From Stanford Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders, a lecture by Mohr Davidow Ventures partner, Erik Straser, on innovation in Clean Tech:

…As you’re thinking about what you’re going do, the no. 1 thing I would advise you is how to find a long wave. Some immutable trend that is gonna permeate most of the 10 years of your career, the next 15-30 years! If you sat down and thought “what are the big long waves during my lifetime?”, jumping on them as a professional will probably be one of the smartest things you ever did. Because if you did nothing, but jump in the computer-business in the late 70s, early 80s, maybe even up to the Microsoft IPO, you had a phenomenal run, 20-something years where you had a very high chance of achieving a higher position, more material income, and just being in a better place, then if you’d chose, for example, Detroit.

So you got to think what wave you’re on and how you get on the wave that makes sense for you both from an interest perspective, a geography perspective, what you want to do with your life. […] Its easiest to see [these waves] right here on campus (note: talking about Stanford School of Engineering). […] Research universities are the start of the waves.

The no. 1 thing you can do is figure out what wave are you riding, and make sure you’re not on a wave that’s going down.

He identifies three streams, according to what’s going on at Stanford: IT, which is a mature wave, biotech, and clean tech. It puts a lot of things in perspective for me, regarding all the companies, projects, and my own business ideas that I come across on a daily basis.

Focus on things that are going up, not going down! And focus on your fit with them!

Thanks to vodpod, you should be able to watch that whole scene here (if not: here).

[vodpod id=ExternalVideo.747763&w=425&h=350&fv=]

Vincent

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I feel, I’ve been somewhat conned. During my studies, I did a course called “New Business Development,” which was about me and a team working out a business-proposal in the form of a plan for a new business within an existing business. A spin-in, if you will, also sometimes called intrapreneurship.

But so far, 99% of business development jobs are nothing more than sales-functions disguised by a cooler name (E.g. Monster.com)! I realise that nobody really likes salespeople, they have a bad name, but come on! Sales is when you have a product or service and you’re trying to sell it to a customer (B2B sales for companies; B2C sales for individuals). Business development is when you develop a business for another company. Believe it or not, there is a big difference!

I’m not denying that changing the name from sales to business development is a great sales-tactic in itself. Just like the word “entreployees,” I recently came across. But, for people like me, looking for the right job, it makes things super-annoying. One company even said: as a business developer, we expect you to be calling people 99% of the time and spend the other 1% looking up their names in a phonebook. That is a sales-job, worse, a tele-sales job!

Incidentally, what I am currently doing for a consultancy is: leading a team of people to develop a new business opportunity for that company. And yes, my title is business developer or business development manager! That is not to say that sales isn’t an integral part of that function; I spend half my time networking with professionals and customers. The other half is spent in product- and operations-development for that business however. That is what makes it fun, that is what makes it “a business!”

Vincent

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The key to a fulfilling career is, I believe, not so much about choosing the right job, it’s about finding pleasure in the job that you are doing. Applying for jobs is a job, not a particularly well-paying one, but a job that can be extremely fulfilling nevertheless.

It is really a combination of two activities: consulting and sales. Or, to put it another way, it’s information-rich selling, i.e. you collect a lot of information about the market (the company & surroundings) and sell a complex product (yourself). Since both the ability to transform complex information into simple, understandable terms, and the ability to sell just about anything (even your monkey-self) are probably the most desired qualities on the job-market today, applying for jobs is an excellent training, which everyone should look forward too.

