Business & Finance – Page 3

Building a farm, planting a tree.

You can teach someone how to pick an apple from a tree or you can teach someone how to plant an apple tree.

I planted an apple tree about 3 years ago, when I started a college marketing company called Runaway Productions. Although my personal and direct involvement was extensive, educational and rewarding, the greatest reward came thereafter. I had recent conversations with its new owners, and they are now generating more revenue, breaking new ground, and expanding the original business model.

It may be easy to build something for the short term and for self serving purposes. That in itself may be rewarding. But when you can build something and watch it grow even after you’ve left, you can really experience a much deeper sense of gratification and accomplishment.

Try it. What’s the worst that can happen?

Well we’re living here in Allentown

As I was driving home the other night from Vermont, I was listening to some Billy Joel. The song Allentown came on, and I could not help but to think how disappointingly appropriate the song is for the current times. Today was a mess.

Well we’re living here in…the United States…

Well we’re living here in Allentown
And they’re closing all the factories down
Out in Bethlehem they’re killing time
Filling out forms
Standing in line.

Well our fathers fought the Second World War
Spent their weekends on the Jersey Shore
Met our mothers at the USO
Asked them to dance
Danced with them slow
And we’re living here in Allentown.

But the restlessness was handed down
And it’s getting very hard to staaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
aaaaaaah aaahhhhh ooooooooh ooooooh ohhhhhhh.

Well we’re waiting here in Allentown
For the Pennsylvania we never found
For the promises our teachers gave
If we worked hard
If we behaved.

So the graduations hang on the wall
But they never really helped us at all
No they never taught us what was real
Iron and coke,
Chromium steel.

And we’re waiting here in Allentown.
But they’ve taken all the coal from the ground
And the union people crawled awaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaay
aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah aaaaaaaaaaah aaaaaah.

Every child had a pretty good shot
To get at least as far as their old man got.
If something happened on the way to that place
They threw an American flag in our faaaaaaaace, oh oh oh.

Well I’m living here in Allentown
And it’s hard to keep a good man down.
But I won’t be getting up todaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaayyyyyyyy
aaaaaaaaaaah aaaaaaaaaaah aaaaaaaaah.

GUITAR SOLO

aaaaaaah aaaaaaah aaaaaaah oh oh oh.

And it’s getting very hard to staaaaaaaaaaaaaay.

And we’re living here in Allentown.

Free Market Economy

Not in one anymore.

Consider this: This is the first time in my lifetime, as well as the lifetimes of everyone in my generation, that we are experiencing something very, very BIG (financially)…or as Warren Buffet put it…

“We are facing financial Pearl Harbor”

The real effects or magnitude of this situation are still incomprehensible to me.

Once this bailout officially goes through, which it will, the financial industry will never be the same. The private sector will never truly be private (at least not for a while), and a socialist economy will begin to take shape.

Individuals with real ingenuity and innovation in the financial markets, along with strong ethical and moral values will spark new oppurtunities and blaze a path that will hopefully bring us back to that free market.

These heroes will most likely come from my generation, and hopefully, they will not succumb to exploitation tactics in search of quick riches.

I hope those heroes come sooner, and I hope those heroes make their way to leadership positions within our government.

I was curious to see what the markets looked like from the year I was born (1985) until today. Below is a snapshot that displays General Motors, S&P 500, Nasdaq, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average from 1999-present day.

No analysis here. Too busy contemplating the future.

Something Called Validation – TheCampusAtlas.com

Two years ago I co-founded a website specifically designed for college students. The site:

(Check out my site before continuing to read the rest of the post…or look below. You will understand why)

Today, I see the following article in :

2008 Finalists: America’s Best Young Entrepreneurs

CampusLIVE

Jeff Cassidy, 23; Boris Revsin, 22; Jared Stenquist, 23
www.campuslive.com
Amherst, Mass.

