The Tuesday Push is a crowd-sourced approach to PR with a little word-of-mouth marketing thrown in. It gives Irish businesses a push on the web and occasionally a little advice.
Image via sulla55@flickr
Cmypitch.ie is an online angel network designed to connect investors with startups looking for funding. As an entrepreneur you upload a pitch to describe your business and have it viewed by high net worth individuals looking to invest. The revenue stream fro cmypitch is straightforward – the entrepreneur puts their money where their mouth is, paying two hundred euros for the opportunity to pitch. (Correction from cmypitch: Uploading a pitch to the site is completely free, though there is a fee to pitch directly to investors at their live pitching events.). It’s a similar idea to Angel’s Den in the UK, which has proved itself as a vehicle to create companies.
From a brief demo of the site, the design is clear and uncluttered. Without actually paying to upload a pitch I can’t tell the sort of feedback you can get on a pitch. An ideal situation would be to get commentary on what areas of the pitch investors thought was strong or weak, or some sort of ratings metric across a few areas to determine what people thought of the idea.
The site has racked up a few partners from household names such as Bank of Scotland, Deloitte, and The Irish Times and some entrepreneur endorsement from Eddie Jordan. It looks like a solid enterprise but the proof of the pudding is in the eating – I’m looking forward to see what sort of businesses get funded, and how they fare.
Summary: A selection of industry leaders answer the question – Should I do an MBA, or should I start a business?
Photo courtesy of JustVodka@Flickr
Every once in a while I get the notion into my head that I’d like to do an MBA. I have a stack of GMAT study guides that I skim through, firing dusty synapses in the long-forgotten test-taking portions of my brain. I read through the theories, the course content lists, the testimonials from happy-looking people in suits and wonder if it’s really something for me. I left large companies for startups years ago and even in the toughest times have rarely looked back with regret. Is an MBA really something I want to devote my energy, money, and sanity to?
Then there’s the alternative: could I gain similar or better experience by jumping straight in and just starting something? An MBA is going to run upwards of €10,000 per year, what if I could take that money and start a software business, or try to take a product idea to market? One question remains – considering I have a list of potentially good ideas and the desire to work for myself “at some point” why haven’t I done it already? I’ve taken halfway-steps towards this sort of freedom by investing in a few Irish startups, but I still wonder why I haven’t fully immersed myself.
So which of these two paths is a recipe for success? I reckoned I could do worse than asking smart, experienced people that I admire what they thought, so I drafted an email and thought of some smart people who have inspired me recently. Here’s the list (In alphabetical order…):
Creator of Ruby on Rails, and partner at 37signals. One of the most outspoken programmers you’re likely to find.
It really depends on what you want to do. If you’re thinking about doing it on your own, I think an MBA is probably a waste of time. But if you want to work in a big corporation, then I’m sure that’ll look good on the resume. Only you will know whether you have that fire in the belly to chart your own waters. It’ll require more of you, but will probably be a lot more rewarding.
Also, you don’t have to spend that much money starting a new business these days. You could try the “My Own Business” for a year and see if there was any traction. If not, you can always fall back on the MBA backup plan.
The first question must be – why do you want to do either?
An MBA is great for developing and enhancing your overall knowlegde of business and in my opinion hugely beneficial to most of us. If you have technical background then learning about finance, accounting or strategy can be really helpful.
If you are thinking of starting a business then having an MBA might well help you in the longer term to grow the business.
Sometimes people feel that education can kill your desire to be self employed by highlighting too many risks when often it is about having massive self-belief and belief in your idea and just jumping in (with some homework done first I might add).
My view is why not do both? In essence the business will benefit if you have a broader understanding of the principles and your studies will benefit from having some real life experiences on which to hang your new learning.
Life is more then having and getting it is really about being and becoming. The real question is;
What, or more importantly, who do you want to be or become and will either or both help you get there?
If you’re ultimately interested in doing your own thing / starting your own business, self-education and moving forward with your small business idea is your best bet. The only advantage MBAs provide is a bigger hiring network within ~3 years of graduation, so if you’re not looking to take advantage of that, the time and opportunity costs of MBA programs are way too high.
This depends on what you want to do. If it’s to work for a established company, maybe the MBA is better. If you want to be an entrepreneur, be an entrepreneur.
Acting CEO of YouGetItback, finance director of Compliance and Risks Ltd, and MBA graduate. Pat has founded successful businesses such as Microtech Cleanroom Services and TICN (The investment club network).
Depending on your focus, this could be a very easy question to answer. An MBA won’t necessarially make you money.
Writer of expert career advice, and founder of three startups; most recently BrazenCareerist, a web service to help companies find candidates.
