Tech Trends

I’m not a big fan of lists, but here are a couple that you might want to pay attention to from Venture Beat. Five Overhyped Technology Trends and Five Trends You Should Pay Attention to, both for 2011.

Keeping the Start Up Alive Inside

Take a look at the article from the NY Times, How to Shape the DNA of a Young Company. It is an “interview with Jeremy Allaire, chairman and chief executive of Brightcove, an online video platform for Web sites, and was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.”

From the article:

Q. How has the culture evolved as your company has grown? How do you maintain that original DNA, as you call it?

A. It’s a huge challenge. One point is that you always need to have everyone feel like they’re on some broader mission. In the early stages, the mission is: Are we going to survive? Is there a product? Does it work? Is anyone going to want it? Is there a market? They’re like existential questions for a business, but I think those core mission tenets remain important through that growth stage. It’s something that people can attach themselves to, so people aren’t just coming into a job. So I’ve tried to really provide that narrative over and over, even as the milestones just keep changing.
The other thing is to hold onto that feeling of being a start-up, and it actually relates very deeply to how you go to the next phase of growth. Companies that figure out how to really become significant in scale reinvent themselves and create completely new things. Just as an example, a little over a year ago, we created a start-up inside the company to create new products. That was so galvanizing and so energizing, and it kind of cascaded across the company. People were saying, “This isn’t the kind of same old, same old — we’re reinventing ourselves.”

Good Days Ahead?

I attended today the Centerstate CEO’s (Corporation for Economic Opportunity) Economic Forecast Luncheon, with the keynote speaker being noted economist Hugh Johnson, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer of Hugh Johnson Advisors. It was a very interesting and entertaining presentation, which included a historical comparison to the banking crisis of 1907. In between a couple of very interesting comments on the Fed, he told the group the following:

· The conditions in the economy that accompany a recovery are all in place
· Leading indicators for the economy are rising. We are early in the economic recovery which should continue through 2012.
· By 2012, the economy should recover 7.0 million of the 8.3 million jobs lost in the recession.
· Short term interest rates will start to rise late in 2011
· Stock prices should rise 7.8 percent annually for the next two years
· While we are in a recovery mode, the recovery will be anemic by post-war standards as a result of the drag caused by real estate and the housing situation

Small Ideas

Get yourself a cup of coffee, settle back in a comfortable chair, and enjoy 15 minutes with Allen Kupetz. Allen’s outstanding presentation took place at the recent TEDxOrlando conference and it considers things such as purple catsup, the Segway, and the interesting notion of The Small Idea.

Learning from Six Companies That Didn't Make It

In business schools, we love to talk about the successes. Nothing like talking about Starbucks, Zappos, Five Guys, Amazon and many of the other startups that became the big guys. And while I have no problem discussing these companies, I think it’s important that we also talk about those that didn’t make it. The successes are certainly what we want our students to aspire toward (and perhaps give a nice gift back to the school that made it all possible), but it’s also important to take a look at those businesses that didn’t make it, and learn from them as well. Often times those that failed to make it, if we listen carefully, have more to tell us.
To that end, take a look at the article from the NY Times, How Six Companies Failed to Survive 2010 by Eileen Zimmerman.

Twitter and the NFL

Ever since we used to live out west, I’ve been a Denver Bronco’s fan. Yes, they were an absolute mess last year(there is a lesson for all us to heed in that mess dealing with hiring), but I thought the article in today’s Denver Post on John Elway, the NFL and Twitter was interesting.

From the article:

"It was important to us to reach our fans directly and in the most personal way, and it was important to restore some of the credibility in our organization that might have been lost in a challenging season. We owe that to our fans."

VC's and the Choices That They Make

Not the first time I’ve run across an article on how VC’s make their investment decisions, but given the amount of time that we spend talking about institutional investors, it makes sense to take another look at this topic. So here is the SF Chronicle article, How Venture Capitalists Make Investment Choices by Ben McClure.

From the article:

With mature companies, the process of establishing value and investability is fairly straightforward. Established companies produce sales, profits and cash flow that can be used to arrive at a fairly reliable measure of value. With early-stage ventures, however, VCs have to put much more effort into getting inside the business and the opportunity.
Here are some of their key considerations:

1. Management
2. Size of the Market
3. Great Product with Competitive Edge
4. Awareness of Risks