a crucial decision. Having built up Spoleto, his chain of casual Italian restaurants, to 150 outlets in Brazil, and opened in Mexico and Spain, the time had come for Mr Chady, based in Rio de Janeiro, to choose between expanding into America or putting the idea on hold for at least 18 months. To help make up his mind, he asked for help from an organisation called Endeavor, which had chosen him as a potential “high-impact entrepreneur” in 2003.

Endeavor is a non-profit group based in New York dedicated to promoting entrepreneurship in emerging economies. It had already supplied three teams of students from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to help Mr Chady craft a strategy for America. But as he spoke to members of the Endeavor network, ranging from leading Brazilian business tycoons to fellow up-and-coming entrepreneurs, he became convinced that it was the right strategy but the wrong time. Mr Chady decided to concentrate on expanding even faster in Brazil, and leave America for later. “The US economy is not at a very good stage, whereas Brazil is very hot now. Endeavor helped me see this,” he says.

It is routine for entrepreneurs to consult their networks of mentors in Silicon Valley. But in much of the world, such networks are notable by their absence—and so, too, are examples of Silicon Valley-style successful entrepreneurship. Changing this was why Endeavor was created in 1997.

“Why can’t the next Silicon Valley pop up in Cairo or São Paulo or Johannesburg?” asks Linda Rottenberg, who co-founded Endeavor with Peter Kellner, a venture capitalist. Fresh from Yale, she was working in Buenos Aires for Ashoka, an organisation that supports social entrepreneurs—people with innovative, usually non-profit ideas for solving social problems—and concluded that ordinary entrepreneurs needed a similar support system. Much of the difference between countries such as America, where entrepreneurship thrives, and those where it does not is cultural rather than regulatory, she believes. In many emerging economies, business tends to be dominated by a closed elite hostile to new entrepreneurs—and failure is stigmatised, rather than being a badge of honour, as it is in Silicon Valley.

The making of a start-up

Getting Endeavor started required some classic start-up doggedness of its own. At first, the philanthropic foundations Ms Rottenberg courted regarded the project as too elitist. “They complained that we were only trying to build a middle class, not to help the poor, despite all the academic evidence that a strong middle class is essential to prosperity,” she recalls. Eventually Stephan Schmidheiny, a Swiss industrialist who has given away a large chunk of his fortune in Latin America, was persuaded to provide some seed capital, and Endeavor was up and running, initially in Argentina and Chile. Today it operates in 11 countries, including South Africa, Turkey and, most recently, Jordan.

Endeavor’s magic works most powerfully in its selection process. Entrepreneurs are screened first by a national panel of successful businessmen, and then, if they are short-listed, by an international panel. So far over 18,000 entrepreneurs have been screened but fewer than 400 have been chosen. The aim is to identify those who can succeed on a scale that will make them into national role models, and then provide them with every possible support. But the process is designed to benefit all entrants, by helping them define their visions more clearly.

Endeavor’s national boards are rosters of leading tycoons—the founders of InBev in Brazil, Jennifer Oppenheimer in South Africa and Lorenzo Zambrano, boss of Cemex, in Mexico, for example. The international board, chaired by Edgar Bronfman Jr, boss of Warner Music, is even more august. At a selection meeting in Turkey in June, the panel included Daniel Och, a hedge-fund boss, Naguib Sawiris of Egypt’s Orascom Telecom, Brian Swette, the chairman of Burger King, and Ali Koç of Koç Holdings. “It is a lot of fun. You go to all these nice places in the world, find all these young enthusiastic people, who you get to help. Sometimes you invest, maybe make some money,” says Ali Mehmet Babaoglu, a Turkish textile tycoon.

Once the selection process is over, these business figures then become mentors to the entrepreneurs. “Endeavor’s genius has been to get the establishment in these countries together, not to kill these entrepreneurial companies but to support them,” says Bill Sahlman, a professor at Harvard Business School who was recruited as an adviser early on.

