Entrepreneurship - Category Archive

Dwolla – New Payment System Sidesteps Credit Cards
 |  December 1, 2011

by Alyson Shontell – There’s a tiny 12-person startup churning out of Des Moines, Iowa. Dwolla was founded by 28-year-old Ben Milne; it’s an innovative online payment system that sidesteps credit cards completely. Milne has no finance background yet his little operation is moving between $30 and $50 million per month; it’s on track to [...]

How to Lead With Purpose
 |  November 16, 2011

by Marla Tabaka – The purpose-driven company is led by someone who has a reliable inner compass guiding them. John Baldoni asks: What’s your direction? Can you describe the purpose of your business in a single sentence? Do you—and does every single person who is connected with your organization—have a reason to believe in that [...]

PovertyCure – From Aid to Enterprise
 |  October 13, 2011

PovertyCure is an international network of organizations and individuals seeking to ground our common battle against global poverty in a proper understanding of the human person and society, and to encourage solutions that foster opportunity and unleash the entrepreneurial spirit that already fills the developing world.

Entrepreneurs: Leading the Way Out
 |  March 7, 2011

by Greg Pesci – Entrepreneurs, free to pursue their economic dreams, built America! They are, and always have been, its creators of jobs, growth, and wealth. In 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America:“It may be said that, in the United States, there is no limit to the inventiveness of man to discover [...]

Just Manic Enough: Seeking Perfect Entrepreneurs
 |  September 21, 2010

9/18/2010 – David Segal – Imagine you are a venture capitalist. One day a man comes to you and says, “I want to build the game layer on top of the world.” You don’t know what “the game layer” is, let alone whether it should be built atop the world. But he has a passionate [...]

Entrepreneurship Helps Make America Great
 |  June 30, 2010

6/30/2010 – John Stossel – For all its problems, America is a great place. And one thing that makes America great is its prosperity. Yes, some people have suffered during the recession — but compared to all the other countries in the history of the world, America is rich. Why? One reason is that America [...]

The 20 Most Important Questions In Business
 |  June 17, 2010

6/17/2010 – Christopher Steiner and Brett Nelson – Entrepreneurs can’t completely inoculate their businesses from the vagaries of the market. What they can do is wrestle with the fundamental questions that govern the fate of any enterprise. We’ve done our best to compile the 20 most important ones. Digging for those answers is a grueling [...]

The Power Of Personal Passion
 |  May 26, 2010

5/26/2010 – Eileen Gittins – How entrepreneurs can turn what they love doing into successful businesses. Most people think about their jobs as the thing they do, instead of the thing they get to do. When you can build a culture where people feel privileged instead of entitled, that’s magic. And that’s what the best [...]

Message to an Entrepreneur: You’re a Chump
 |  April 30, 2010

4/28/2010 – Mike Whalen – Washington Times – Major policy changes can have long-term cultural implications. Major changes can impact behavior almost immediately, but the real cultural implications are a result of the often subtle changes in individual attitudes. With the Obama administration, I believe we will see such cultural changes. I am an entrepreneur. [...]

Can Entrepreneurship Be Taught To Big Business?
 |  April 23, 2010

Forbes.com | by Matt Symonds | 4/23/2010 Entrepreneurship has become big business. Nearly two-thirds of all the colleges and universities in the U.S. offer formal courses in it, 10 times as many as in the 1970s, when only 200 institutions had the temerity to think they could teach such a thing. Now business schools are [...]

Lessons From a Blue-Collar Millionaire
 |  February 28, 2010

Inc.com | by Bo Burlingham | 2/1/2010 When Nick Sarillo launched his pizza business, he had one goal in mind: to create a corporate culture unlike any he had seen. It’s Takeout Tuesday at Nick’s Pizza & Pub, and the air is thick with the smells of hot pizza crust, peppers, onions, and cheese. Eighteen [...]

Why B-Schools Set Up Entrepreneurs To Fail
 |  February 28, 2010

Forbes.com | by Sramana Mitra | 2/26/2009 Business schools need to focus on bootstrapping, not only raising money from VCs. I know I am entering highly contentious territory. Academia generally looks down upon entrepreneurs even as they teach entrepreneurship in business schools and other university programs around the world. Meanwhile, I have come to observe [...]

