Venture capitalists sit through hundreds of pitches a year. Entrepreneurs can make the most out of the opportunity by having their pitch stand out and have enough information to be taken seriously. If executed properly, entrepreneurs can obtain enough capital to jump-start their businesses. By cutting to the chase, investors can lean-in and gain interest right away. Having a specific potential market will increase the venture capitalists’ confidence in the company. Endorsements from fellow team-members in the company is endearing, and something investors like to hear. Automating demonstrations can prevent awkward glitches that can arise. The secret to funding is to have a buffer: ask for double the amount needed. Read More >>
Monthly Archives: January 2020
Ready For Meat Grown From Animal Cells? A Startup Plans A Pilot Facility
Memphis Meats, a California based company, plans to build a pilot production facility to grow meat from animal cells. They have funds raised from high-profile investors including Bill Gates, Richard Branson and Kimbal Musk, as well as two giant players in the animal protein and feed space: Cargill and Tyson Foods. The company says its latest funding round has brought in $161 million in new investment. Memphis Meats is still technically made from animals, but helps fight against the environmental impact of livestock agriculture. Read More >>
How To Measure The Performance Of Your Remote Startup Team
Hiring remote workers gives access to talent and cost savings. Remote workers tend to accomplish more in less time, experience lower levels of stress, feel more connected with their colleagues, and are less likely to quit their job. Today, no matter the location, budget or the skills needed, as long as there is an internet connection, a team can be built and managed. Remote employees can come with challenges as well. Without proper management, transparency, low reliability, poor communication, low productivity, and security issues can arise. Drawbacks can be avoided by hiring to delegate, having expectations quantified and qualified, and by shortening evaluation cycles. Read More >>
Firms Favor Academic Insights That Come From Hubs
When research professors cannot get the attention of pharmaceutical firms, they turn to start-ups to fund the research. Firms are successfully using academic science as a source of having a competitive advantage. Through this, they are able to identify a breakthrough faster than their competitors, If done properly, it could become huge. Academic science plays a growing role for technology development. Its exploitation by firms has become an important frontier for strategy. Given the volume of academic output, firms home in on the academic discoveries that would give them a leg up via hubs. Hubs are geographic clusters of companies’ R&D labs in specific technological fields. Hubs facilitate the translation of academic science into corporate inventions. The struggle with scientific literature is that its extremely voluminous, fast-changing. Much of it is useless and not reproducible. It is not wise to ignore academic science altogether, as hubs produce a disproportionate amount of useful academic science. The best gems sometimes come from unexpected places. Read More >>
Think Universities are Making Lots of Money from Inventions? Think Again.
About $75 billion dollars is spent on academic research, and it makes way for little return on investment. A very small amount of university research products ever makes it to the public market. Colleges and universities only provide a small proportion of the nation’s patents. In 2016, academic institutions only produced 6,639 of the 304,126 patents according to the National Science Board. A possible reason for this is that faculty are awarded tenure and promotion based on measures such as how much research money they bring in and how many papers they publish, not their numbers of patents or start-ups or the licensing revenue they earn. Obtaining a patent is a long process that can take seven years. It is easier for universities to calculate merit over papers instead of patents. Read More >>
Start-ups: The Founding Team Is a Real Magic Bullet
The majority of new ventures fail prematurely. A lot of this failure is due to a lack of collaboration within founding teams. Important, early decisions are prone to conflict. Examples of these decisions include funding, development, etc. Because tensions are so high, investors often look at the team-dynamic as much as the start-up product itself. Strong teams can overcome and navigate turbulence, leading them to success. Founders of start-ups are in a unique situation, as they can build and craft their whole team from the ground-up. Teams should be made of both unique skills, and people with interpersonal skills. The culture that the originating team sets usually lasts long after the staff rotates out. Read More >>
Your Work Friends and Enemies are Affecting your Performance
Conflict may appear to be two-sided, but this is not usually true. The basis of most conflict at work is tryadic: when there are three parties involved. The third party is often the key to relieving tension and restoring balance. When employees feel socially balanced at work, they tend to perform better. Researchers from Northwestern University, Harvard Business School, and University of California teamed up to discover how social triangles change over time. They ruled relationships into four categories: a friend of a friend is a friend, a friend of an enemy is an enemy, an enemy of an enemy is a friend, and an enemy of a friend is an enemy. If all four rules are satisfied in a tryad, the tryad is balanced. There are two possibilities for this, which are when all three people like each other, and when two friends have a mutual enemy. Balanced relationships are important because employees tend to make better and more profitable decisions than when they are in an unbalanced situation. Read More >>
Deciding How Much Equity to Give your Key Employees
The new trend within tech start-ups is giving offering potential talent equity shares. Giving worthy job candidates a share of equity could be the difference of them picking your company over someone else’s. This also motivates workers, and decreases employee turnover. Equity encourages employees to stay long-term, because they are motivated by the idea of the company enters the public stock-market, or if it is sold in the future. Equity acts as a foreign currency, and the amount depends on timing, need, and expertise. It is also very good for attracting potential advisors to the company. Advisors can triple the value of a company, so the equity would eventually pay for itself. Read More >>
What You can Learn from Being Asked to Resign
Being asked to resign can be an incredibly painful experience. However, dealing with this confrontation can lead to insight of how the company is doing, and what is going wrong. Many people asked to resign are caught off-guard, and receive criticism. This honest constructive criticism can lead to one’s future success. While alarming at the time, constructive criticism is a gift that allows one to listen to others’ concerns and re-evaluate one’s own actions. Listening and allowing oneself to be vulnerable will help one bloom into future jobs, or keep the ones they already. Read More >>
Why Your Next Brainstorm Should Begin with an Embarrassing Story
New research from the Kellogg school shows that embarrassment can be a gateway to creativity. It turns out that holding cringe-worthy anecdotes back creates an unintentional barrier of self-censorship. “When you have a brainstorming session, what you’re hoping is that people are putting out any idea, without regard to any judgment or evaluation,” says Leigh Thompson, a professor of management and organizations at Kellogg and author of Creativity Conspiracy: The New Rules of Breakthrough Collaboration. Sharing embarrassing stories is also a good way for groups to break the ice, as it creates a humorous space where people are allowed to feel vulnerable. This is opposed to traditional ice-breakers where people share their accomplishments. Adding this sense of pride inevitable turns ice-breakers into a competition. Bragging about one’s accomplishments may be a confidence boost, but it results in a hindering of innovative thinking. Instead of closing people off from each-other, reinforcing funny or embarrassing stories can lead to trust and better performance. Read More >>
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