Terry Starbucker

FEBRUARY 16, 2011

The “Secret&# of success is not just a great idea, a positive attitude, and venture funding. A lot of us are so impatient when it comes to this – we want instant success. Are you willing to put in a LOT of hard work and practice? But it’s rarely so. Are you a “Santa or an Elf&# ?

Entrepreneur 273

Entrepreneur Venture Funding Finance Books 273

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 12, 2024

Research involving numerous accelerator programs and interviews with various stakeholders reveals that startups in these programs typically achieve higher funding and survival rates. What role do business accelerators play in boosting the growth of early-stage companies? And they work.

Succession 22

Succession Education Advice Environment 22

The Horizons Tracker

OCTOBER 1, 2020

Successful partnerships. Research from INSEAD suggests that the most common way of currently working with a startup is via a corporate venture fund. Even these are no guarantee of success, however, as illustrated by a recent paper from IESE Business School. Successful partnerships.

Incubator 80

Incubator Entrepreneur Venture Funding Incentives 80

The Horizons Tracker

SEPTEMBER 16, 2019

It’s an approach that borrows from the success seen in areas such as citizen science, where members of the public contribute to an array of scientific endeavors, often via byte sized chunks of a much larger body of work. It’s a model they believe can co-exist successfully together.

Power 69

Power Ethics Venture Funding Quality 69

Mills Scofield

NOVEMBER 5, 2011

After some introspection, she agreed to head up Clayton Christensen’s venture fund, Rose Park Advisors , to help companies grow. Since the odds of failing are so great, it’s important to take big risks because every success is more impactful. Lesson: If failure is inevitable, every success is more significant.

Blanchard 124

Blanchard Video Venture Funding Innovation 124

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Two in particular are corporate venture funds, which invest in start-ups outside companies'' walls, and internal idea contests. But cutting back on research funding doesn''t work either. And corporate venture funds, if well managed, can avoid the fickleness problem that plagues independent venture capital and crowdfunding.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Venture Funding Innovation Incentives 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 10, 2013

Two in particular are corporate venture funds, which invest in start-ups outside companies’ walls, and internal idea contests. But cutting back on research funding doesn’t work either. Many large companies have been wary of corporate venturing, because they’ve seen such funds deployed ineffectively.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Venture Funding Innovation Incentives 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 5, 2018

Corporate executives seek to inject “Silicon Valley DNA” into their cultures, and policy makers point to venture-funded entrepreneurship as a solution for all manner of problems. The early success of the model led to a process that was somewhat self-perpetuating. This is a dangerous mindset.

Technology 8

Technology Venture Funding Venture Capitalist Entrepreneur 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 2, 2017

Regardless, accelerators still have an important role to play that can help position entrepreneurs for success. It’s not all about venture funding. Accelerator programs are most successful when they provide the right help to the right people. When it is about venture funding, hone in on the best matches.

Marketing 8

Marketing Venture Funding Entrepreneur IPO 8

Harvard Business Review

SEPTEMBER 6, 2012

If your business has high velocity, high margins, and a huge market, venture may be a good road for you. There are some helpful resources out there on venture terms , good venture funds vs. bad ones , and questions you may want to ask a venture capitalist if you meet one.

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Venture Capitalist Advice Venture Funding Incubator 15

Harvard Business Review

MAY 10, 2011

If big companies are to seize more fast-growth opportunities, they can learn from the venture capitalists that back the most successful entrepreneurs. Venture funds create a basic thesis about what industries will grow, and then they place a lot of inexpensive bets and give start-ups leeway.

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Venture Capitalist Venture Funding Entrepreneur IPO 12

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 22, 2014

Advances in technology — especially digital technology and the increasing role of software in products and services — are demanding that large, successful organizations increase their pace of innovation and make greater use of resources outside their boundaries. If entrepreneurs are successful, we keep a piece of the action.”.

Venture Funding 14

Venture Funding Entrepreneur Agility Business Model 14

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 14, 2013

But a successful start-up requires a technologist – someone with the intelligence and technical skill to, you know, actually build a worthwhile, sellable product – and a product person, one with accurate perspective and a solid handle on penetrating the market you’re hoping to capture. Can B-school partnerships ever work?