Endeavor’s entrepreneurs—who collectively now control companies with combined revenues of $2.4 billion and 91,000 employees, earning on average ten times the minimum wage in their country—rarely say they would not have succeeded without Endeavor. But they all believe they got bigger much sooner thanks to its endorsement and support. Leonardo Shapiro of VeriFone, a maker of online credit-card payment systems, describes as “priceless” the advice he got from Pedro Aspe, a former finance minister of Mexico, before he flew to meet a potential American buyer of his firm, and the legal help Endeavor arranged from White & Case, which although not pro bono “was at a very interesting discount, and pay it when you can.”

One of Endeavor’s earliest successes was Wenceslao Casares, who sold Patagon, his Argentine internet brokerage, to Banco Santander for $705m at the peak of the dotcom bubble. He believes Endeavor has started to change cultural attitudes in the countries where it has been active for a while, mostly in Latin America. “When I said I was going to start a business, it was against everyone’s advice, from my family to my university,” he says. “Now, go to the same university and the same professors will tell you that one of their goals is to produce good entrepreneurs.”

Brazil is perhaps most vibrant of all. Endeavor’s successes include Leila Velez, who grew up in a favela and whose beauty salon firm, Beleza Natural, now has revenues of $30m, and Bento Koike, whose wind-turbine-blade manufacturing firm, Tecsis, recently struck a $1 billion deal to supply mighty General Electric.

Going global

Endeavor has “created islands of hope,” says Mr Casares. Now it must find ways to “change continents, not just little islands.” This has been recognised by Endeavor’s global board, which recently adopted an ambitious plan to expand to 25 countries by 2015. Endeavor is confident that it now knows how to adapt its model to new countries, having learnt from early stumbles in Chile, South Africa and Turkey. Fadi Ghandour, the Jordanian boss of Aramex, a logistics firm, believes there is much potential in the Arab world, which is full of young would-be entrepreneurs who have “discovered the new thing, that it pays to have an idea, not rely on land or investing.”

Funding has long been a problem for Endeavor. As a non-profit, it has to rely on donors—many recruited through a glitzy annual gala in New York—which has been tough at times, as in the months after the terrorist attacks of September 11th 2001. Would it make more sense to be a for-profit operation? Endeavor has struggled constantly with whether to pursue profits, but each time has concluded no, says Ms Rottenberg, who also says she declined the chance to set up a $100m fund focused on emerging-market entrepreneurs. “If Endeavor had been an investor, rather than an independent, objective, non-profit enabler, it would not have been trusted by the business elite, or the entrepreneurs,” she insists. “Trust is everything.”

Happily, Endeavor has high hopes of moving onto a stronger financial footing. In some countries where it operates, starting with Brazil, successful entrepreneurs are signing up to a “give back” programme, donating 2% of their equity to Endeavor. With luck this could soon make the national operations self-sustaining. Moreover, on July 31st Omidyar Network, the philanthropic organisation set up by Pierre Omidyar, who made his money in Silicon Valley by founding eBay, announced a $10m investment to build up the capacity of Endeavor’s global operations. “Endeavor is already having a significant impact,” says Matt Bannick, managing partner at Omidyar Network. “Given capital, it could grow rapidly.” Watch this space.

Junior Chamber International - National Entrepreneur Competition

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 19:37:00 +0000

Pablo Martínez, a former AIESEC colleague (and now JCI member) shared with me this option that might be suitable for you or for other colombian entrepreneurs you might know. You can find more information as well in the following Facebook group.

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=20893447697&ref=mf

Hurry up, deadline is August 15! The winners will have the chance to participate in the Global version of the JCI competition (to take place in India, in October 08). Below also information in spanish.

1. Requisitos:

Los participantes deben ser mayores de edad, para participar en el concurso mundial BBP de la JCI debe ser menor de 40 años.

Completar el formulario de inscripción

Cumplir con los plazos de entrega

Los demás requisitos exigidos por el Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo

2. Modalidades y categorías a concursar:

1. Planes de Negocios (Emprendedores con proyectos avalados por una entidad)
Categorías:

Innovación

Industrias Creativas y Culturales

Impacto Social / Ambiental

2. Empresas Innovadoras (Empresas con por lo menos 6 meses de constituidas)

Desarrollo tecnológico e innovación de clase mundial.

