If you are a young entrepreneur who is going to be in the Bay Area anytime this Fall (September to November) and is interested in speaking in front of a large group of undergraduate students about your ideas and passions, we are looking for speakers for a number of “guest lecturer” opportunities in two entrepreneurship classes at UC Berkeley ranging from 50-200 students in size.

We are looking for entrepreneurs who recently graduated from college, and preferably started their business while they were a student. It doesn’t matter what industry you are focused in and the more diverse your start-up and idea is the better.

Speaking at Berkeley will allow you to expose your product to a large group of entrepreneurial students and help build credibility for your firm. It also a great way to recruit students for internships or full-time positions.

If you are interested in getting more information, send me an e-mail using the contact form.

Last week I wrote about The Blind Side, a movie currently in theatres telling the story of Michael Oher a homeless teen who was taken in by a well-to-do family and offered a second chance at life. He grew to become the star athlete, playing Division I football at Ole Miss and being selected by the Baltimore Ravens in the first round of the 2009 NFL Draft. The story was quite inspirational, but I was surprised to see that it was rated PG-13.

The story was a heart-warming tale and there were only one or two scenes which made the content of the film not suitable for those under thirteen. However, despite these few scenes, the movie was a great story for children, regardless of their interest in football, across the United States. I have no doubt that there were tens of thousands of kids who would have paid to see this movie but weren’t allowed to see the movie because of the PG-13 rating.

So I was thinking, why wouldn’t the directors create two versions of the movie, a PG version that children could enjoy, and the PG-13 version for more mature audiences? This captures the best of both worlds as everyone with any interest in this movie could purchase a ticket. If only a PG version was made, teenage audiences would be less likely to purchase a ticket to a movie for “younger children” when outer PG-13 or R rated movies were in theatres.

This is a lesson that I think that all entrepreneurs can apply to their own products and services. If you have a few large groups of users, make a product that is targeted towards the different customer groups you have.

A lot of companies are taking this further by allowing for products customized to every individual customer. Now, unless you are in a service industry, it is impossible to manufacture versions of your product so that every individual customer will find something that suits them perfectly. Instead, you have to let your customers design their own products. Nike is a great example of a company succeeding at this strategy with their NikeID program. Nike ID allows customers to customize nearly every aspect of a Nike shoe they wish to purchase online and get their customized shoe delivered to only them.

Just something to think about with relation to your business.

I just wanted to share a very well-made inspirational entrepreneurship focused video I came across today on YouTube. The video shows how entrepreneurs can change the world.

The video is also a great example of viral marketing as it is very well put together viral video advertisement for GrassHopper, a telephone system developer for entrepreneurs. So far it has amassed over 110,000 views in under a month.

]]> http://www.ambeat.com/2010/06/02/inspirational-entrepreneur-video/feed/ http://www.ambeat.com/2010/05/15/decal-coming-to-an-end/ http://www.ambeat.com/2010/05/15/decal-coming-to-an-end/#comments Sat, 15 May 2010 17:15:49 +0000 Aditya Mahesh http://www.ambeat.com/?p=830

Another semester has ended which means students in the Entrepreneurship Crash Course DeCal I teach at UC Berkeley are just a few short weeks away from submitting the business plans they have been working on throughout the course of the year.

Its been another great semester with a lot of motivated students and great business ideas. I look forward to sharing some of these ideas here after I get a chance to read through them. Unfortuantely, students didn’t get a chance to present their ideas this semester due to scheduling conflicts, but judging on periodic updates I have been receiving, there are some great ideas being developed.

We had a very entrepreneurial group of students this semester; many of whom have already taken the initiative to start their own businesses from iPhone applications to clothing lines. We will have more information on some of these businesses in future posts.

If you are interested in taking the DeCal and are a UC Berkeley undergraduate student, you will be able to sign up later this summer when it appears on DeCal Courses.

If you are not a student, feel free to drop in on a class. A schedule will be published soon.

Thanks for another great year
Aditya Mahesh

Bill Gates came to UC Berkeley in late April as part of his college speaking series to give a speech titled “Giving Back: Finding the Best Way to Make a Difference”. The event was limited to an auidence of only 2000, but has been webcasted online.

The link to the webcast can be found here.

In the speech Bill Gates talks about whether or not the world’s brightest students are working on the most challenging and important problems and talks about ways students can use their lives to give back in the most meaningful ways possible and make a real impact.

Event Details:
April 19
11:15 a.m. (doors open at 10:30 a.m.)
Zellerbach Hall
Free. Open to students only.