You can only evaluate the MBA when you evaluate what you will do with it when you’re done, and whether you needed the MBA to do that in the first place. Usually the answer is no to an MBA.
You can only evaluate doing the startup by evaluating the chance that it will meet your goals.
You don’t tell me about the startup or about your goals for doing a startup, bu you probalby know both and that’s what you should think about.
My instinct tells me keep your day job; try the startup at night until you get enough revenue to be profitable and then quit day job. Forget the MBA.
Definitely doing a startup. Here’s why: Business Schools are repositories of knowledge about what has worked in the past. If your life’s ambition is to manage a LOB (line of business) for a large company an MBA is relevant. But if you want to not spend your life working for someone else, that means starting your own business(es). Also, over the next few years it’s a safe bet that disruption and change are going to be the order of the day in the business world.
For existing businesses, this this is not good news. For startups, it’s opportunity time! Between the growing role startups play in society, the economy these past few years and major economic disruptions ongoing, there’s never been a better time to start a business.
The fact you’re asking the question leads me to believe that you haven’t recognised a real problem that people need resolved and you have the answer. So, in short, study for an MBA whilst you continue to earn money in full time employment.
It doesn’t take much to start a company if you do it whilst working for someone and getting others to help build a site in return for a contra deal. In my personal opinion, qualifications are over-rated.
I’d never hire someone based on a qualification – unless I was looking for someone to build me a semantic web based application and they had a degree in computer science *and* knew what the semantic web was AND were able to build it. That said, a good friend of mine is getting a lot out of his MBA. Hope that helps.
Thanks to all who responded, these are some fantastic answers that have given me a lot to think about. But what do you think?
Way back in ancient history, I reviewed Guy’s book Rules for Revolutionaries, a “manifesto for creating and marketing new products and services”. This review is his latest offering, a fantastic guide to any entrepreneurial offering.
“The Art of the Start” is a guide for anyone who wants to start… anything, presented as a list of lists. This list format is perfect for picking back through the book as a reference guide. One criticism I have heard of Mr Kawasaki is that he is a “miner of miners” in that he sifts through the distillations of others and distils them further, combining the result into a coherent whole. This could well be true; were it not then he may not have succeeded in writing one of the most complete and immediately useful guides I’ve read. Each chapter provides ample references on subjects covered to allow the reader to further research areas of interest or just get a different opinion.
In my previous review I clarified that I’m a big fan of Guy’s work, so I’m going to spare you my sycophantic blubbering and simply say that the writing style retains his characteristic humour while delivering a succinct yet informative payload. Here is a brief summation of the contents:
Causation – This section covers how to get the ball rolling; how to use inspiration to decide to create a product or provide a service which will make the world a better place. Once you have this initial idea you follow through with a basic mantra to remind you that you’re following the right path, and milestones which define your success or failure.
Articulation – This section covers positioning your product or service – essentially the answer to a potential client asking you “What do you do?”. Once you have the fundamental answer to this question, a chapter on pitching explains the best manner to deliver this information to your audience in a convincing manner, whether the audience is potential investors, partners, or customers. The final chapter in this section formalises the founder’s intentions with a killer business plan.
Activation – This section takes the formulated plans and lights the touchpaper. The chapter on Bootstrapping explains how to get useful moving on minimal resources. This section also covers how to hire the right kind of people, and how to get some much needed finance to grow the company.
Proliferation – The proliferation section is all about taking your seedling company and exploding; creating useful partnerships which provide mutual gain, branding your products or service in a manner which inspires evangelists to spread the word, and creating business leads and connections.
Obligation – This final chapter explains how to use success to make the world a better place.
My latest read from Joel Spolsky’s MBA reading list is “Rules for Revolutionaries” by Guy Kawasaki. Guy is founder and current CEO of garage.com, a firm that provides seed capital to technology startups. His pedigree is impressive – he was involved on the original team that developed the Macintosh, and was the Chief Evangelist of Apple.
I had stumbled across Guy’s weblog a few months ago and it immediately became one of my top five reads; Guy has a wealth of knowledge that he manages to convey succinctly in staccato bullet points and in a self-deprecating, humourous style that I wish I could emulate. Hagiography aside – Guy writes informative and entertaining books that richly deserve their place on an MBA reading list.
It is difficult to categorise “Rules for Revolutionaries” – the essential pigeonhole would be “Evangelism”, which I interpret as a mix of marketing, business strategy, and vision amalgamated into a driving force to turn your dreams into reality, your reality into products, and your products into customer magnets (to quote directly from the book sleeve). Kawasaki divides these goals into three main sections: “Create like a God”, “Command like a King”, and “Work like a slave”. Each section covers fundamental issues at each stage of bringing a product from imagination to cash cow.