Company 13

Company Venture Funding Banking Education 13

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 4, 2014

But the vast majority of successful entrepreneurs never take any venture capital. Funding his company’s steady growth with the proceeds of one successful viral video campaign after another, Moseholm and his partners built GoViral into Europe’s leading platform to host and distribute such content. Yes, I mean that.

Venture Funding 14

Venture Funding Entrepreneur Incubator Advice 14

Harvard Business Review

JULY 25, 2012

The process, instituted by a particular stripe of venture capitalist, represents the acme of "adult supervision" by the VC, a destroy-the-village-to-save-it moment of investor heroism. The CEO, the VC reminds us, serves at the pleasure of the board. Sensible in theory, this strategy almost always destroys value in practice.

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Venture Capitalist Venture Funding Gordon CEO 13

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 16, 2011

Such a strategy limits an early venture's funding in order to force the business to develop a profitable business model and then invests heavily in growth once such a model is identified — Christensen terms such investments "good money" for incubating growth businesses and extols the strategy for three reasons.

Christensen 20

Christensen Fixed Costs Metrics Venture Funding 20

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 24, 2011

Our IDEAS Ventures fund is a joint arrangement with the National Research Foundation as part of the National Framework for Innovation and Enterprise. It is always possible that the iterations that characterize early-stage startups would have eventually led him to success, but we decided not to invest in his company.

Venture Capitalist 16

Venture Capitalist Venture Funding Handbook Entrepreneur 16

Harvard Business Review

MAY 16, 2016

If the limiting factor for the startup economy is capital, you’d expect newly founded venture funds to generate solid returns. In fact, venture capital hasn’t performed well compared to other asset classes, with the big wins clustered among the top dozen or so firms.

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Venture Funding IPO Finance Constraint 9

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 7, 2017

The result, a program called I-Corps , is helping hundreds of scientists become successful entrepreneurs. One of the core tenets of Steve Blank’s philosophy is that startup founders always begin with a flawed idea, so the key to success is to identify the flaws and fix them before you run out of money. An Idea Takes Shape.

Entrepreneur 13

Entrepreneur Venture Funding Conference Course 13

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 25, 2011

Joining (or founding) a start-up is an act of faith — the conviction that an idea eventually can become a sustained commercial success. They want the enterprise as a whole to be successful, but are more motivated by the challenges of their particular function and the ability to advance in their careers.

Innovation 15

Innovation Company Venture Funding Follow-up 15

Harvard Business Review

FEBRUARY 25, 2016

Campbell, the food company best known for its soups, is investing $125 million in a venture fund to help finance food startups, according to the Wall Street Journal. Despite that aggregate revenue growth, not every startup is successful — in fact, the vast majority will fail. Set your company up for success.

Company 8

Company Brand Venture Funding Retail 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 17, 2012

Dig into the genesis of a paradigm-busting new product or service, and you'll usually find that its success owes more to the indomitable spirit of a lone innovator than to the obliging climate of an inherently pro-innovation management model. The fact is, most companies aren't very good at game-changing innovation.

Innovation 15

Innovation Process Competitive Advantage McKinsey 15

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 18, 2014

This particular toy importer violated every one of the rules that govern the success of a midsize company’s strategic initiative: It gave an unproven team an unrealistic budget and asked it to do a highly technical, risky, but mission-critical job without strong external partners or a proven implementation process. Their ability to execute.

CFO 8

CFO Venture Funding IPO Retail 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 19, 2011

In this way, the interns will build practical knowledge while making a significant contribution to the firms' success. And companies in Accra include venture fund Oasis Capital and agricultural private equity house Injaro Investments.

Venture Funding 12

Venture Funding Banking Participative Globalization 12

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 20, 2012

For decades, the utility-metering industry was dominated by a handful of middle-market companies, many of which still run successful and profitable businesses. We now face new competition from Silicon Valley start-ups with venture funding and a great idea, as well as from mature industrial and technology powerhouses from the Fortune 500.