Following are a couple of the skills you learn in this job:

• Strategic positioning: this is the basic activity. Job-hunting is an activity that moves in concentric circles. In the centre, there’s you, your strengths & weaknesses, your niche. Then comes the company and how you fit into it. Finally comes the strategic landscape of the company and what its priorities are there. Positioning is, according to my basic marketing book, about communicating 4 C’s (Clarity, Confidence, Continuity, Competitiveness), matched to the needs of your customer.
• General market-research: finding interesting companies is like finding a needle in a haystack. Well, not really. But it does require using all the mediums available to you to get to that sale. And you may want to segment the market and focus on specific types of companies.
• Strategic market-research: it’s a jungle out there, and the more awareness you show for the company’s strategic (competitive, current & future) landscape, the more she will trust you to do a good job. And, as a side-benefit, you’ll find out what other companies you may want to target if this one doesn’t bite.
• Functional market-research: your company/customer will be looking for specific features in you, and you have to position yourself according to what is required. The functional job-description = feature requirements.
• Targeted advertising: You CV and application letter are like a brochure about yourself. You’ll be competing with tons of other “products” and you have to speak the language of your customer.
• The pitch: your “marketing-brochure” may get you a foot in the door, but that’s only 30% of it. You need to present yourself to your customer, the way he would present himself to his customers. If those are a tough sell, he will be a tough sell, and vice versa.
• The negotiation: after finding your target, marketing to it, and pitching it, you’ll need to get a good deal too. That is a whole other science into itself.

Seriously, if this wasn’t a non-paying gig, I think I’d be doing this for some time. Learning a lot here. I’ll go as far as to say that if you were either a sales/marketing person or an entrepreneur, you’d be doing some pretty similar things.

But beware! You shouldn”t use job-applications as an excuse to get your foot into the door to sell products & services from other companies! That’s like calling someone during dinner-time, because you know they’ll be home, and trying to sell them insurance. It’s Just Not Done!

Vincent

(I’ll write more about tech tomorrow, I promise)

Addendum: I predict, I won’t get too many comments on this one. Maybe it’s an age thing; 5 years ago, I would’ve felt differently about this process. But these days, pretty much any interview I go to ends up being a pretty interesting conversation about how to run a company, and the process beforehand, the homework, is pretty versatile too. Just thought, I’d add that.

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As I’m currently applying for jobs, I naturally often get asked what my dream job is. I hate that question, as there’s no simple answer. My dream “job” is to set up companies, which is really a great number of jobs. Following series of steps is the way I visualise this process, seen from a business, investor’s, and somewhat European perspective, and not so much a technologist’s one. As always, my articles are meant to be the start of a discussion and your feedback is appreciated!

My framework is somewhat inspired by the “Strategic Framework” on the right, which I got from an excellent, but fat book, called “Valuation – Maximizing Corporate Value.” Along with explaining valuation very well, including what all the financial inputs mean and where (!) they can be found, it’s really meant to be a tool for building sound business-strategies. A good book for consultants, if you’re interested in a simple book on finance, and a concrete book on strategy (hard to find in that combo)!

Let’s do it!

Step 1 – the idea

This can really be sub-devided into three separate parts: the vision, the mission, and the plan. The vision is like the cloud in the sky which you spot while taking a walk. You don’t know if and how it will work yet. The mission is a long-lasting platform for you to run your company on; it’s a set of parameters, which come from both your values, your strengths, and your objectives, e.g. “I want my business to be fast, honest, and affordable.,” or Google’s: “…to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.”

The plan is not the business-plan per se, but the action plan that is something like this post here. It’s meant to be a set of steps that brings you from the idea to the business, and includes developing your business-idea, writing the business-plan, selecting the team, approaching investors & partners, where to locate, what technologies to use, etc.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: technical about your product, development, the industry; creative techniques; planning techniques.

Step 2 – a short market-research

Just to get an overview of the market and to what extent the problem you’re trying to solve is already being solved. I think step 1 needs to be quite far-developed before proceeding to step 2, because being confronted with a market filled with giants isn’t exactly a great motivator to develop your yet vapourous idea. The same applies to talking to other people (step 4), as those can be quite reality-distorting also.