This is the kind of book that I find far more useful then a dry academic tome in that each point is backed up with a real-world example I can relate to. Every section is peppered with interesting and relevant quotes from industry mavens, and finishes with a recommended reading list which would compose an MBA reading list on its own. Picking some points completely at random and out of context:
Ne Te Terant Molarii – This literally translates to “Don’t let the plodding millers grind you down”; Guy describes it simply as “Don’t let the Bozos grind you down”. The world is full of people who will shoot down an idea, tell you to quit, and naysay until they’re blue in the face. It takes temerity and indomitable spirit to be able to focus on your own vision with enthusiasm and prove them wrong.
Churn! – You may create a product for an initial purpose, but it might not be the one that you stick with. Continually soliciting (and listening to) customer feedback is the only way to ensure that the product you develop satisfies the needs of your current customers; churning back these new concepts into the initial design means you can capitalise on markets you hadn’t envisaged originally. Synonymous with the concept of Kaizen.
Avoid death magnets – Companies can try to follow paths which seem to be positive ways to drive the business, but are actually paths which lead to a deep pit full of faeces-covered punji stakes. Concepts such as planning on making a product which is not quite as bad as the competitions, religiously obeying a budget to the detriment of common sense, or relying on a brand name above any evidence that the product has quality. Conventional approaches lead to conventional results – more often than not this means failure.
In summation, this is one of the most enjoyable books I’ve read so far on the reading list. Above the excellent information that it imparts, it’s genuinely funny. As a result I’ve ordered two other of Guy’s books and at the tentative half-way stage through reading his latest book I can also recommend “The Art of the Start” (review pending…).
Techies like gadgets. For people primarially involved in developing back-end computer systems or networks this usually means the gadget which has the most features, and is technically superior to the competition. If the item in question requires a manual which would rend an industrial-strength paper shredder to sheets of twisted metal, or has an interface which loses to an Altair 8800 in a game of Gadget Top Trumps, then all the better.
This worldview is perfectly acceptable; techies like learning, and there’s a certain sense of achievement in getting your toaster to pick up satelite channels from Kyrgyzstan. This perception can sometimes lead to synapic connections which unfortunately don’t make sense. If I want something which has the most features, surely other people want the best technical solution too? So if I set up a business writing software that’s “better” then the competitions offering – has more features, is more flexible in terms of the install platform and system requirements, then surely I just have to present this idea to a large company and they’ll give me millions of dollars to spend on more gadgets?
Michael Cusumano’s excellent book “The business of software” comes with the tagline “What Every Manager, Programmer, and Entrepreneur Must Know to Thrive and Survive in Good Times and Bad”. If you can identify with any of the gross generalizations presented in the previous paragraphs, this is the tonic to shake out any lingering preconceptions.
Cusumano divides his time between advising various companies on their strategic direction, and lecturing in Strategic Management, product development, and entrepreneurship in MIT’s Sloan School of Management. His experience in the area is evident in a book which lives up to it’s tagline – If you are pursuing a career in technology, this should be compulsary reading.
The underlying theme of a company evaluation is Cusumano’s “8-point lens”. A company should have an equally strong showing in each of the areas identified in order to build a sustainable, profitable, long term business. The author then evaluates a half dozen companies under these criteria and points out critical events in the company history which lead to success or failure.
A Strong Management Team – Investors typically provide money for people, not groundbreaking ideas. Without an experienced management team, most companies are sunk before they begin.
An Attractive Market – The potential for a companies main product has to be large enough, growing fast enough, or be potentially profitable enough to warrant investment.
A Compelling product offering – The product or service should aimed at a particular type of customer. On the typical “MBA” chart of X = Value to customer and Y = uniqueness, you want to be at a point in the top right hand corner. (A famous animal trainer once spent 15 years training a camel to walk backwards – It had never been done! The first audience who were shown this amazing feat barely blinked. Who wants to see a camel walk backwards?!)
Customer interest – If need evidence that someone’s going to buy the product. Many startups develop a business plan which involves grabbing a tiny percentage of an enormous market; the usual outcome is that they grab nothing. You need letters of intent from actual interested customers that aren’t just a nebulous projection on a powerpoint presentation.
Credibility – Don’t leave me high, don’t leave me dry. Customers want assurances that your company isn’t going to explode, leaving them with an unsupported product that they can’t use. You need a list of customers who are using your product, a chain of partners and suppliers who can support your product if the worst should happen to your company. You may even have to give the thing away to get customers on your list. Cusumano intially recommends companies to focus on a niche market which doesn’t require longevity, and then gradually persue more long term strategies.
A sensible Business model – The dot com days are long gone. Investors have a stronger grip on their wallets. As above.
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