Capabilities required to be an entrepreneur

One of my classmates, Shobhit Chugh, has published an insightful post on the capabilities required to be an entrepreneur, as described by Clayton Christensen. In brief, they are:

• Operated in environments with high degrees of uncertainty.
• Developed plans to unearth seemingly unattainable knowledge
• Experimented and found unanticipated customers for a product or service.
• Placed bets based on theory and intuition, not necessarily detailed data.
• Resourcefully solved problems without spending much money.
• Built a management team from scratch - a team with skills matched to the task.
• Shown experience in fending off certain corporate processes and in harnessing or manipulating others, in order to get the right things done quickly.

Shobhit's post discusses whether consulting is useful preparation for going into startup.

Talking to people about the business.

Lunching with me can be an investment opportunity of sorts. ©

The psychological process of commitment is interesting. For me, it starts with a thought. I think it through a lot. I then come to a decision as to whether or not to commit. I will start talking about the commitment with people I know, to gather their views. When talking to them, I'll often tell people that it's just something I'm thinking about. In reality, I will be beavering away in the background to move it ahead. I'll tend to be far more committed than they know.

At the start of the year, I started publicly talking to people outside my social circles about my plan to intertwine starting a business with completing an MBA. The best part of talking to people has been hearing their interpretation of what they think my ideas are. Sometimes their interpretation is better. When I speak to people and they ask questions, I realise how much I have actually thought things through. I'm slogging away at writing a business plan at the moment, so I find these questions useful.

When I was at DAK in February, I even ran my thoughts past a few people there. These not only included students and admits, but also people ranging from those at the technology incubator (tied to Northwestern University) to Farley Center for Entrepreneurship. I left those conversations with two distinct impressions - (1) that entrepreneurship at Northwestern is not centered at Kellogg and (2) that there are people around the university that do have the expertise to help me take my ideas forward.

Since then, back in the UK I have been getting in touch with people who might be interested in partnering with me to build a prototype of the idea. Most of these people are friends from university, now bona fide software developers. I'd meet them for lunch, one day after the next. After about the third person, I got into the flow of giving a pitch. However, the sell has been a lot harder than I imagined. This is partly because everyone I speak to is in the UK and well, I'm leaving the UK for Kellogg in August. "Can I have a job in 2 years, when you finish?" said one. "I have a better idea... no I'm not telling you what it is" said another. Throwing in talk of a programming scholarship they could apply to at Northwestern has not enticed them either. Perhaps I need to improve my sales skills? As unlikely as it would seem, the person showing most enthusiasm is someone I met again at a house party - "yeah! re-igniting the face of news", he says.

While the business plan is a work in progress, I've carved out a small section from it as a slide deck to describe the concept. Hopefully, this will make it easier to convey to people what my thoughts are, as I start talking to more and more people about my business proposition.

Business startup ideas: the opportunity.

I'm flying over to America in the Fall to find out. ©

I believe one of the next big opportunities in entrepreneurship is in content. Of the five ideas I previously mentioned for starting a business, the two that I continue to investigate in 2009 revolve around content.

The Internet has decimated existing business models for making money out of content. In the past, content would be tied to physical goods. For example, movies would be tied to the limited copies of the DVD that were made. The consumer paid for the DVD and the physical production of that DVD with the content on it. With content becoming digitized, the cost of creating copies has become zero - it as is easy as copying a word document. How do you create revenue streams from this? The music industry has suffered and continues to suffer from the disruption. The movie industry will suffer as high speed broadband connections become more common place. The newspaper industry is suffering at the moment.

While taking naps away from MBA applications during the latter half of 2008, I developed five ideas by tiny amounts as inspiration came to me. I jotted my thoughts on a private wiki (a Google site). As 2009 dawned, and I got my free time back after the MBA application process, the ideas that I continued to investigate were the ones that related to content: #4, #5 (Sorry PA for a While, Ahembeea). Here is a recap of those two ideas:

• Product Placement: Video-on-demand is growing, not only through Tivo boxes, but through internet services such as Hulu. People don't want to watch adverts when using such services - with Tivo, you can skip straight through them. How might television advertising work in such an environment? One possibility is product placement - such as the American Idol idols drinking Coca Cola. This has largely been a niche area, but has potential for huge growth.
• A new model for news: It does not look like newspapers will survive in their current form. What kind of other things will replace them? Perhaps community blogs where people like you and me contribute? Or will it be philanthropy funded news, such as that from ProPublica? There is massive opportunity in this space.

With TV, the content is already of course "free". Supported mainly through advertising, the problem the Internet has created is that it has become possible to strip away the advertising and redistribute the content without adverts. Will it prove feasible for force consumers to watch advertising clips? With respect to newspapers, text based content is the easiest to copy. Why pay the cover charge of a newspaper? I believe the newspaper area in particular has great opportunity. There are plenty of open source tools for content management and manipulation. Though this low barrier to entry also means every person and their aunty is doing something in this space, I think the differentiator for those that are successful will be in execution and innovation.

Through 2009, as I have developed my thinking, I have spent some time reading around these ideas and posted on these topics on this very blog. I noted that television is currently a three way matchmaking business. Perhaps the future of television is in brand integrated TV shows? i.e. giving away the content because it is in actually marketing material. I also speculated on the newspapers of the future. Perhaps they will be free publications? Or written by bloggers? I found writing these blog posts to be very helpful – they helped clarify my thinking on these areas and forced me to form opinions.

As I continue to explore these areas of opportunity, I'll continue to write about them here. The trick will be to not give too much away ;-).

My previous posts on free content:

• Everything paid for to become free?
• Is it possible to make money from digital content?
• 8 ways to make digital content valuable

Business startup ideas: the short-list.

They say the best ideas are simple... ©

During the last 6 months of 2008, as I was working through the MBA application process, in my spare time I started scribbling down ideas which could be seeds from which I could draft business plans later. I ultimately came up with five ideas. All five were related to media, perhaps because I have always been interested in media.

The essence of those ideas follows. Can you guess which ones survived into 2009? I'll post the answer in a future post.

1. Digital TV Production: Many TV broadcasters, particularly smaller ones, still use physical tapes to record content - tapes that are passed from one department to another. If digital technology was used instead, content could be made easy to search through, store, manipulate and transfer. The opportunity in this idea is selling digital technology to broadcasters stuck in the analogue age.
2. Emails and Relationship Management: You want to be in regular personal touch with 300 people, but hand-cranking an email to each person requires immense effort. What I need is a mail-merge for email. Not just a mail-merge, but something that tracks previous correspondence and makes it really easy for each relationship interaction to be unique.
3. Open Source Film Making: Amateur videos on YouTube will never be able to compete with professional videos so long as one person – the person creating the YouTube video – is relied upon to possess all the skills necessary to a create video. We need a way to bring together people with specialist skills to work together to create the video. Something like BaseCamp, but for film-making; something to take video production from concept development/commissioning through scripting, casting, production (filming), post-production and eventual distribution.
4. Product Placement: Video-on-demand is growing, not only through Tivo boxes, but through internet services such as Hulu. People don't want to watch adverts when using such services - with Tivo, you can skip straight through them. How might television advertising work in such an environment? One possibility is product placement - such as the American Idol idols drinking Coca Cola. This has largely been a niche area, but has potential for huge growth.
5. A new model for news: It does not look like newspapers will survive in their current form. What kind of other things will replace them? Perhaps community blogs where people like you and me contribute? Or will it be philanthropy funded news, such as that from ProPublica? There is massive opportunity in this space.

Remember folks, ideas are worth nothing unless executed. They are just a multiplier. Execution is worth millions. More on that thought, here.