Table of Contents

What you should know before beginning

• Steve Jobs' Advice for Entrepreneurs: Love what you're doing, or you'll give up.
• Start with Why
• Entrepreneurship needs to be boring
• External Factors
  • Entrepreneurial Explosion
  • Steve Blank on Tech Bubbles

Start with customer acquisition

• 37Signals' Jason Fried: The Drug-Dealing Model of Online Business (Freemium vs Advertising)
• How do you get 50,000 followers on Tumblr?

Finding and assessing ideas

• Recipes for good ideas
  • Forget Customer Pain. Find Arbitrages.
  • Who's losing their job over this?
  • Proprietary Relationships = High Margin Business
  • How whole industries disappear
• Sources of inspiration
  • Where did your big idea come from? (Best answer: Customers)
  • Do the impossible
  • The workaround
  • Dinner with 12 strangers
  • The second gold rush
  • Don't think Big. Think Big and Fast.
• Assessing ideas
  • Just three questions
  • The beginning is different from the middle
• Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning:
  • Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning
  • The problem with Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
  • The opportunity in Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning
  • Segmentation, Targeting, and Positioning in online social networks
  • Google's approach to STPing in online social networks
• Interesting ideas / opportunities:
  • Kill Hollywood; Blackout
  • Kenyan farmer lauds internet as saviour of potato crop. (The opportunities of Internet penetration in the third world.)
  • Amazon's Silk disrupts the microprocessor race (... moving processing to the cloud)
  • Better than Facebook?
  • The real time web
  • Journalism for hire
  • The trend of remote, micro work
  • The last of the moguls
  • Getting closer to the semantic web
  • Turning online waste into gold
  • Two sided markets
  • Turning private to public

The Pilot Business

• Pivoting and persistance
  • Starting a company is like playing the slot machine
  • What are you solving for?
  • Jump off a cliff and assemble an airplane on the way down
  • What success looks like
  • Just when you thought nothing could stop you
  • MacBook Air: Apple persisted while others quitted
• Measuring progress
  • Seth Godin on analyzing web businesses
  • Metrics on app downloads vs usage
  • Dave McClure's Startup Metrics For Pirates.
• Pricing:
  • How the movie industry uses disruptive technologies to charge you whatever you'll pay
  • How you're supposed to calculate price of pineapples
  • Pineapples make variable pricing real
• 8 lessons from starting a company at Kellogg
  • 5,000 Hours Later (Part 1 of 4)
  • 5,000 Hours Later (Part 2 of 4)
  • 5,000 Hours Later (Part 3 of 4)
  • 5,000 Hours Later (Part 4 of 4)

Scaling The Business

• Building a next generation, cost-efficient enterprise
• What customers are coming to expect (... great customer service).
• People Management
  • Red, Orange and Green Apples. (People management)
  • Arrive in a limousine with six assistants

At Maturity

• Avoiding the end

Investors

• Who's your VC?
• The only thing that matters to investors
• Analysis of Appmkr's $1M seed round raise
• The gentle ways in which investors turn startups away

Attitude

• Forget failure. Just do it.
• Time sensitivity
• Never tell me the odds
• His finest hour
• Eric Lefkofsky's Three Quotes
• Light up the darkness
• The Marshmallow Test
• The Crazy Ones

Logistical Issues

• US Immigration Options for Entrepreneurs
• An introduction to stock and options
• Startup Communities:
  • London
  • Chicago (1871)
  • Entrepreneurship at Northwestern: Fad or Fixture?