Archive for the ‘review’ Category
Stanford’s Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES) is a great website for general information regarding the entrepreneurial happenings here at Stanford and in the Bay Area. The goal is to explore issues, facilitate exchange, and provide a forum for students, faculty and professionals in regards to everything entrepreneurship. Overall, the website is lackluster in a couple ways, but the nuggets that a person finds make it well worth exploring. I will admit, though, that I was overall just a tad disappointed with this “glowing” recommendations for the organization.
The Website
Overall, the style is a bit dated and reminds me of websites that aren’t what they’re promoted to be…They say a revision is underway, and I hope it comes soon. The site navigation is a bit difficult, especially since it’s very hard to know all of the information that is encompassed under a single category. For example, the I-Challenge (Innovators’ Challenge) has eight subcategories. Even though it is logical, it is still annoying that I have to first click on the category, then click on any sublink to get where I want to go (and that’s assuming I remember exactly where it was on the site…)
The Team
This little section of the website is a great way to get started contacting different people in the field. From Stanford faculty members to students who are group/organization vice presidents, you can find out who’s who in this organization. After digging around, I found plenty of ways to contact nearly anyone on the list (professors, students, and professionals) and learn more about the makeup in general. This section is good for those looking to make a solid contact somewhere.
Membership
A person can sign up for the BASES Digest and/or the BASES job posting list to receive information about upcoming entrepreneurial events and job postings. It’s also worth noting that membership is open to ANYONE. If you’re a college student on another campus, go ahead and learn more about what’s going on in the Bay Area.
Events & Calendar
Three of the major components of the website relate to the Stanford I-Challenge, E-Challenge, and Social E-Challenge. There’s a mailing list sign up to receive the most up-to-date information, a FAQ page, an opportunity to view past winner’s entries, and a resources page (these pages exist for each of the three events.) Probably the coolest and most worthwhile portion of this website is the resources page because it includes links to other Stanford groups, Bay Area groups, other entrepreneurship challenges/competitions, national/international entrepreneurship related organizations, Stanford fellowship and research funds, research opportunities, and legal/technical/business plan/etc resources. Of course, most of this information is spread across three pages (with some overlap), but I would still check out the links individually. As for the calendar, I was a bit surprised that the whole month of February has only two events…
Interact
This section of the website is supposed to connect aspiring entrepreneurs with high tech panels, venture capitalists, and office hours with venture capitalists and professors. While this area seems promising, the details page that is supposed to have all of this information is down.
Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders
While I’ve mentioned ETL in a couple of posts before this one, it’s still worth noting again. ETL, also known as MS&E 472 to Stanford students, is a speaker series that has one “Entrepreneurial Thought Leader” come in almost every Wednesday to discuss what they do, where they’ve come from, and what entrepreneurship means to them. I took the class last quarter and I’m unofficially taking it again this quarter (I’m enrolled for too many units…) and it is definitely one of the highlights of my Stanford career thus far. What’s great is that each of these talks is turned into a podcast and archived on-site.
Conclusion
The site has a pretty large goal in mind and while lackluster in some areas, it is definitely helpful in others. I feel that this site’s best use is as a starting point to connect someone to someone else. Even though I am disappointed in some areas, it is mild disappointment, and I’m actually quite excited about the website upgrade that is hopefully coming soon.
With a primary goal of uniting all of the Stanford resources related to entrepreneurship, the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network, in my mind, has done a very good job at beginning this process. The site is easy to navigate, and provides information about entrepreneurship groups, events, resources, and a unique program called Coaches-on-Call. There is a blog created by Christina Harvett, but it hasn’t been updated within the past month. An overview of my thoughts are as follows:
Entrepreneurship Groups
A detailed list is provided on the site, with a short synopsis, link, and email address for each program’s head coordinator. There are groups for biodesign, the Graduate School of Business (GSB), venture capital, internationally focused entrepreneurship, and some “general purpose” groups. Nothing too exciting, but the best list I’ve seen so far.
Events
Not much information is here. One resource is a redirect to the BASES calendar and another to the events page of Stanford’s main website. A couple other haphazard links exist. I would like to see a more inclusive, compiled list of all events of all the groups talked about, but such a list is nowhere to be found.
Competitions
As of the day I checked, there are only five competitions listed here. One is an international competition called Uuni with Stanford students as contacts, another is a GSB business plan competition, a third is the social e-challenge, fourth is the cleantech venture challenge, and the last competition is the Gumball Challenge. Also, this area of the site fails to include the Innovation Tournament of E-Week 2008, even though it’s mentioned in the events page. I’m going to check out all of these resources, and Uuni looks especially interesting. For more information regarding the Gumball Challenge, please refer to my About page or their website.
Resources
This list of resources is impressive and any aspiring entrepreneur, especially those who are Stanford students, should check it out. From high tech to doing business in China, starting a business at college or doing business with Stanford, it’s all here. I would like to iterate, though, that the list is by no means complete. Rather, it is one of the more impressive aspects of the site.