Impacto social y ambiental.

Las modalidades y categorías que no presenten inscritos, o que no obtengan el puntaje mínimo de evaluación, se declararan desiertas

Inscripciones:

Para realizar la inscripción debe seguir las siguientes instrucciones:

Bajar el formulario de Inscripción haciendo Click aquí
Lea las secciones siguientes que le ayudaran a comprender la metodología del concurso
El Formulario de Inscripción diligenciado y el Plan Empresarial deben ser enviados en físico y copia en CD a la siguiente dirección:

Señores:Emprendedores Colombia – Ministerio de Comercio, Industria y Turismo. Concurso Nacional de Emprendedores Calle 28 No 13A 15- Bogotá D.C. O al siguiente Apartado Aéreo: Señores:Camara Junior de Colombia Concurso Nacional de Emprendedores
Atn, Maria Ximena Serrano Corredor A.A 25695 Bogotá D.C.

Modelpreneurs?

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Wed, 30 Jul 2008 18:54:00 +0000

"Everyone knows it pays to be pretty. It's good to know that it pays even more to be savvy"

I found this very interesting article on Forbes where the term "MODELPRENEUR" came across. The term reffers to "Entrepreneurial Supermodels", women such as Heidi Klum, Gisele Bündchen, Lauren Hutton or Kate Moss (among others!) that are not only pretty but also know how to make money out the brand that each of them represents.

I think that´s cool to realize ... specially because the last thing that one might co-relate to the life-style or atributes of a model is the entrepreneurial spirit ... and well, in the end, models themselves (their bodies, their faces and the icons they represent) are enterprises! We are full of paradigms!

Of course it will always be a question who really manages their businesses, but well, if someone else does that for them, who cares? finally being an Entrepreneur doesn´t neccesarely mean being a CEO :-), they key thing is to have the right vision and drive to endeavor something, launch it, find the right managers and staff (the past three steps can kill you though!) and well, let them do the money for you!

Another isssue is that many of their companies are related to the show-bizz, beauty industry, or clothing ... but again, who cares? In the end one should jump into a business that we really love and KNOW! - and in the case of supermodels those industries make no doubt a perfect fit!

Below some examples that were shared on the article!

Elizabeth Hurley
Business: Beachwear, and soon, pre-packaged frozen low-fat health food

The Estée Lauder model first rode to fame as actor Hugh Grant's girlfriend, but she is riding to fortune with her beachwear line, Elizabeth Hurley Beach, launched in 2005. Those bikinis, jewel-encrusted sarongs, lightweight pants, caftans, hats and bags are marketed in several continents, including the U.S., Europe, Asia, Russia and the Middle East. She hopes to soon launch a line of pre-packaged frozen low-fat health food inspired by and sourced from the food grown on her 400-acre farm.

Gisele Bündchen

Business: Shoes, sunglasses

The highest-paid supermodel in the world, with an estimated $35 million in earnings last year, is also an astute businesswoman. Last year, Gisele reportedly began demanding to be paid in euros instead of the ever-shrinking dollar. And even though she has over 20 modeling contracts, the biggest payday comes from her licensing deal with Brazilian sandal-maker Grendene. The model's line, Ipanema by Gisele, is sold worldwide and accounts for 20% of the company's shoe sales, or about 30 million pairs last year. Gisele's annual royalty stream: about $8 million. Tom Brady's gal pal has also recently licensed her name to Luxottica's Vogue Eyewear for her own line of sunglasses called "Gisele's Selects." Oh, yeah, and she's in the hospitality business to boot, as the owner of Brazil's successful Palladium Executive hotel.

Iman

A firmly established modelpreneur, this Somalian-born beauty and wife of David Bowie started her line of cosmetics for women of color in 1994. It's now carried at U.S. mass retailers such as Target, Wal-Mart, Walgreens and Duane Reade and at international stores like Debenhams.

This blog needs to get alive again

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Tue, 29 Jul 2008 21:45:00 +0000

What started as a "new years" resolution during the last weeks of december, lasted hardly a month ... shame on me ... I´m talking about this blog. Some people have been asking me in past weeks what happened to the blog, why I was not writting anymore, etc ... the only answer I have is called LACK OF DISCIPLINE.

