OK, So We Aren’t Exactly Perfect…

Melissa Chang has an amusing post about the less than desirable personality traits — paranoid, obsessive, and delusional, just to name a few — that many entrepreneurs exhibit from time to time (or for some, all the time).

While the most important trait of an entrepreneur must be his or her flexibility and adaptability, it’s also true that people who found start-ups often have some less-than-stellar qualities that help them be successful in their ventures.
Here’s a look at 10 qualities that some entrepreneurs share that may help them be great at starting a company, but not so great at existing in normal society.

Social Entrepreneur versus Non-profit

Sam Davidson offered a good distinction at his blog between the traditional non-profit and the emerging social ventures that do not choose to take the non-profit route.

For the first time, students can focus on what it means to build a business that is focused on multiple bottom lines, focusing on serving the community while running their operation. No longer are students forced to choose between operating a greedy business or working for an altruistic nonprofit. Now, students can live and work in that lovely overlapping Venn diagram of a place where their need to make a living can coincide and address the largest needs of the world.

Important Trends to Watch

The cover article for Entrepreneur magazine this month looks at the “people, trends and events that matter most for your business.” They call them “the influencers.”
In the hustle and bustle of starting a growing a business we can lose sight of the big picture. The trends and changes that created the opportunity for the business in the first place can just as quickly take away our economic advantage.
While I am not sure I agree with all of their choices for the top 25, it is worth a read and some careful reflection. Opportunities in the dynamic world in which we live can be quite fleeting.

Angels Not Quite as Gloomy

The Angel Capital Association reports on their latest survey of angel investor attitudes. It seems that angels are not quite as gloomy as their VC cousins (see my post on their mood from last week).

Angel group leaders expressed optimism about the climate for investments in early-stage businesses in 2008 in a recent survey by the Angel Capital Association (ACA). This optimism comes despite recent news about the slowdown of the US economy and follows a year in which investment activity stayed level with 2006.

You can read a summary of their report here and find the summary statistics from this survey here.

Time to Vote Again!

Three of the eight finalists in this month’s ideablob competition for the best idea are Belmont students offering up social ventures. The winner will receive $10,000 from Avanta to help develop their venture.
Here are Belmont’s three finalists (in alphabetical order of the student’s name):
Noah Curran’s Turning Actions into Good (winner of “Sprint 1”) is a web-based non-profit charity which revolves around the kindness of strangers. The concept allows anyone to participate in a charity, regardless of financial status. Here is how the process works: Become a free member. Print off pre-made TAG-cards. Commit an act of kindness. Give the person a TAG-card which asks the stranger to do another act of kindness and go to the website to report about the deed that was done to them. After submitted, viewers can vote for the most touching act of the month. The leading vote getter would receive a cash prize.
Janice Dotti (winner of “Sprint 1”) wants to create a completely fair trade, completely organic coffeehouse that sponsors social justice causes while taking care with the environment. In addition to serving fair trade coffee, she will also only use fair trade sugar, tea, and cocoa as we educate our consumers on how their buying habits affect the working poor in developing countries. Every month, this coffeehouse would sponsor a social justice cause–promoting awareness to customers about worldwide issues of injustice. This coffeehouse will also have free wifi, live music, local art–all with a community emphasis.
Finally, Megan Lopez (winner of “Sprint 3”) presents an idea to create an informational website about how to raise your child naturally. From recipes to exercise programs to do with your children. Childhood obesity is a growing epidemic in our country today. We need to instill habits in our children starting at birth, so they can maintain and carry them through for the rest of their lives. Organic Baby will be a tool for parents to use as a community blog, buy organic clothing and bedding merchandise, research the benefits of healthy organic foods, etc. She would later like to own her own baby organic clothing line.
Please go to ideablob and vote for our three finalists in this month’s best idea contest! You can vote for more than one idea, but you can only vote for each idea one time.

Where Did the Year Go?