So a short market-research, using mediums relevant to your industry. Google is always a good start, but sometimes you need to do a patent-search or a scholar-search for high-tech; at other times you need to look at Crunchbase for Web X.0; and sometimes a phone-book or the chamber of commerce databases for local stuff. And sometimes there’s no material out there (a very tricky situation!), in which case you need to look at substitutes for your product/service as well as new entrants from related industries. While that’s already substantial in terms of work, it helps with step 3: the pitch.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: marketing, both in terms of what to focus on, where to search for stuff, and how to write it up so that it makes sense.

Step 3: Pitch v. 1 – convincing your peers

The most important quality an entrepreneur must have is the ability to sell. And there’s a phrase in selling, which goes something like: you can’t sell what you don’t believe in… and vice versa. The more your idea is worked out, the more you know about the market, the more confident you can defend your ideas from the many, many sceptics that are out there.

A pitch v.1 needs to be a mini-business-plan of one to a few pages and include as much information as possible about the product, about how (you think) you will produce it, who you will (need to) hire, where you will be located, what need you are meeting, how you will market your product, how you will make money, how you will defend yourself from the competition. The more specific, the better!

And then that needs to be summarised into a pitch of ca. 2 mins, summarising all the vital data + a touch of personality & charisma!

Good knowledge to have at this stage: apart from the data from steps 1 & 2 (technical, marketing, your industry, your customers), you need some business-planning skills, which includes some (not much) financial techniques; as well as presentation skills & passion.

Step 4: find your team

There’s different philosophies about idea-generation (step 1), with many, I’m sure, arguing that you should be brainstorming with your friends on the idea from the start, that more heads have more/better ideas than one, etc. etc. I completely agree with this. But my philosophy is that without a clear direction, a team can quickly lose focus and follow political objectives, rather than pragmatic ones. While, I’ve been blessed with a few groups of people, where the chemistry was excellent and everyone was intelligent enough to be willing to listen & learn from others, many other groups have been a complete failure, because politics & brains definitely don’t always come hand in hand. So, I’m of the opinion, that an idea needs to be very well-developed & thought out before presenting it, after which it can be refined and adapted, and even rejected, according to the more specialised knowledge of group-members.

About finding team-members; for myself I have to say, after spending a long-long time on my thesis—a solitary activity—it’s not that easy. Again, networking, LinkedIN/Facebook, blogging, university (very important!), family, highschool-friends, former employers/co-workers, etc. , all good choices. Luckily for me, my thesis also brought me into contact with a large number of incubators, which are also good places to run into smart people; I worked for a venture-capital-tracking firm, ditto on the smart people; and there’s Tech IT Easy, Ditto 3x! So, really, never a shortage of smart people, when you look for them!

Good knowledge to have at this stage: material from steps 1-3; people-skills, in terms of choosing the right group of people; leadership & sales-skills; and the ability to form rational arguments & present your ideas well.

Step 5: write a business-plan

Read Jeremy’s post here.

Step 6: pitch v.2 – approaching early-stage investors

Somewhat different from later-stage investors, these are people you talk to, usually before launching your company (except maybe in web-world), and for which you don’t have that much tangible evidence to convince them with yet. So your pitch needs to be somewhat like pitch v.1 (step 3), but will include more data that you collected for your business-plan, but presented concisely and clearly showing how you will meet a need, how you plan to make your investors their money back + some more, how you will reduce the risk for them (very important!), and what you see their role to be in your business, apart from cash-cow—this only applies to active investors, such as business angels, not banks or subsidies, though not all business angels are able to be active (though they should always be able to help with contacts), and some bankers may surprise you.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: all the material from the previous steps, and similar skills as for pitch v.1. You need to speak a language that early-stage (!) investors understand!

Step 7: approaching early-stage investors

Banks & subsidies are easy to find, though sometimes you still need a little help and/or an intro; generally, banks want a lot of securities, sometimes already having a subsidy agreement and working with other, more experienced investors helps a great deal. Subsidies are a b*tch, as they make you do a lot of paper-work and impose some rules, and they generally work best for innovative, sustainable, or export-related ideas.