Coaches-on-Call
By far, this dimension of the website is THE coolest. The goal of this program called Coaches-on-Call is to provide a professional mentoring program for current Stanford students. “Coaches”, or professionals in the field, come in for two hours and conduct 30 minute appointments with students and give advice regarding business plans, best practices, and other things. Checking out the mentors, most have a high tech background, and many of them are near the top of their field. A couple are serial entrepreneurs, and some are venture capitalists. All students have to do to schedule one of these appointments is to email a short bio to the administrator, Ms. Harvett. Be warned though, the largest caveat is that students cannot ask for a job or funding.
Conclusion and Suggestions
Overall, the website provides a great starting point for any entrepreneur. There are many things missing, but since it looks like a relatively new site, I will wait (somewhat) patiently for developments to occur. One thing that needs to be done asap is a better events calendar that has more information from all of the groups and campus-wide activities. A cool little feature to add on top of this is an export button to add events to iCal or other calendars (much like the Stanford news page does.) Another major suggestion is to add a simple mechanism for allowing students to sign up, edit, and discuss entrepreneurial developments and information. If it is going to act as a hub for entrepreneurial information, why not provide the infrastructure and allow students/outsiders to add resources/groups/events/competitions? If these two things would be implemented, the site would increase it’s value 10-fold.
Bob Cramer, a serial CEO who has successfully led six companies to big paydays, shares his 10 month journey of leading a different startup than he’s used to - Nimbit. With a company mission that has a goal to “put musical artists in complete control of their own music business and brand, enabling them to reach their full potential as quickly as possible,” Nimbit appealed to Mr. Cramer’s personal interests when he was recruited to join their team as executive chairman. The original article is told through a series of conversations that occur nearly monthly and can be found here. It was a great read and here are a few of the lessons to be gleaned from this engaging and charismatic leader.
1. Build an all star team. It seems every great start-up begins with a rock solid team. Having an impassioned leader, a web development guru, and a marketing all-star, preferably with some sort of track record, says volumes about your credibility to VC’s and angels when you’re looking for some seed money.
2. Take on mentors with similar passions. Not only should your team work well together, but also a rock star board of “veterans” with similar passions and solid connections could quickly take your business to the next level. Two of the reasons Mr. Cramer was an excellent fit are that he was passionate about the venture’s vision and he knew the ins and outs of raising seed money.
3. If you don’t know the answers, say that you will get them (and get them). At one point during a beginning round of investment, the VC’s asked a couple of questions in which the founders didn’t have any answers. Instead of letting the inexperienced leaders flounder, Cramer, acting in his then-advisory role, told the VC’s that they didn’t have all the information to give an informed answer, but would do so as soon as possible.
4. Hesitation can be costly. After meeting with a few venture capitalists and being told that they would pass on funding combined with Nimbit’s seed money running dry, Mr. Cramer became more proactive in his role and approached the then-CEO about giving up the reigns and letting Cramer take control. Many of the VC’s were looking to Cramer to take on a larger, more committed role, but he hesitated (he can only speculate at his reasoning) and by that time the company had lost enough momentum to be lethal.
5. Continue to beat up support, even when opportunity’s doors seem to be closing. Even though, in hindsight, Cramer feels he waited too long to take control, he proceeded to round up angel money to keep the company afloat while continuously pursuing VC’s for the money they needed to take the business to the next level.
6. Be bold and stick to your guns. Nimbit was receving no after no from VC’s, and after every visit, they would tweak things a little bit here, and a little bit there, but nothing too major. “Those kill companies” Mr. Cramer wisely pointed out, and he says that you should stick to the fundamental mission until that is proven flawed. And if that happens, you’re in serious trouble.
7. Know your audience. During a key presentation that involved people that could be potential clients, Cramer strategically had Faucher, the founder and former CEO, give the presentation. The reasoning for this is that Faucher is an ex-rocker who is passionate about Nimbit’s potential. The results were immediately appreciable, with one of the principal individuals letting out an enthusiastic “Wow.”
8. Build a great business in uninteresting territory vs. a struggling business in interesting territory. While it’s important to be passionate about what you are doing, if the business itself cannot work financially, it’s over. Things may have to be scaled back, reworked, and retooled, then approached again in order to be successful. There may be a number of other reasons why the business isn’t succeeding, such as bad market timing, inappropriate revenue model, etc. The important thing to note is that passion alone will not build a great business, and in a moment of Mr. Cramer’s reminiscing, we realize that half the fun in running a business is creating one that is rock solid, regardless of industry, product, or market.
9. In spite of everything, if failure occurs, live, learn, then move on. Sometimes things just don’t work out as expected. That’s life, as many people will easily point out. The key here is to reflect on what worked, what didn’t work, and how to prevent the same scenario from occurring again. Mr. Cramer took home a couple of these valuable lessons, and then moved on to the next big project.
Conclusion: Even though they were unable to raise the money necessary to take the business to the next level, the founders decided to scale back to reduce its costs and continue to operate. It is still making real progress, in spite of the tight budget. Mr. Cramer, on the other hand, took the CEO slot at Tervela, a data-messaging company based in New York.