Nevada's Center for Entrepreneurship and Technology - Nevada's Business Starts Here » Industry News

How To Build A Powerful Professional Network

Lisa — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:27:48 +0000

It is important to know the two Q’s as you build out your network: quality and quantity. But have you considered the importance of having a well-rounded network?

In this job market, having a strong network is critical to your professional survival. There are plenty of tips and articles on where to find people, how and when to connect to them and even what you need to say to attract and maintain your network. This article focuses on who should be in your network. Read full story:

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SRI chief: Now’s the best time for innovation

Lisa — Wed, 28 Jul 2010 17:27:03 +0000

Curt Carlson, the president and chief executive of SRI International, has run the research

institute in Silicon Valley for 11 years. SRI was spun out of Stanford University more than 60 years ago to commercialize research. First named Stanford Research Institute and later renamed SRI International, it became independent from Stanford University in 1970 and now has more than 2,200 researchers working on things such as the cool artificial intelligence, speech recognition, natural language processing, and other areas. Carlson sat down for an interview with VentureBeat on his predictions for the future. Read more:

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Overlooked When Raising Capital: Investor Preferences

Lisa — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 16:39:45 +0000

If you’re an entrepreneur looking for money, you probably have a list of factors that you’ve heard increase the odds that someone will finance your business. But here’s one you might not have considered: homophily.

For those of you who do not spend your spare time reading sociology textbooks, homophily is just a fancy word expressing the birds-of-a-feather-flock-together cliché.

Sociologists have found homophily to be very common. Studies show that rich people want to associate with other rich people. Lawyers like to be with other lawyers. Doctors prefer to hang with other doctors. And people of the same gender, race, and/or ethnic group tend to favor each other’s company. Read full story:

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How much should you look for in your seed round?

Lisa — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 21:39:53 +0000

I often run across early stage companies in a real quandary about how much money to take in their first round of funding. That is, the round just beyond the Ramen noodle eating/avoid starvation round that is usually funded out of their own pocket (or, if you prefer, the round that really gets things going once you’ve established a team and product viability).

The advice they often get goes something like this: Build a spreadsheet outlining fixed and variable costs over the next year or more. Estimate headcount, salaries, rent, capital equipment needs, etc. and, voila, you’ll have your number.

That’s fine, of course, but the spreadsheet should be the end result of the planning process, not the process itself. In my experience, there are certain high-level guidelines that should be used to determine how much money should be taken. Read full story:

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If you plan to publish an electronic book, plan to protect your work

Lisa — Sun, 25 Jul 2010 14:54:38 +0000

During my business counseling sessions with SCORE, clients often ask about the most effective, profitable and secure ways to sell e-books online.
The Internet is flooded with e-books. Most e-books are purchased online from websites that offer wealth-building opportunities. But they also provide unprotected resell rights. Many online shoppers often find it hard to tell which e-books are worth buying because of the marketing hype and unpleasant e-book purchasing experiences.
Due to the flood of e-books online, many professionally written e-books often suffer low sales and do not get the exposure they rightly deserve. Sometimes the same e-books are seen sold online by an unknown source who was never granted resell rights. Read more:

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Venture Capital’s Midlife Crisis

Lisa — Sat, 24 Jul 2010 19:36:52 +0000

The bursting of the Internet bubble, several years of unfriendly public markets and changes in Wall Street and financial regulations have been hard on venture capital over the past decade. But not all the pressures facing the industry are external, especially in Silicon Valley. The venture community there is showing signs of middle age–moving more slowly and cautiously than before, and hitting fewer home runs than it did in younger, leaner days. As a result, experts say, the sector is having trouble producing the robust performance long associated with it. This means investors need to look at venture capital, and its impact on their portfolios, in a new way. Read full story:

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How to grow your e-commerce business on a tight budget

Lisa — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 21:15:32 +0000

One of the biggest challenges faced by part-time or bootstrapped entrepreneurs who do business online is scale. Finding a warehouse storage and shipping option that grows with their business, offers flexibility, is cost effective and doesn’t distract from their marketing and sales efforts is not an easy thing to do.

Warehousing and shipping can make up about 10 percent of an e-commerce company’s costs. Other than inventory, in fact, it’s often the largest expense a retail or wholesale business faces.

Setting up a warehouse facility involves a lot of guesswork and often doesn’t give your business the flexibility it needs. Leasing one forces you to rely heavily on sales volume estimates – and often requires cash up front, along with various other potential problems. Read full story:

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Budding Entrepreneurs’ Business Education Basics

Lisa — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 17:13:08 +0000

Educational programs for budding entrepreneurs have proliferated in the last decade, creating alternatives to the two-year master’s degree in business administration that are both less costly and less time-consuming. The options available include online business training tools offered by the Small Business Administration. The SBA offers 29 half-hour online training courses on topics that include accounting, cash flow, venture capital, creating a business plan, marketing, and becoming a government contractor. In fiscal year 2009, 609,000 people used the SBA’s online business-training tools, about 70,000 more than the year before, says Ellen Thrasher, associate administrator of the SBA’s Office of Entrepreneurship Education. Read full story:

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How Incubators Speed the Start-up Process

Lisa — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 16:54:36 +0000

Most start-ups don’t need much money to get going. But that doesn’t mean they don’t need help. That’s where so-called seed accelerators come in — outfits like Y Combinator in Silicon Valley; TechStars in Boulder, Boston, and soon Seattle; and the Capital Factory in Austin. A mashup of angel investing, speed dating, and geek camp, most seed accelerators adhere to the same basic model: A group of seasoned entrepreneurs and investors selects a few founders with sound business ideas; hands over a little cash and a place to work for a couple of months; and provides lots of hands-on coaching, strategizing, and butt kicking in exchange for a modest equity share in the company. Read full story:

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Guy Kawasaki on Twitter Brawls, Authenticity, and How He Plans to Win The Influence Project

Lisa — Wed, 21 Jul 2010 16:12:44 +0000

Guy Kawasaki is the co-founder of the news aggregator Alltop.com, the former chief evangelist for Apple, and author of, among other titles, The Art of the Start. At the end of The Influence Project’s first week, Kawasaki sits comfortably in the top 10, so we sought him to discuss the power of social media, how Twitter followers and Facebook fan numbers can be misleading, and the benefits of artfully telling someone off on the Internet. Read more:

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