Business angels are a little harder. Usually, it helps going through trustworthy (& older) people that have built a network themselves. I can’t say more about that, except that entrepreneurs should avoid acting predatory and avoid predatory investors (both happen way too frequently), and you can mostly control the first (yourself), not so much the latter (though it helps going through someone you know).

Good knowledge to have at this stage: know your business-plan inside out; know how to present it and the financial data concisely; people-skills, in terms of evaluating the people you meet and selling yourself; having a network helps; having a good team in place helps a lot; having collateral helps with banks; having a tolerance for bureaucracy helps with subsidies, as does an association with a public research-institute (e.g. an incubator or your university).

Step 8: preparing an action-plan

Technically, this should’ve been part of your business-plan (step 5), but the point is that you now have money, you’ve made certain agreements based on it, and your objective is to use that money wisely to get your business off the ground. So now you need to decide what spending needs to be done, preferably as little as possible, and how to quickly get to the next stage. If you’re in web/software, you should already have a prototype, and focus on developing it, and build an early customer-base. In which case, you need someone to do the developing and someone to do the marketing/selling; usually technical staff outweighs the marketing staff at this stage, the latter often being the role of the entrepreneur himself. If you’re into high-tech, a prototype still needs to be built, which means technical work. This stage is really too specific to generalise; it depends on the type of product, business, and industry. Something in bio- or meditech, for instance, can take a decade to complete.

You also need to decide on whether your basement/garage will be enough, and on what type of legal protection your product needs, as well as the legal structure of your business. Which includes talking to lawyers, like this one.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: an understanding of what the new stakeholders in your business require; the ability to focus on what matters most for your business; a holistic understanding of a wide variety of business-matters, including hiring-practices, location-choice, development, legal & accounting tasks.

Step 9: spend (wisely)

Hire the people that you need, try to find smart ways to get smart people for cheap, either through internships, summer-programmes, or stock-options. And some smart people obviously need to be paid more or less what they are worth.

Locate cheaply while developing. For software, I’d suggest Eastern Europe, close to software-universities, but a basement in Paris/Berlin/London/Amsterdam also works of course, though both the location and the people will come at a premium. Important is to consider that many investors prefer you to be geographically accessible, as do customers.

Find viral ways to market, if you’re at that stage already. Thank you, internet, for existing, but free press also helps. Find smart ways to acquire customers, e.g. involve them in product-development, use them for word of mouth and case studies, partner up with good companies, etc. This is again very product-, company-, and industry-specific.

Build synergies between partnerships & investors; again really a step 7 problem, but it helps when your lawyer or your US/Asia-based marketeers are also investors. I’m also a fan of synergies in the HR-department; giving employees stock-options is not only cheaper, but also serves as a motivator. Of course always be careful who you choose to give part of your company to!

Good knowledge to have at this stage: everything from the steps until now; people-, negotiation- & management-skills, guts to market & sell; the dedication to work as many hours as it takes; etc.

Step 10: pitch v.3 – approaching round 2 (series A round) investors

While building your business, you should also build your business-plan and have a much better idea of the inputs for your valuation and the (projected) revenue-potential. And you should have surrounded yourself with a nice set of advisors and “network-nodes” that get your business-plan to be placed on top of a pile somewhere. You’ll still need a pitch of course, but that shouldn’t be a problem anymore at this stage.

Good knowledge to have at this stage: everything from before, especially how to pitch and what to pitch; and a network helps tremendously.

Step 11: round 2 (series A) investors

Bearing in mind that over 80% of businesses don’t make it this far, in theory, a business goes through a number of stages, before ultimately going public or being acquired. Web-businesses have distorted that process somewhat, as has the Enron-aftermath. But many early-stage investors may wish to be bought out at this point, an exit for them, and you may even want to do the same. VCs like replacing entrepreneurs with experienced CEOs, especially if the entrepreneur is a technical person, who will then likely be “promoted” to something like CTO or CIO. Investors do this because they have to account for the money they invest in you, and hence have to show their “bosses” that they do everything possible to mimimise people-risk.