Entrepreneurship Week is almost here again. It starts on Saturday. Where did the year go?
Like last year, I look at this week with mixed emotions. While I am pleased at the attention it draws to entrepreneurs in our economy, it saddens me that we relegate entrepreneurs to simply one week. After all, entrepreneurship is over 50% of the economy.
Having only our own week puts entrepreneurship right there in the mix with National Fresh Squeezed Juice Week, National Pancake Week, National Cleaning Week, National Condom Week (I am not making these up…), National Headache Awareness Week, National Fig Week, National Backyard Games Week, National Business Etiquette Week, Improve Your Home Office Week, National Pollinators Week, and National Chestnut Week.
Why not give us a whole month? That would at least put us up there with National Hot Tea Month, National Bird Feeding Month, National Umbrella Month, Prune Breakfast Month, National Stamp Collecting Month, National Sweet Potato Month, National Kite Month, National Sweet Vidalia Month, National Bikini Month, National Library Lovers Month, National Noodle Month, National Asparagus Month, Country Music Month, National Baked Bean Month, National Horseradish Month, and last but not least, National Pomegranate Month.
Any way….Happy Entrepreneurship Week!

VCs are also Feeling Gloomy

To those of you who deal regularly with venture capitalists you probably think this is the start of a bad joke. How do you tell when a VC is feeling pessimistic? Well, the University of San Francisco has created an index to measure the mood of VCs — and as dour as they usually seem, their confidence plummeted during the last quarter of 2007. (I am a horrible joke teller, so if you have a punch line to offer for my hypothetical joke, please pass it along!)
“The Q4 Silicon Valley survey indicated a significant decrease in Bay Area VC confidence in the high growth entrepreneurial environment to its lowest reading in 4 years,” says Mark Cannice of USF.
And the mood overseas is not much better.
“The China Q4 survey indicated a modest decrease in China VC confidence in the high growth entrepreneurial environment. This decrease was primarily attributed to a changing regulatory environment and inflated valuations.”
Here is a graph that displays this sudden drop in the confidence of VCs.
vc confidence.gif
So what does this mean?
– VCs will likely now look at each possible deal with even more scrutiny. They will become even more diligent in reviewing each deal and will likely be quicker to throw deals that give them any heartburn out the door.
– They will also in all probability offer less favorable terms to protect their returns. The assumptions they use to model growth will become much more cautious, leading to much lower valuations.
– And they will be quicker to pull the trigger on replacing management if the entrepreneur starts to falter.

Social Entrepreneurship Gaining Steam in Academia

Dean Pat Raines writes about the growth in interest in social entrepreneurship within academia over at Belmont’s blog Strictly Business. Speaking about our own program that launches next fall:

Next fall, Belmont University will begin offering a major in Social Entrepreneurship. The fundamental idea is to provide a practical academic curriculum to serve the fastest-growing segment of society–the millions of individuals that are creating a society of citizen change agents.

A Winning Formula

Bill Hobbs sent along a great story that illustrates one of the most important lessons an aspiring entrepreneur can learn. It is the importance of finding a business that satisfies both the entrepreneur’s needs with a true market need that is backed up by hard data.
From Latina Lista:

Carrie Ferguson Weir spent all of her professional life asking the hard questions. As a daily newspaper journalist, this Cuban-American Latina was accustomed to asking the kinds of questions that force honest responses.
However, it wasn’t until she had her own daughter and found herself wrestling with the age-old “working mother dilemma” of either returning to work after maternity leave or being a stay-at-home mom that Carrie found herself on the receiving end of her own interrogation.
What could she do that would give her the freedom to be a stay-at-home mom and a successful businesswoman?
…”The idea came as a lightening bolt out of nowhere,” Carrie said. “I believe in those messages. The research that followed backed up the hunch.”
What Carrie had noticed was a gap in the baby t-shirt business when it came to exhibiting proud Latino roots.