Zach Shubkagel - Willoughby Design

Zach Shubkagel came into the Foundation today. He is a designer at a local company, Willoughby Design that was established 30 years ago and provide strategic branding to a variety of clients.Zach talked us through the design process, showed us some previous projects and answered all questions through at him extremely well.

Some of the topics and advice I took from the session was:

Get to know customers, learn about the in’s and outs, research properly. Visit their place of work. (typically 1-4 weeks) KNOW YOUR CUSTOMER!

Typical example turnaround : 2 year contracted single project, $250K.

“Something deeper…” the best clients are those that have an appreciation for design. $50 logos are readily available, if thats what they want let them go for that. If they want something different, ‘personalised’ they are the good clients to have.

Franziska Conrad’s host comapny will be Willoughby Design. Check out her blog here.

ownyourventure.com

A great little tool:-

“The equity simulator makes understanding the impact of raising money for an early stage venture transparent and easy to grasp.

It is intended to take some of the confusion out of raising angel or venture money. The audience for this tool is broad, but we hope it will find its way into the hands of founders in particular, those who are just beginning to make decisions about how to finance their companies — simplifying the process so that they can focus on their big idea.” Check it out.

(Copy from: www.ownyourventure.com)

Highs and Lows of the Cloud

A friend forwarded me this link he came across, its a great little article on ‘Economist.com‘ on cloud computing and its potential future highs and lows.

Amazon Kindle 2

Amazon have announced their Kindle 2. Click here to check it out and order yours!

Noam Wasserman - “Founders of CEO”

Today I attended a seminar by Noam Wasserman, who teaches a second-year MBA elective, entitled “Money and Power in Entrepreneurial Ventures,” that is based on his research over the last decade at Harvard.  From 2004-2007, he taught in HBS’s required first-year MBA course on Entrepreneurial Management, and he has also taught in Harvard’s Doctoral and Executive Education programs.  For three years in a row, Noam’s MBA students elected him to teach their “second-year reunion” classes (Capstone and EC Viewpoints).  He is one of three members of the core faculty of the Kauffman Foundation’s Global Scholars program, and has delivered numerous keynote addresses to meetings of the Young Presidents Organization (YPO) and various entrepreneurship conferences.

The main points that came from the reading material were:

If, as an entrepreneur your batting for a home-run or your “swinging for the fences” in baseball terms you have a greater chance of “striking out” where if you went for  single or a double there would be more chance to succeed. Meaning, sometimes its better to aim for smaller more achievable targets rather than aim for something that ‘could’ be unattainable or at least of having a high risk of failure.

From the reading prep I took away a few interesting points, which I think any startup or entrepreneur should at least think about:

• Don’t try to build too much, too soon.
• Don’t create something that you wouldn’t use yourself and be excited by.
• Don’t raise too much money too soon.
• Do listen to your gut instinct.
• Do focus, not necessarily at first but at some point it will help to narrow to one area.
• Do be picky, don’t except any old deal, employee or advice.
• Do have balance. The old saying “work hard, play hard” - it will help you through the hard times and help to motivate.