entrepreneurial

startFEST+DEMO

startFEST+DEMO is a social gathering with the aim to create relationships among growth-oriented entrepreneurs, innovative companies, and members from the investment community. This first event will introduce the Kansas City business community tostartPATH, a virtual incubator and social network helping entrepreneurs transform concepts into successful companies. In addition, 10 companies will be demonstrating their technology during this event. Fine beers from Boulevard will be provided, encouraging lively social interaction among attendees.

March 6, 2007 (6-9pm)

Boulevard Brewing Company
2501 Southwest Boulevard
Kansas City, MO 64108

Silicon Valley is undoubtedly the center of the startup world. The numbers can be staggering, with 75% of VCi returns coming from a 10 mile radius around Stanford. A good portion of the remaining VC returns come from the area around MIT. The rest of the country trails far far behind.

Stanford and MIT are certainly a large factor in this success, but it isn't the whole story.

Success From Failure

Counter intuitive as it may seem, acceptance of failure seems to be one of the larger contributors to this success. Most startups fail, 60-90% depending on who you ask, and this applies even in Silicon Vally. The community in Silicon Valley not only accepts this, they embrace it. Failing shows that you tried, as long as you worked hard, were quick on your feet, and honest, you could try again, possibly working with the same investors.

Examples in Failure

Failures can be small incremental concept and business plani failures, or they can be catastrophic crashes with investors, founders, and employees being pounded.

Concept Failure: Confinity was initially started to transfer money from Palm Pilot to Palm Pilot to pay for meals! What a ridiculous idea, it only worked on Palm Pilots it was solving a problem that no one really had. They got $3 Million in VC funds to exploit this market. Not much exists from the original idea, which focused around encryption on mobile devices, but they realized their mistake and reshaped into a industry killer.

Result: PayPal!

Total Failure: GovWorks.com WAS an attempt to make transactions with local government (tickets, drivers licenses, property tax)easy. Great idea, but the team had problems, the technology didn't work, and competitors moved faster. They failed completely and a
movie, Startup.com, details their fateful journey.

The following came from Guy Kawasaki's blog (http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2008/01/take-the-entrep.html):

Scott Shane of Case Western recently published The
Illusions of Entrepreneurship: The Costly Myths That Entrepreneurs, Investors,
and Policy Makers Live By. In the book, he bursts many of the
bubbles of entrepreneurship in America. Says he, “People start
businesses based on the myths we tell ourselves about entrepreneurship and then
are hurt when confronted by reality. Investors believe these myths and invest
money and they’re disappointed when they don’t hold true. Policy makers make
policy based on these myths and then wonder why the economy isn’t growing with
all these entrepreneurs now in it.” If you think you already really know the
scoop about entrepreneurship, try taking his test. If
you score less than 80%, maybe you should buy the book. I scored a whopping
40%.

All,

We are having a meeting at Dave and Busters at the Legends on Wednesday Jan. 16th at 6pm.

To recap the purpose of these meetings are to bring like minded entrepreneurs together for collaboration and to share insight on how to achieve success. Plus it is a great way to share connections and in business thats essential! Also feel free to invite as many fellow entrepreneurs as you want.

Please let me know if you are planning on coming and if/how many guests you are bringing. I look forward to hearing from you and seeing you there.

Cheers and feel free to e-mail or call me with any questions,

Seth Meinzen

DigiRace, Inc.

www.digirace.com

913.708.4025

The Enterprise Center of Johnson County
is a business incubatori that provides business consulting, advisory
services, financing resources and office space to accelerate the growth
and success of high-growth companies.
Since 1999, ECJC companies have created 675 jobs, raised more than $45M, and generated over $32M in sales.

Christmas party??

Location TBD

written by Nisan Gabbay from www.startup-review.com , posted on November 5th, 2006

Facebook was launched in February 2004 by Harvard undergrad students as an alternative to the traditional student directory. Its popularity quickly spread to other colleges in the US by word of mouth, and the site now registers close to 15M monthly UVs and over 6B page views per month. Facebook has completed two rounds of venture financing at very high valuations, the first at a valuation of ~$100M and the second at ~$550M (valuations are unconfirmed). These valuations were driven by the multiple acquisition offers that Facebook has reportedly turned down (the latest was a rumored $750M offer). Facebook is already generating significant revenue, so despite all the valuation and web traffic metric hype, it has also established a very real business.

Interviews conducted: Noah Kagan, early product manager for Facebook. Noah will soon release an e-book on Facebook, with good insight on the social networking space. You will be able to download the book at Noah’s blog, okdork.com. I have had plenty of informal conversations with people close to Facebook over the last two years, while not formal interviews, I would regard these as quality sources – employees, investors, and competitors.

"If you're thinking about starting a business, you'd be crazy not to read this book." - Daniel H. Pink, Author, Free Agent Nation

VCi and entrepreneur from Boulder, Colorado.