Will college students use a Web site devoted to helping them find campus services and local businesses? CampusLIVE cofounder Jared Stenquist thinks so. About a year and a half ago, the self-taught Web developer started the site as a hobby in his University of Massachusetts Amherst dorm room. When advertisers started to contact him, he took a leave of absence to develop the business.

The site can now be customized for 18 campuses around the country, including the University of Vermont, University of Connecticut, and George Mason University. Stenquist, who isn’t planning on going back to school, says the business, which employs five full-timers as well as interns, had just over $100,000 in revenues in 2007 and is negotiating a $1.25 million seed round with a group of angel investors. He expects it to be profitable by January.

Besides the fact that their site looks exactly like TheCampusAtlas, and besides the fact that they started after TheCampusAtlas did, the fact that BusinessWeek considers the idea worthy, is validation.

Validation that our insight into a market need actually existed, and validation that the need could be executed in a successful manner.

While I congratulate the Campus Live team, I also congratulate the other founders of The Campus Atlas.

Stay tuned for the future of The Campus Atlas.

America’s Management Team

When the media covers a presidency, they constantly refer to the phrase “The (insert president’s name here) administration”. A phrase that is reflective of a group of people that form consensus, make decisions, and ultimately run our country. They are America’s Management Team.

When American citizens choose their next President and Vice President, why are they only presented with two teams, of two individuals (although, in reality there are actually more options)? As the world continues down this road of globalization, there are many more factors that come in to play. How can two individuals posses the mental capacity and expertise to address all of the different domestic and global challenges? The short answer is, they cannot, thus appointing others to their cabinet and creating new appointments as needed.

Why can’t the presidential candidate declare the following appointments (or at least a select few..one or two even) pre-election day?

Vice President
Secretary of Agriculture
Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Defense
Secretary of Education
Secretary of Energy
Secretary of Health and Human Services
Secretary of Homeland Security
Secretary of Housing and Urban Development
Secretary of Interior
Secretary of Labor
Secretary of State
Secretary of Transportation
Secretary of Treasury
Secretary of Veterans Affairs
Attorney General

Granted, disclosing all of the appointments may be a bit much. And maybe their can be a different approach that presents more options or more insight. Even so, in today’s world I would be thoroughly interested to see who would take up the following positions pre-election:

Secretary of Commerce
Secretary of Defense
Secretary of Education
Secretary of Energy

After all, aren’t we voting on the people who will run our country for the next four years? America’s Management Team?

Just a thought.

New Ideas – Y Combinator

Startup Ideas We’d Like to Fund
Paul Graham
July 2008

When we read Y Combinator applications there are always ideas we’re hoping to see. In the past we’ve never said publicly what they are. If we say we’re looking for x, we’ll get applications proposing x, certainly. But then it actually becomes harder to judge them: is this group proposing x because they were already thinking about it, or because they know that’s what we want to hear?

We don’t like to sit on these ideas, though, because we really want people to work on them. So we’re trying something new: we’re going to list some of the ideas we’ve been waiting to see, but only describe them in general terms. It may be that recipes for ideas are the most useful form anyway, because imaginative people will take them in directions we didn’t anticipate.

Please don’t feel that if you want to apply to Y Combinator, you have to work on one of these types of ideas. If we’ve learned nothing else from doing YC, it’s how little we know. Many of the best startups we’ve funded, like Loopt, proposed things we’d never considered.

GREAT LIST. GREAT IDEAS.

http://ycombinator.com/ideas.html

The International Game

Who is winning? And at what sports?

I’m not speaking in literal terms, but a recent post by Andrew Weissman really forces us to look at the future of business. Business creation, sustainability, and innovation.

Six sigma worked pretty well for GE. Google’s 70/20/10 rule seems likes its doing just fine. What new business strategies will emerge….and where?

The Stockdale Paradox

“Retain faith that you will prevail in the end, regardless of the difficulties.

AND at the same time

Confront the most brutal facts of your current reality, whatever they might be.”

-Jim Collins, Good to Great

Let us try and apply this to our own lives. What could possibly be the result?