Bill Gates is co-chair of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Along with his wife and co-chair, Melinda, they collaborate with the foundation’s grantees and partners to expand opportunity to the world’s most disadvantaged people. They also participate in national and international events and travel extensively to champion the foundation’s primary issues―global health and ensuring that low-income minority students are prepared for college and have the means to attend. As cofounder of Microsoft, Gates led the company to become the worldwide leader in business and personal software, services, and solutions. Today he serves as the company’s chairman and advisor on key development projects. Gates also founded Corbis, which is developing a comprehensive digital archive of art and photography from public and private collections around the globe.

This event will be webcast live to a limited audience of 2,000 concurrent viewers. The quality of the signal degrades if more than 2,000 people are viewing it simultaneously. The present

Sixteen finalists from around the globe will converge in Berkeley April 22 and 23 to compete for $45,000 in prize money during the two-day Global Social Venture Competition and Conference.

Now in its 11th year, the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) encourages business students and others to create sustainable ventures that generate positive social change. The competition attracted more than 500 entrants this year, a dramatic increase over the 300 in 2009.

The two-day competition and conference, which will take place at the David Brower Center and Hotel Shattuck Plaza in Berkeley, begins on Thursday, April 22, with a day-long presentation of the finalists’ plans followed by a networking reception.

On day two, Friday, finalists for the Social Impact Assessment award will present in the morning. After lunch, the conference will feature breakout sessions on topics ranging from how to secure funding in a down economy and key legal issues faced by social enterprises to global health and education entrepreneurship.

The Friday lunch keynote speaker is Wilford Welch, author of the book The Tactics of Hope: How Social Entrepreneurs Are Changing Our World. That night the awards dinner will be keynoted by Neal Keny-Guyer, CEO of Mercy Corps, a development organization that operates in 40 nations around the world.

The finalists include two UC Berkeley teams and teams from the UK, France, India, China and other countries. Each team must include a graduate student or someone who has graduated within the past two years from any business school in the world.

LoChlorine, a team that includes Ryan Stanley, MBA 09, and Jessica Huang, BS 08 (Business and Civil Engineering), as well as Berkeley graduate students in public policy and mechanical engineering, is one of 11 finalists for the $25,000 grand prize. The for-profit company has created a low-cost water chlorination system to treat drinking water that can be sold at kiosks in the developing world through partnerships with local NGOs and governments.

The second Berkeley finalist team, WE CARE (Women’s Emergency Communication and Reliable Electricity) Solar, includes Abhay Nihalani, MBA 10, and Berkeley graduate students in pubic health and the School of Information. The company provides solar electric kits to generate power for lighting, communications, and the operation of medical devices in obstetric health care facilities in areas of the world without reliable electricity. WE CARE Solar is competing only for the $5,000 Social Impact Assessment prize.

The GSVC was founded by Berkeley MBA students. It has grown into a partnership with five regional partners – Columbia Business School, London Business School, Indian School of Business, Thammasat University, and ESSEC Business School – and four outreach partners. The two initial rounds of the competition are held at the partner schools, with the finals held in Berkeley. The newest outreach partner, Peking University’s Guanghua School of Management, became involved for the first time this year and was responsible for almost 100 entries.

To register for the event, go togsvc.org/conference/event_details. Early-bird rates are available until April 9.

I recently wrote a guest post on how to leverage real world social networks. The article is specefically targeted to bloggers, but it can apply to all niches. The article can be read here but a link to the post can be found here.

“Everyone is part of social networks, whether informal or formal. By social networks I don’t mean Facebook, I mean real live social networks which we find ourselves part of in our daily lives. For me, the main social network I associate with is my university, UC Berkeley. For others, these social networks can mean extracurricular groups (such as John’s Dot Com Pho), trade organizations, religious groups, etc. The more resources and members (or influence over others) the group has the more beneficial it will be for you to blog “within this network”.

Now, blogging “within a network” is a broad phrase so to help provide some substance to this idea I will share what I have done and the benefits I have enjoyed through associating my blog with UC Berkeley.

I started CEOB, the College Entrepreneurship Organization at Berkeley, and after recruiting close friends as initial members, worked to grow the group to over 100 members and the largest undergraduate club on campus. (The club was entirely self-funded) I had been blogging about business for quite sometime at my personal blog, AM Beat. Traffic to the blog had been sporadic at best coming from a wide variety of sources. I decided that it would be beneficial to associate the blog with the club.”

A little while back, Seth Godin wrote a post on his blog about career fairs and how they were essentially useless as they did not help you launch a career and they were anything but fair. You can read the full post here, but in short the post talks about how the jobs offered at career fairs are the “wholesale filling of average jobs with people trying to be average” and the fact that “By the time a job opening hits the career fair, it’s a job you don’t want. And by the time a job seeker is walking down the aisles, standardized resume in hand, it might be too late for her to find a job that’s worthy of her.”