But today I felt like stopping with the procrastination. I had a moment of PAINFUL CLARITY and realized that it´s time to leave the laziness aside and bringing this blog alive again. Yes, I´ve been very busy, that´s a fact, but for things you do with conviction, there´s always time. And I indeed have it, it´s just that my time has scaped without my permission to other endeavors!

So, ready to read again?

Let´s see how it goes! Man, 5 months without posting, so many experiences .. where to start?

The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Mon, 28 Jan 2008 15:14:00 +0000

I would like to reccommend that you all take a quick look at this study, which takes less than 15 minutes:

The Impact of Entrepreneurship Education: An Evaluation of the Berger Entrepreneurship Program at The University of Arizona, 1985-1999

They do a great job showing the real impact that Entrepreneurship Education can have on people and the economy. They make a compelling case for adopting it.

You can find the complete PDF file at:

http://entrepreneurship.eller.arizona.edu/research/impact_evaluation.aspx

The Most And Least Profitable Businesses To Start ...

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 14:56:00 +0000

Entrepreneurs start companies for all sorts of reasons. Maybe they have a passion, like being in control, want more flexibility--or even hate their current jobs.

But no matter the inspiration, one thing's for sure: They'd better make money. A rising revenue line might make for good cocktail conversation, but if you don't turn a profit--and keep turning one--you won't be an entrepreneur very long.

Take a look ate the Most and Least profitable businesses to start, according to Forbes.com

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 15:20:00 +0000

HP and AméricaEconomía (a leading latinamerican business magazine) are on the search of the global SME´s (small and medium enterprises) of Latin America. You have to complete your info (if you are interested in participating) entering here.

Interested in knowing former winners?

Read here the story of SQUALO.

Top Ten Myths of Entrepreneurship

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Thu, 17 Jan 2008 14:32:00 +0000

Posted on January 10, 2008 at http://blog.guykawasaki.com/

1. It takes a lot of money to finance a new business. Not true. The typical start-up only requires about $25,000 to get going. The successful entrepreneurs who don’t believe the myth design their businesses to work with little cash. They borrow instead of paying for things. They rent instead of buy. And they turn fixed costs into variable costs by, say, paying people commissions instead of salaries.

2. Venture capitalists are a good place to go for start-up money. Not unless you start a computer or biotech company. Computer hardware and software, semiconductors, communication, and biotechnology account for 81 percent of all venture capital dollars, and seventy-two percent of the companies that got VC money over the past fifteen or so years. VCs only fund about 3,000 companies per year and only about one quarter of those companies are in the seed or start-up stage. In fact, the odds that a start-up company will get VC money are about one in 4,000. That’s worse than the odds that you will die from a fall in the shower.

3. Most business angels are rich. If rich means being an accredited investor –a person with a net worth of more than $1 million or an annual income of $200,000 per year if single and $300,000 if married – then the answer is “no.” Almost three quarters of the people who provide capital to fund the start-ups of other people who are not friends, neighbors, co-workers, or family don’t meet SEC accreditation requirements. In fact, thirty-two percent have a household income of $40,000 per year or less and seventeen percent have a negative net worth.

4. Start-ups can’t be financed with debt. Actually, debt is more common than equity. According to the Federal Reserve’s Survey of Small Business Finances, fifty-three percent of the financing of companies that are two years old or younger comes from debt and only forty-seven percent comes from equity. So a lot of entrepreneurs out there are using debt rather than equity to fund their companies.

5. Banks don’t lend money to start-ups. This is another myth. Again, the Federal Reserve data shows that banks account for sixteen percent of all the financing provided to companies that are two years old or younger. While sixteen percent might not seem that high, it is three percent higher than the amount of money provided by the next highest source – trade creditors – and is higher than a bunch of other sources that everyone talks about going to: friends and family, business angels, venture capitalists, strategic investors, and government agencies.

