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 >>
Category Archives: Start Ups
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 >>
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 >>
How to incorporate early-stage brand management into startup plans.
Roese, a professor of marketing at the Kellogg School who studies the psychology of judgment and decision-making claims that as a company develops its branding they make a transition from purely functional aspects of the product and service to the psychological side, that is critical for the creation of a long sustaining brand. Roese suggests 3 methods that the entrepreneurs can adapt in order to include early-stage branding into their startup plans.
- Define the personality of your brand i.e how it would behave if it was a person and this helps the company to have a vision and set up the guidelines for future growth.
- Develop a brand design Plan, Entrepreneurs will have to find the right balance between specificity and abstraction while defining their branding elements, so that there will be room for improvement keeping the same general theme.
- Having a well-defined brand, This makes the brand easily identifiable and ensures that the customers are familiar with your company even as you scale into new markets. Read More>>
Friction is essential!
“The lion that is desperate for the meal is going to be a lot more focused and smarter than the one that isn’t worried,” says Gary Hirshberg, founder of Stonyfield Farm. The above statement is a counter-argument to the advantages of the services offered by Epic Entrepreneur House in San Diego, At Epic we can see aspiring entrepreneurs working on ideas that could disrupt industries without being distracted. Here dry-erase boards line all the walls of the house and also an in house chef prepares all the meals. The prearranged social events make it possible that the friends of all those in EPIC visit them regularly. The dangerous road that was once walked alone by founders many years ago is now completely paved and lit up, this includes outsourcing of various supplementary tasks easier and with websites providing info on almost everything an entrepreneur needs such as how to pitch, what to wear and how to find VC’s makes it possible that one can start a bussiness all by himself. However, This is not welcomed by many experienced startup founders. Read More>>
the reason why Hypersonic pitch day is so exciting.
The pitch was held at Doolittle Institute in Niceville, Florida on November 7th,2019. Over 9 startups pitched their products on Hypersonic Flight such as Mach 5 plus capabilities, These included small propulsion units to composite materials that are capable of withstanding very high temperatures and speed. The reason the pitch is so exciting is not just the same day contract of $750,000 that will be awarded to the winner of the pitch by the Airforce but also the opportunity presented by Airforce to the company to partner on the current up-gradation project of their warfighters such as F-35 with Hypersonic grade weapons. The pitch day winner will support the two major Air Force boost-glide hypersonic prototype efforts now underway: the Hypersonic Conventional Strike Weapon and the Air-Launched Rapid Response Weapon (AARW). Read More>>
When to call it quits on a business venture?
No one wants to be a quitter, But there comes a point when the founders are struggling with their startup and have to make the big decision in order to keep their reputation and sanity intact. The process of shutting down a startup is always a messy affair because it involves burning down customers,employes and investors. However, there are other ways an entrepreneur can strategically shutdown the company and bounce back from the failure. The key is to know when to give up,Although failure is a slow process and there is no way to measure how well a startup is doing, one should know that when the startup is moving sideways it is time to reflect on the direction the company is heading. It overwhelms any founder when they have to shut down their venture because they do not want let others down and future job prospects is another factor that makes this whole process even harder.Read More>>
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