He ends the post by asking for a new type of career fair, “one that’s selective, interactive, long-term and both career and fair.” Seeing how the majority of this blog’s reader base are entrepreneurial students or entrepreneurs looking to hire fresh talent, I thought it would be wise to address the issue.

I understand what he is saying in general about career fairs. A lot of the career fairs I have been to have been full of less than appealing positions in otherwise well known and respected companies.

Here is why I believe career fairs are not the best way to find an opening: all of the best jobs are taken by those who “go to the job”, while those who wait for the job to come to them (come career fairs) get whatever mediocre openings are left over after the ones who took initiative had their pick.

So if the career fair is not the way to find the right job, then what is? In my experience and those of my peers who have landed entry level jobs at top financial, technology, and consulting companies including Goldman Sachs, Google, JP Morgan, McKinsey, and others, the only way to find the “right job” is to go after it and not wait for it to come to you.

Now, “go after it” may not be the concrete answer you were looking for so here are some specifics straight from individuals who have landed these top jobs.

The most important part of getting the job you want is not network with the right people and connect with them early. If you are waiting until a career fair to network you are waiting too long. It will serve you much better if you take the time to find out exactly what it is that you want to do and where you want to do it and contact individuals with your “dream job” as mentors and advisers before you actually start the job search process. It will surprise you how many people will be willing to help guide you and help connect you with opportunities you would never find at a career fair down the road when you are looking to apply for your first job or switch careers.

Professors are also great resources for students as often times they have a number of connections within the industries they teach about/work with and building a close relationship with a professor or faculty member will give you access to additional possible openings. Obviously professors at the university you are associated with are the easiest to network with, but even professors at other universities are often willing to help.

Lastly aside from currently employed individuals and professors, a last group of individuals worth networking with are individuals who cover the industries you are interested in for the press, mainstream or not, and these are the individuals most familiar with the inner workings of the industry and are also extremely well connected.

Aside from networking, “going after it” involves taking an initiative and looking for jobs as soon as they are posted and jobs that may not even exist yet. The first of these suggestions is important when looking for opportunities at large firms. You need to filter through this companies’ employment listings and apply as soon as new appealing opportunity appears as these openings fill be full by the time the company hits the job fair circuit.

As far as jobs that don’t exist, this tactic can be effective when targeting an opportunity at a start-up company. Everyone has a unique set of skills and if you can find a problem with the way a start-up is doing something and show them how you can fix it, the flexibility and personal nature of hiring within the start-up community increases your chances of finding an opportunity.

If this post could be summed up in a few sentences it is this: The “perfect job fair” doesn’t exist. If you want the perfect job you have to make it happen, not wait for it to come to you. The ways to do this is network early and often and search for jobs in traditional AND unconventional ways, whether it be mining online listings or creating your own job and pitching companies.

Date: April 1, 2010
Location: East Pauley Ballroom
Time: 7:00 PM

On Thursday April 1st, 2010, Berkeley’s Beta Alpha Psi will be holding an event on the revolution of generation Y and its relationship to social media. The event will feature a panel of top executives from leading social media firms, such as Yahoo!, Google, Facebook, Zynga, Skype, Yelp and Meltwater Group. Panelists will share their professional experiences and provide their insights into recent developments in the fast-changing industry. Students will have the opportunity to network with the professionals, and resumes will be accepted.

More information can be found here.

I just have one question for every entrepreneur or freelancer who deals with corporate or repeat clients, does your client see you as cost of doing business, just another line on their expense reports, or as a long-term investment? Based on your answer to this question for every client you are currently working with and any client who approaches you in the future, who should you be focusing on?

This is a question I wished I asked myself about three years back when I was running a public relations company for local small business owners and web entrepreneurs. Answering this question for everyone of my clients would have really helped me prioritize and focus on the right aspects of my business.

There were so many clients who simply viewed my services as just a cost, a service they would purchase once or twice, simply to get the word out quickly about their product. I would write and deliver the press release, and then move on. However, there were also those clients who were in it for the long-haul. Those clients who wanted to form a long-term relationship, and thus more lucrative partnership, to not only get the word out once, but also develop three month or six month or even one year plans for ongoing public relations work.

These were the clients I should have been solely working with as it would be the clients who invested in me that would bring in the greatest amount of revenue and referral business, growing sales and building my brand in the industry. Time wasted on trying to adjust the view of the companies who saw my services as merely another cost so that they would see me as an investment would have been better spent working on making sure that the companies who had already invested in me achieved an even better ROI.