6. Most entrepreneurs start businesses in attractive industries. Sadly, the opposite is true. Most entrepreneurs head right for the worst industries for start-ups. The correlation between the number of entrepreneurs starting businesses in an industry and the number of companies failing in the industry is 0.77. That means that most entrepreneurs are picking industries in which they are mostlikely to fail.

7. The growth of a start-up depends more on an entrepreneur’s talent than on the business he chooses. Sorry to deflate some egos here, but the industry you choose to start your company has a huge effect on the odds that it will grow. Over the past twenty years or so, about 4.2 percent of all start-ups in the computer and office equipment industry made the Inc 500 list of the fastest growing private companies in the U.S. 0.005 percent of start-ups in the hotel and motel industry and 0.007 percent of start-up eating and drinking establishments made the Inc. 500. That means the odds that you will make the Inc 500 are 840 times higher if you start a computer company than if you start a hotel or motel. There is nothing anyone has discovered about the effects of entrepreneurial talent that has a similar magnitude effect on the growth of new businesses.

8. Most entrepreneurs are successful financially. Sorry, this is another myth. Entrepreneurship creates a lot of wealth, but it is very unevenly distributed. The typical profit of an owner-managed business is $39,000 per year. Only the top ten percent of entrepreneurs earn more money than employees. And the typical entrepreneur earns less money than he otherwise would have earned working for someone else.

9. Many start-ups achieve the sales growth projections that equity investors are looking for. Not even close. Of the 590,000 or so new businesses with at least one employee founded in this country every year, data from the U.S. Census shows that less than 200 reach the $100 million in sales in six years that venture capitalists talk about looking for. About 500 firms reach the $50 million in sales that the sophisticated angels, like the ones at Tech Coast Angels and the Band of Angels talk about. In fact, only about 9,500 companies reach $5 million in sales in that amount of time.

10. Starting a business is easy. Actually it isn’t, and most people who begin the process of starting a company fail to get one up and running. Seven years after beginning the process of starting a business, only one-third of people have a new company with positive cash flow greater than the salary and expenses of the owner for more than three consecutive months.

The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 18:37:00 +0000

The Cartier Women’s Initiative Awards is a unique business plan competition for female entrepreneurs in the initial phase created in 2006 by Cartier and the Women's Forum with the support of McKinsey and INSEAD management school.

Each year, 5 Laureates, one per continent, receive a US$ 20 000 grant and personalized coaching support for a full year.This website - www.cartierwomensinitiative.org - intends to provide you with the main information regarding our Awards and how to participate in our competition, but also key resources for writing your business plan, launching your business and realizing your dreams.

Read more on:
www.cartierwomensinitiative.org
Deadline: February 15, 2008, 23:59 (Paris time: GMT + 1, extended deadline).

If interested, I know a colombian winner of 2006, that I´ll be happy to put you in contact with.

Hamburgers made out of cactus?

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Mon, 07 Jan 2008 15:38:00 +0000

To see the original new in spanish from the colombian newsletter EL TIEMPO, click here

Happy new year!

Sorry for the silence of this blog in the past days, but as in many latin countries, we were on Xmas holidays. The good news are that there are lots of entrepreneurial stories to share after this break!

Let me start with this first one, that I found particularly fascinating.

In the northern colombian departament (state) of GUAJIRA, a team of wayuu indigenous secundary school graduates started recently what they call "the first bakery in the desert". Before having this bakery, sure they could get somehow bread, but this one would be already old and hard, in all cases not an attractive thing to buy or eat.

The innovative aspect of their bakery, is that they have discovered in the cactus, one of the most common plants in the desert, a great insume to produce food and drinks such as sweets, wine and even hamburgers! What for the "white men" (called by the wayuus white mean arijunas) is an useles plant, for the young team of wayuu entrepreneurs became a source of work.

Their endeavor started after they visited a zone in the desert full of medicinal plants and other native species of flora ... after this they talked to their grantparents about the old traditions and came to the conclusion that their environment was ruled by three main things: SUN, SAND and CACTUS. So, they had to find a way to make use of them, specially with the cactus. For that, they contacted Rafael Márquez, who is known as one of the most experienced individuals in cactus in Colombia.