CEO 8

CEO Chief Executive Officer Venture Funding Taylorism 8

Harvard Business Review

JANUARY 26, 2012

The industry was born in its current form, however, when the first venture capital firms were founded in the middle of the twentieth century. In a relatively short time, venture-backed companies have grown to account for over 20% of US GDP today. The best VCs have successfully identified major industry disruptions before they occur.

Disruptive Innovation 14

Disruptive Innovation Hedge Venture Capitalist Venture Funding 14

Harvard Business Review

DECEMBER 28, 2012

Will badges require successful course completion? While recommendation engines have been fantastically successful for the Amazons and Netflixes, they remain relative underachievers given their technical and algorithmic potential. Will lower interest rates make venture capital a more appealing option? But is it enough?

Innovation 17

Innovation Trends Human Capital Venture Funding 17

Harvard Business Review

MAY 24, 2016

Many large and successful manufacturing companies are feeling the threat from software and online competitors, both big companies like Google or Amazon as well as startups allying with longstanding manufacturing competitors. Consider John Deere , the agricultural equipment manufacturer.

Morale 13

Morale Metrics Motivation Venture Funding 13

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 5, 2017

While it’s still early days (we launched this accelerator in early 2016), we believe the accelerator has scored enough successes to prove that the model can work. It has accelerated nine projects and spun three of them out as start-up companies that have secured over $2 million in venture funding. Insight Center.

Health Care 10

Health Care Company Innovation Entrepreneur 10

Harvard Business Review

AUGUST 21, 2014

Vox Media, a venture-funded publishing start-up, recently lured Ezra Klein away from the Washington Post. And it’s not just the financial results that are impressive — Huffington Post has won a Pulitzer Prize, as has Politico, a news organization launched in 2007. These examples are not mere exceptions, but part of a growing trend.

Venture Capitalist 9

Venture Capitalist EBITDA Venture Funding Magazine 9

Harvard Business Review

JUNE 27, 2013

They''re in tune with corporate goals and how the company should ideally be projected to evoke success to investors and customers alike. We asked each thirty-five different questions, such as the following: What defines a successful company? A company''s founders and executives know what they''re on a mission to accomplish.

Execution 8

Execution Mission Statement Team Venture Funding 8

Harvard Business Review

APRIL 15, 2013

On the belief that everyone in the division would need to support the campaign to make it successful, he spent as much energy cultivating internal ownership as external engagement. Brent Remai, CMO at FireEye , was hired into a small, venture- funded company with several years of moderate results. The results?

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Venture Funding Brand Marketing Content 9

Harvard Business Review

NOVEMBER 13, 2013

There are also great success stories to encourage us. For DC’s cybersecurity entrepreneurs, venture funds like In-Q-Tel & CORE Capital have emerged to fund such endeavors. Finding talent and financing isn’t the only hurdle to overcome on the road to startup success; it’s the first of many.

Entrepreneur 8

Entrepreneur Venture Funding Finance Engineering 8

Harvard Business Review

OCTOBER 29, 2013

Companies that move to Silicon Valley after gaining traction end up having a better success rate. Omniture has been acquired by Adobe, and was venture-funded by Silicon Valley firms such as Hummer Winblad. Of course, people come to Silicon Valley from all over the world, and many of them become successful.

Venture Funding 8

Venture Funding Entrepreneur Attrition Engineering 8

Harvard Business Review

JULY 27, 2017

Talented founders know that corporations simply cannot replicate the deep experience private VCs have in starting companies, nor their expertise in assisting startups with complex challenges such as deal making, business modeling, resolving disputes among founders, executing a successful IPO, and so on. A New Name and a Unique Brand Identity.

Venture Capitalist 8

Venture Capitalist Meyer Innovation Fixed Costs 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 10, 2015

Some people line up lunches and coffee dates because they’re in search of a job, venture funding, or clients for their company. But those are side effects of relationship building, and your meetings will be far more successful if you don’t go in explicitly seeking them. Here’s how to do it successfully.

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Cialdini Venture Funding Conference Short-term 8

Harvard Business Review

MARCH 31, 2011

He insisted that the "first to invent" patent system gave his firm the time not only to determine which were the best inventions to pursue without squandering the firm's precious resources, but to secure venture funding as well.

Entrepreneur 14

Entrepreneur Venture Funding System Industry 14