My junior year in high school will come to an end in eight days!
Here’s a real brief post announcing my summer plans:
During half the month of June, I will be interning at the Founders Fund in San Francisco. If you live in Silicon Valley and want to meet up please contact me!
For three weeks in July I will be hanging out in Aspen, Colorado with my family and a couple of friends.
Finally, in August I will visit Hawaii for the first time.
Along with those travel plans I will be: hanging out with friends, working on a few business projects, playing a ton of tennis, studying for the SAT, and relaxing.
I was pretty disappointed with the results of the first project. To read the assignment, check out the post written a couple weeks ago.
A few teams dropped out and did not complete the project. One very noticeable, constant problem was that students were afraid to execute. Ideas are cheap… implementation is not! The people that execute and actually make things happen are the ones who go far in the world.
Here are what the teams did:
1) bought a pack of gum with their $5 and resold each piece
2) sewed/made and sold socks.
3) sold personalized business cards
4) contacted the Astros foundation for two autographed baseballs to resell at a little league baseball game
These teams did not move beyond the standard response and challenge traditional assumptions. I was hoping the teams would realize that the $5 was simply an unneeded resource. Focusing on the money frames the problem too lightly.
The most common lesson learned was that marketing is extremely important. In order to sell a product, you need people not only present but also aware of what you are offering.
Team 4 made the most money. All of the money was donated to the Astros Foundation.
Founders of start-ups and the venture capitalists who finance them have two ways to get their money out of the company: sell it to another company or sell shares to the public.
The market for initial public offerings has dried up and companies are not being very acquisitive these days. In the first three months of 2009, only 56 companies were sold, half the number of a year ago, and none went public.
What do we need to do to make this happen? How can we make investing in private companies easier?
First off, the accredited investor law is whacko – there has been a sudden loss of employment and salary cuts have occurred sharply. The government needs to take a look at this law and adjust it. The changing of this law will improve the small business (and local) communities.
The SEC should do a better job at policing bad/unethical companies…they should not prevent people from investment opportunities. Having the mindset of only letting “rich” people invest is un-American.
The American investor has been beat up by the stock market and small businesses are coughing up blood. America is a capitalist country – it is non-seneschal to not be able to invest in small companies.
There should be a way to better empower small businesses and to better the capital for small businesses. By doing so, this could create a larger (local) community around such small businesses.
The way most are currently conducting business is not good – there is panic, fear, and lack of confidence.
I agree with this comment below. User “NYCStartupfiend” left this comment on Fred Wilson’s blog. He said this market is…:
Incredibly badly needed. Many entrepreneurs who have already built reasonably successful companies, but have not yet had any liquidity (read: money in their pocket) are likely to become better entrepreneurs after they sell some stock. With the “putting food on the table”, or more likely, putting the kids through college, risk gone, they be psychologically freed to think more boldly and clearly about their strategy. For the investors, employees, and the entrepreneur herself, that might well be one of the most critical levers in creating a massive return instead of a middling one.
What are your thoughts? How can we make this happen? What are current capital raising restrictions that exist which harm small business? Please use the comments to discuss / brainstorm.
Last week Brad Cohen spoke to a large group of teenagers in Houston to stress the power of one.
Brad is an award-winning teacher and author who has severe Tourette syndrome. During his childhood, he was accused of being a troublemaker in school and was punished by his teachers for the tics and noises caused by his Tourette syndrome.
After graduating from college, Brad decided to “become the teacher that he never had”. 24 elementary schools rejected him from a teaching job. Can you imagine getting rejected 24 times from your dream job? After being told several times your dream could not come true? After the 25th interview, he was hired at Mountain View Elementary School in Cobb County, Georgia. As a new teacher, he was named Georgia’s First Class Teacher of the Year.