This sounds like a great story (and it is!) however the limitations and difficulties to make all this happen were ane are many. Lack of efficient transpotation means, energy, computers and internet have made the education of teh former secondary students and set up of the business very hard. The government has tried to offer some help in equipement and energy plant, however a big proportion has been useless. And here is when the real entrepreneurial challenge starts, a good idea is not enough, resources are needed, and this search of resources and the balance to keep still their products of high quality is the current day to day of this wayuu entrepreneurs. I really hope to read and hear much more from them in the future.

If anyone is interested to support, let me know!

GIVE LIKE AN ENTREPRENEUR - taken from Forbes.com

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Thu, 27 Dec 2007 14:23:00 +0000

To read original entry at Forbes.com, go to: http://www.forbes.com/2007/12/14/philanthropy-giving-donations-ent_mf_1214charity.html?partner=smallbusiness_newsletter

Mitch Goldman is looking forward to shaving this weekend. For four weeks, he's been growing a mustache and using it to gain attention--and contributions--for his favorite charity. As co-organizer of the New York chapter of Mustaches for Kids, Goldman is helping 80 members raise about $40,000 for Donorschoose.org, a nonprofit that helps public school teachers buy school supplies for students who can't afford books, paper or pencils. The direct link that donorschoose.org builds between people with means and people with needs demonstrates the way the Internet is reshaping the world of philanthropy. Individuals at almost any financial level are now setting the specific course of their own charitable giving and volunteerism in a way that until recently was reserved for the very wealthy.

In Pictures: Give Like An Entrepreneur (click to see)

For decades, only the largest givers made extensive use of networking, highly targeted giving and specialized volunteer efforts. Now, those three tools are in the hands of almost everyone with altruistic leanings, thanks to proliferating Web sites like Donorschoose.org and Network for Good. Steve Case, co-founder of America Online, and his wife are tapping into this momentum. Their private foundation, the Case Foundation, is hosting a competition in which users of the Causes application on Facebook and readers of Parade magazine can compete to win between $250,000 and $500,000 for their favorite charities. "This is the year of the 'wired fund-raiser,' " says Bill Strathman, executive director of Network for Good, the independent nonprofit Web site founded by America Online, Cisco Systems and Yahoo! that connects charities, donors and volunteers. According a survey the group sponsored, 75% of individuals say they give to charity because friends and family ask them.

"People can now use the Internet to fund-raise, something that's much harder to do in person," Strathman says. "By hiding beyond the Internet, people can also donate on their own terms." Actor Kevin Bacon, known for his six degrees of separation from nearly everyone in entertainment, has tapped into the zeitgeist and worked with Network for Good to set up Six Degrees, a Web site where individuals can set up accounts to ask friends and family to contribute to designated, licensed U.S. charities. Another Web site, Chipin.com, allows users to solicit money for a specific cause and use PayPal to collect the funds. Online donations are growing. Network for Good.org says its donations are up 50% from last year. It expects to raise $20 million during December, a month responsible for 40% of the year's donations. According to ePhilanthropy Foundation, a Washington, D.C.-based, nonprofit research and education organization, online giving has increased to more than $4.5 billion in 2005 from $250 million in 2000. While online networking has become a key component to fund raising, many people are also using a variety of Web sites to find specific causes and even recipients for their charitable giving. More than 58% of high net worth individuals say they would give more to charity if they could determine their gift's impact, according to a 2006 survey of more than 1,000 people earning more than $200,000 a year that was conducted by Banc of America and the Center on Philanthropy at Indiana University. "The most significant trend we've seen is the increasing desire of donors to know where their money is going and how it's used," says Donna Callejon, chief operating officer of Globalgiving.org, a Washington-based international marketplace for charitable giving. Through Global Giving, individuals can target contributions to specific projects--for example, water systems or schools in different areas of the world. Callejon says all donors receive regular progress reports for their donations.

