My earlier post concerning the waning fortunes of Yahoo! and, to a lesser extent, Ebay, made me consider the nature of brand loyalty. I say this because, in seeing the Economist claim that “Yahoo! lives, but on the web’s equivalent of life support,” I felt deeply bothered. The more I thought about the article the more uneasy I became. As inconvenient and old as Yahoo! has become compared to Google and other nascent internet companies, I return to, I gravitate toward that cluttered homepage that said article unflatteringly describes as a “tawdry strip mall.”Yahoo! is special and important in a way that can never be replicated by any other internet company. It gave me my first experience with a search engine, my first glimpse of a website back in sweet 1997 when my dad brought home our first clunky PC with Windows 95 and spent hours roaming the World Wide Web. (more…)

The market is a tough place, even for the strongest of competitors. The rise and decline of companies tell us much about how leadership, innovation and long-term visions contribute to the survival of a venture. What factors make even the most promising of companies falter as they mature? What wise decisions allow other companies to remain leaders in their industry year after year? And what can their failures and successes tell us about how the industry is changing? 

A recent article in the Economist analyzes the “diverging fates” of three of the largest and oldest internet companies – Yahoo, Amazon and Ebay. 

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I don’t know if you managed to catch the recent article in The Atlantic called “Is Google Making You Stoopid?”. In it, the author spoke about how Google (and all modern media) is changing the way that we think. Rather than be the type of learners who pour through works with careful attention to detail and long periods of time spent on reflection, we are becoming skimmers and devoting less of our time to contemplation.

The article argued that the way our brain reads is a learned habit, as opposed to speaking which is a natural tendency. So, our learned habit is something influenced by the outside world but it is something that also influences how we see the outside world. Therefore, we no longer learn to read in a contemplative style and as such we don’t see the world in the same contemplative way. Rather than be driven by a contemplative reasoning, we are driven by an information overload by knowing a little about everything rather than everything about one thing.

So, you must know be wondering, why is she wasting my time with this article summary? (more…)

Entrepreneurship is living a few years of your life like most people won’t, so that you can spend the rest of your life like most people can’t - A student in Warren G. Tracy’s class

So, I read an article recently which stated that youth in South Africa fail to flood the market with new ideas. Instead they resort to running typical i.e. low-risk business.:

Thulani Timile, a consultant who runs SA Business Development and Management Consultancy, said the challenge facing young entrepreneurs was coming up with “out of the box” business ideas. (more…)

There are some things that I am simply ignorant to—baseball, tops the list. I don’t understand the allure of the game beyond the fun of stadium seating, pretzels and adult beverages. My last memory of a baseball game, a friend spilled a Coke all over the woman in front of us and her husband tried to pick a fight. I quietly slunk away to see what was going on by the food vendors. (more…)

So you have your great idea; you finally have people paying attention; you land the investor meeting and then what? How do you make the killer presentation- the one that lands you the money to make your dream a reality? One of the partners for the Week, kindly sent me an email recently and attached this paper: Startup Presentations for Angel/Seed Stage Investors and Partners, (startup-presentations-to-angel-seed-stage-investors-and-partners-2.pdf ) which explains how to do just that. (more…)

“Teenagers are hardwired differently, they want to make a difference and care about the world and their community. They have something unique to offer and they have it now,” said Dr. Susan L. Reid, author, entrepreneur, and business coach during a recent interview about her new book, Discovering Your Inner Samurai: The Entrepreneurial Woman’s Journey to Business Success. She explained that we, as teenagers and young adults, have a sense of ourselves as unique individuals– we are Millennials, a group of youth who value our uniqueness and ability to contribute to and fix the world.

Her book, which offers cogent and inspirational advice for women who are engaging in their first entrepreneurial adventure, is also applicable to youth. (more…)

Interested in Entrepreneurship? Like Making Movies?

Global Entrepreneurship Week is searching for filmmakers of all backgrounds to create an original 60-second video explaining “What it Means to be an Entrepreneur.”

Be creative:

Create an original 60 second short describing “What It Means to be an Entrepreneur” for Global Entrepreneurship Week. (more…)

When I was four years old, I picked flowers and watched Little Mermaid videos. Lucian Tarnowski, owner of Brave New Talent, sold apples from his family’s orchard, door to door, to little old ladies. Not only did he sell them, he jacked up the price, found himself driven by turning a profit, and earned the lovely moniker of “Moneyman” from his siblings.

As, he has grown, not much has changed. (more…)