While there are cultural & VC-specific differences, the risks that you need to have already covered here are usually both technology- and market-risk, translating into a workable product and one that preferably already has customers (lined up).

Good knowledge to have at this stage: either the ability to grow with the business; i.e. become more of a manager, less of an entrepreneur; or the ability to step back.

Step 12: launching the rocket-ship

A good VC will take your business far, and that’s where I’ll end it.

Some further reading

If you haven’t read enough already…

• “Valuation – Maximizing Corporate Value.”
• “Crossing the chasm” – on tech-marketing, -sales, and -strategy.
• Venture Hacks’ Term Sheet Hacks – on investors, mostly
• Ask the Wizard – on lot’s of interesting entrepreneurship problems
• TechITEasy.org – on lots of interesting tech & business-subjects, if you dig deep, i.e. use the search.

This may qualify as the longest post on Tech IT Easy, I don’t know. I think I covered the main topics on a global level and obviously there are plenty of feedback loops and some short-cuts, but please let me know if there’s things I missed!

Vincent

P.S. I’m always interested in building great companies, as well as discussing this topic. So if you’re a smart (tech-)person, looking for a biz dev. guy, or you just want to discuss you idea in confidence, feel free to give me a shout.

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Trying to digest a cheesy crust pizza this noon, I was wondering if instead of a pizza I was carrying a baby. The good thing was that there would be two of us going back to work, even if the one was rather unqualified to give me hand. What a delight for my pizzababy to grow mentally through this early job! Apart from hanging around with Bruckner’s twins (le Divin Enfant) getting early to work will permit it to develop the working flexibility that parents preannounce and corporations tend to establish through rotation programs.

So, how often will it switch jobs? Every 3 years, two times a year, each month or…. why not several times a day?

Assumption: A job may less and less be outline of your style, status and skills, THE choice that you make in your self-creative youth and pursue with passion until your hands have shrunk and you mumble wisdoms on professional resilience to your children.

It seems (to me, to you too maybe?) that jobs get more and more project–centric, existing-skills based, time and locality indifferent.

with Theme-generated-tasks’ accomplishment  transforming into task accomplishment around a theme.

The digital business field, where change is well in advance, brings up a strong trend on segmentation of the classical notion of job.

Two examples on the internet can tell the story:

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk

and

Innocentive

These two companies propose a per task remunerated employment, amazingly different as regarding necessary skills.

Amazon’s Mechanical Turk mostly addresses the non qualified workforce and Innocentive the ultra specialized scientific one. The concept on both is that you’re hired on a per project basis, for a translation, to prove the Fermat Theorem or to fill in the ISO forms.

It is then highly important to have a personal job management system to handle contests you participate and your prizes, puzzle your profile and communicate with trusted professionals.

A sort of e-mployment survival kit to prevent you from e-xploitation.

This vast talent pool of potential Mechanical Turks, scientists and everyone between, also creates opportunities for providers of meta-HR services to aggregate and compose job particles into a real job.

Providers such as advisors, agents and therapists:

social engineers, serial trendsetters, legal timing planners for fringe technology testers (“get the trial before the action is criminalised with a law”), real life rehabilitation mentors (“get rid of Wii gestures when in the grocer’s”), tec-addiction therapists, viral marketing therapists/ digital image makers (banal already maybe), mini-krach recoverers, startup estate agents, other (attention, this is not a generic term, it can be a job where you are paid to differentiate and foster evolution), and so on.

A combination of a middlejob with a classical one or the mix of various middlejobs could result in a steady plus variable income, mental coherence and growth, an optimised planning and a life-job balance.

On the “which?” the question is open. On the “how many?” 2 jobs maybe ok while 3 or more could definitely assure the statics of the e-mployement construction. …

Job- memo for my pizzababy: Exercise with 3 or more jobs, with an hourly basis frequency, vary the status. In case you need help call your agent.

After it was digested I went back to work.

Georgia

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