"It used to be that you needed to give a lot of money to get that kind of reporting back," she says. Other groups that allow people to target donations to specific projects include Heifer.org, a Web site aiming to eliminate hunger. It allows Internet users to purchase farm animals or trees for families or communities throughout the developing world. Kiva.org allows budding entrepreneurs in the developing world to solicit loans. They outline their needs, their plans to use the money and their ability to repay a loan. Those with money can use the site to make either a donation or a loan at a reasonable rate. Some loans are for as little as $20. Time is as valuable as money, and many intermediary organizations use the Internet to help volunteers find ways to donate their time to charities.

The Hands on Network (handsonnetwork.org) helps people find volunteer opportunities that can last for just one day or find a place to make a longer-term time commitment. While it's possible to approach an agency or organization to offer assistance, typically it's easier for both the individual and the nonprofit to go through these intermediary agencies. "Not every organization has the capacity to manage volunteers. It takes resources," says Ariel Zwang, executive director of New York Cares, the New York chapter of the Hands on Network. The sheer number of participating nonprofits provides volunteer opportunities that match many skills and interests. "If a project involves a choir singing in nursing homes," says Zwang, "people who gravitate to that project can probably pick up sheet music and sing it." While the Net and high-tech networking provide highly targeted charitable opportunities, a little face time still works wonders, says Goldman, the Mustaches for Kids organizer, especially when your face is changing every day. "Half of what we do is some sort of rah-rah publicity for mustaches," Goldman says. "Once we get people interested in that, we can keep going and pitch for money and our cause."

Two young jewerly entrepreneurs

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 21:29:00 +0000

Here we go with the first two entrepreneurs to profile, two young ladies, friends of mine!

Specially for this Xmas season, who knows if some of you might be interested in purchasinfg their products!

1. Vera de Galdos - http://www.veradegaldos.com/

Entrepreneur: Vero Luna (Peru, UK)

Vera de Galdos is the brand new peruvian silver jewerly project of Veronica Luna. I shared with Vero, a crazy and very professional woman, two years of work back in AIESEC. Vero has worked for TCS in London and currently for UBS, in the same city. So together with his father and another partner, Vero has lauched Vera de Galdos.

The site, being still a young company, looks great and allows you to do online shopping.

One particular reason why I want to share Vero´s case (besides being a friend!) is that her story is a proof that you can perfectly be highly engaged with your work as employee (let´s call it your non-entrepreneurial life) and yet find the right partners, product and market to start making money.

2. Gris Joyería
http://www.flickr.com/photos/grisjoyeria (catalog), http://www.bogotamiciudad.com/Directorio/Detalles.aspx?BMC=127861

Entrepreneur: Catalina Spinel (Colombia)

This is a very similar story to Veronica´s, but the business is however is bit smaller. Catalina is a work college (that also is a full time employee!) and nowdays with a partner designs and sells jewerly. They started first just trading jewerly and even had a shop together with more people in the north of Bogota, but after the shop closed for some reasons, they started designing the own pieces and trading them in key spaces as handcrafts fairs. They even won a price recently of Artesanías de Colombia, not designing jewerly, but some amazing bag, gloves and kind of bells done with the same material of the colombian San Jacinto Hammocks.

The jewerly market, at least in Colombia, is very competitive and diverse. Colombians can buy jewerly for 1 USD on the streets but also in prestigious boutiques that designers put together at expensive malls. There is market for everyone ... but no matter the choice that one makes, it´s a beautiful business where it´s very brave to see people, as my two friends, entering and discovering what it means to be an entrepreneurs. I wish them lost of sucess and lots of sales!

Roots of the word entrepreneurship

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 22:18:00 +0000

Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women, defines entrepreneurship by looking to the roots of the French language. She found two words: "entre" and "prendre" that suggest the act of immersion into something that also takes hold of you. (Taken from Stanford Educators Corner)

I have always liked the past video (not only because I love indian accent!), and even if it was an intervention of 2003. What a better way to start understanding entrepreneurship than analizing the roots of the word itself?

So, even if the roots of the word entrepreneurship (and therefore of the word entrepreneur) come from a romance language, as french is, it´s important to notice that in spanish only few words or terms that we use normally related to entrepreneurship do officialy exist. For example, if you go to the REAL ACADEMIA DE LA LENGUA (the highest authority for the spanish language words writting and definitions), the noun EMPRENDIMIENTO (entrepreneurship, endeavor) is reported as non-existent. But we use it everywhere. However words as EMPRENDEDOR (entrepreneur) and EMPRENDER (verb for entrepreneurship, that actually does not exist in english) exist. And it´s a similar story in portuguese. I personally remember starting using the word entrepreneurship when I was about 19 - 20 years old ...

