Co-founder of The Entrepreneurial Mind, serial entrepreneur and professor of entrepreneurship.
Author: Jeff Cornwall
Dr. Jeff Cornwall is the inaugural Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. Dr. Cornwall's current research and teaching interests include entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics.
Dr. Jeff Cornwall is the inaugural Jack C. Massey Chair in Entrepreneurship at Belmont University in Nashville, Tenn. Dr. Cornwall's current research and teaching interests include entrepreneurial finance and entrepreneurial ethics.
Once in a while lightening strikes a small business. That may be the case for a small putter manufacturer located right here in Franklin, Tennessee. It seems that Zack Johnson, winner of the Masters on Sunday, used a putter made by SeeMore Putter Co. From the Tennessean:
The four-person company based in Franklin received some major publicity thanks to Zach Johnson’s winning the Masters golf championship on Sunday in Augusta, Ga.
Johnson used a SeeMore putter to stiff-arm Tiger Woods and win the green jacket. Television commentators Nick Faldo and Jim Nantz constantly referred to Johnson’s superb putting, and CBS routinely showed close-ups of the putter.
“We probably got way more free publicity than we could ever pay in advertising,” said Jim Grundberg, managing director of SeeMore.
Grundberg said he was jumping around his Brentwood home with family Sunday during the action. Johnson’s playing partner and good friend, Vaughn Taylor, also was using a SeeMore putter, used by only a handful of PGA Tour players.
So an unlikely winner teams up with a small-time player in the golf equipment industry and both hit it big. Cool story!
SeeMore needs to carefully nurture this publicity. They need to leverage it to build momentum for their company. They cannot just rely on their fifteen minutes of fame. They have done a great first step at their website, which is already full of the big news for their little company.
On the flip side, they also need to be ready for a possible onslaught of demand. If they do not monitor and manage their growth carefully, their own success could sink them. They do not meet demand and have the systems in place to satisfy what can be a fickle market.
I hope Zack and SeeMore make the most of their success and that both are around for a long time!
A new report from the Angel Capital Association finds that angel investors are optimistic about the general climate for early stage investments.
In the Angel Group Confidence Report of North American angel group leaders, ACA found that angel groups forecast that the quantity and quality of entrepreneurial investment proposals will increase in 2007, that more than 80 percent of groups will continue investing in seed and early stage companies, that there is a strengthened opportunity for more positive exits, and more plans to co-invest with other sources of capital.
This follows a strong job report last week that included a big jump in self-employment. The entrepreneurial economy seems to be picking up steam….
We’ve been hearing all week to expect an increase in unemployment to 4.6%. Wrong! It actually dropped to 4.4%. And increased self-employment is part of this positive economic report.
There is a great article at Inc.com on what it will truly take to compete in the evolving global economy. And it will have an impact on businesses of all sizes, as this article so clearly demonstrates.
Thanks to Robert Hill (an MBA student at Vanderbilt) for passing this along.
Angels also have a lot of idle cash (see earlier post today on VCs) and their deal flow seems to reflect this. From the Center for Venture Research:
The angel investor market experienced steady growth in 2006, with total investments of $25.6 billion, an increase of 10.8 percent over 2005, according to the 2006 Angel Market Analysis released today by the Center for Venture Research at the University of New Hampshire.
On Friday, April 20, I would like to invite ANY person that wants to meet to come by our office in Raleigh, NC. You can have just an idea all the way to a well run business doing millions in revenue. It doesn’t matter. And all the typical venture capital BS that you may hear is removed – you won’t be screened out in advance, you don’t need to know someone to “get in” and there are no secret handshakes required. Everyone is welcome and I’ll plan to be in the office all day.
This was posted by Jason Caplain of Southern Capitol Ventures at the blog site TechJournal South.
I knew that VCs had a lot of extra cash these days, but this sounds like it is either desperation or an unprecedented PR stunt for a VC firm. Either way it seems to indicate what many of us have suspected — VCs have over-sold their funds.
Many observers have long claimed there is something special about Silicon Valley that promotes entrepreneurship. Are these claims true? Is Silicon Valley more entrepreneurial, and if so, is there a special “it” factor, or are the rates due to factors already known to produce entrepreneurs? A study released today by the Office of Advocacy of the U.S. Small Business Administration answers these questions by showing that while high, Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurship rates are not unique, although the factors that drive them may be. Entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley during the Boom and Bust, written by Dr. Robert Fairlie of the University of California Santa Cruz with funding from the Office of Advocacy, examines the reasons for the rates of entrepreneurship in the dot com boom and post-boom periods.
The study found that Silicon Valley’s entrepreneurship rate, as measured by the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity, was consistently higher than the national rate during the dot com boom of the late 1990s. However, several other Metropolitan Statistical Areas had higher rates of entrepreneurship during the same period.
The Silicon Valley rate rose in the post-boom period, suggesting that the tight labor market, high wages, and available stock options suppressed entrepreneurship. After controlling for factors such as education and native/non-native birth, the Silicon Valley rate remained high, lending credence to the idea that Silicon Valley has a special, unmeasured factor that drives entrepreneurship.
My best guess is that there was a convergence of money and talent that happened at just the right time. Just like any success story, there may have been more than a little luck involved — in fact, luck may be the mysterious “it” factor in the Silicon Valley story.