What is the point I try to make? Isn´t it funny to talk so much about those terms in Latinamerica when the word simply does not exist? Let´s face it, entrepreneurship now is in fashion, and many of us once used the word without even knowing what it really meant! but at the beginning must have been hard to start acting upon a culture which definition and concept was not even familiar to our language. Nevertheless, entrepreneurs, no matter what we called them and since when we started called them like this, have always existed, id oubt our civilizations would have had evolved without them. If not, let´s remember that in France in the beginning of the XVI century the word was also used to refer to the adverturers that traveled to the "New World" looking for life opportunities without knowing what to expect. Not really a big difference with what we today understand, right?

Any other theories or insights about the roots of the word?! Feel free to share!

Hope to come back soon with more capsules about Nature and Definitions of Entrepreneurship.

Welcome to Entrepreneurial Discovery!

torres.oriana@gmail.com (Oriana Torres) — Wed, 19 Dec 2007 17:10:00 +0000

Dear readers,

It´s with lots of exitement that I am lauching Entrepreneurial Discovery! Since some months I have been procrastinating launching this blog that is meant to serve as an space to inform, share and discuss about the different aspects of the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Why I am doing this blog? First of all, I enjoy a lot blogging. Since around 3 years I´ve managing my own personal blog, where I touch all kind of topics, many of them about my own life and my adventures, many of them related to general topics I am passionate about. The second motivation to launch Entrepreneurial Discovery is highly related with the fact that always, and specially since the beginning of 2007, I breathe Entrepreneurship everywhere. I´ve been engaged with international programs that fostered Social Entrepreneurship, working with foundations and NGOs. I worked with an India entrepreneurs as a trainee for 6 months. Right now, I work for a global non-profit organization that identifies and supports high-impact entrepreneurs in emerging markets to facilitate and encourage long-term sustainable growth. On the other side, many of my familiy members, friends and my boyfriend are entrepreneurs. So I feel blessed to be on a professional and personal level engaged with real change makers, from diverse sizes and industries as well with top business people that support those entrepreneurs at different levels.

It´s inspiring. It´s challenging. And it´s a pity that all the knowledge and experiences that I have access to every day gets archived only in my head. That´s why I wanted to give a chance to this blog.

To finish this first post, I just want to share some principles:

1. This blog can be read and nurtured by all kinds of people, you do not have to be an entrepreneur nor an expert on entrepreneurship to participate. The idea is to have a space to learn from each other, around a topic that we all should be passionate or at least interested about.

2. We encourage you to disagree and challenge everything that is written by all blog participants (if it´s the case), however do it constructively and in a respectful manner, trying to understand the points of view of everyone.

3. The official languages of the blog are english and spanish. I´m colombian and I´m not native in english, therefore thinking of my local network, it might happen that some posts will be in spanish. For those cases, I´ll make my best to write at least an abstract in english, if not a full translation. When the blod grows, we can see if the add more languages!

4. The nature and topics of the post are not restricted, however I would love to keep some order and use tags that relate to certain common themes. So far I have:

Nature and Definitions of Entrepreneurship

Financing and Investing

Entrepreneurial cuture and attitude

Entrepreneurs - role models and case studies

Entrepreneurship and education

Entrepreneurship and legislation

Entrepreneur´s challenges

Innovation and Creativity

Youth Entrepreneurship

Women Entrepreneurship

News and opportunities for Entrepreneurs

All past areas apply for business as social entrepreneurship.

5. Finally, I am open and looking forward to include people not only as readers, but as writters of the blog. The process for that is simple, if there is an interested person, she or he can let me know, we´ll talk about the motivations to be a writter of the blog and if there is a good fit, we start!

Feel free to subscribe for email update or through RSS, the options are to be found in the right side bar of the blog. WELCOME!

Oriana