The Way I Work: Kathy Ireland
 |  February 18, 2010

Inc.com | As told to Liz Welch | 12/1/2009 Former supermodel Kathy Ireland founded a little company to make products for “busy moms” like herself. Now, with revenue of $1.4 billion, she’s busier than ever. When she was in her 20s and a model, Kathy Ireland says, her job description was “Shut up and pose.” [...]

Five Attributes Of Enduring Family Businesses
 |  February 15, 2010

Forbes.com | by C. Caspar, A. Dias, H. Elstrodt | 1/15/2010 The keys to long-term success are professional management and keeping the family committed to and capable of carrying on as the owner. Family businesses are an often overlooked form of ownership. Yet they are all around us–from neighborhood mom-and-pop stores and the millions of [...]

Entrepreneurs Go on Strike
 |  November 26, 2009

American Thinker | by C. Edmund Wright | Nov. 20, 2009 Can Barney Frank dunk on Lebron? No, he cannot. Nor can anyone else in Washington. Nor can they catch passes from Ben Rothlisberger in the Super Bowl or strike out Derek Jeter in the World Series. They are not equipped to do so. So [...]

How to Liberate an Economy
 |  October 30, 2009

Entrepreneurs understand the importance of freedom in the workplace. City Journal | by Guy Sorman | October 21, 2009 Brian Carney and Isaac Getz’s Freedom, Inc. is a timely book. It’s also countercyclical and somewhat counterintuitive. After all, most of today’s writing about economics and business is haunted by the current crisis: nearly every author [...]

Capitalism: A True Love Story
 |  October 21, 2009

Forbes.com | by Steve Forbes | October 19, 2009 How is wealth created? Seemingly a strange question for Forbes readers, but the question is hardly an academic one in the wake of the credit crisis and ensuing global recession. It has profound political implications that will affect our economic future. Clearly, a sizable portion of [...]

How Aaron Patzer of Mint.com Made $170 Million in Two Years
 |  October 13, 2009

Inc.com | by Aaron Patzer | October 2009 Aaron Patzer launched Mint.com as a user-friendly alternative to Quicken and other personal-finance software out there. Little did he know that just two years later, Intuit, which makes Quicken, would fork over $170 million for his website. So how’d he do it?

Fix It – Even If It Ain’t Broke
 |  October 12, 2009

FastCompany | by Kaihan Krippendorff | October 12, 2009 When something works, people grow fixated on it. They stop looking for alternative options. And this fixation creates an opportunity for those willing to reconsider the accepted approach. The company I introduced last week, Rosetta Stone (RST), hasn’t been satisfied with the fact that its products [...]

How to Work More Like a Start-Up
 |  May 31, 2009

Inc.com | by Darren Dahl | May 2009 The first thing you notice when you walk into the Chicago offices of Total Attorneys, which provides software and services to small law firms, is the number of people on their feet. Every morning, the company’s 180 employees gather around the office in groups of five to [...]

From Crisis to Creative Entrepreneurial Liberation
 |  May 6, 2009

Acton.org | by Anthony B. Bradley | May 6, 2009 Necessity is the mother of invention, said Plato, and the truth of the proverb has been borne out once again. Necessity is generating entrepreneurial energy amid America’s current economic crisis, according to a new study by the Kansas City-based Kaufman Foundation. The study reveals an [...]

Inspired Misfires – How Hard Could It Be?
 |  February 4, 2008

Inc.com | by Joel Spolsky | February 2008 Why the most important innovations are often those that appear to be fatally flawed. I could fill a pretty long book with all the stories of times I thought that an idea was stupid and could never work, only to discover that, in fact, it was pretty [...]

Breaking Through
 |  January 20, 2008

Inc.com | by Mike Hofman | January 2008 How companies just like yours mushroomed into powerhouses in their industries. A conversation with Keith R. McFarland. How do you create a breakthrough company? Where do you start? First, I’d say that it’s not about being in a hot, sexy market. It’s not about having the coolest, [...]

The Nanny State in Space
 |  November 1, 2004

No sooner had SpaceShipOne safely landed in the Mojave Desert, making history as the first privately-funded manned space vehicle, than government officials rekindled their desire to regulate this nascent private industry. Such concern for the safety of future space travelers is commendable but somewhat disingenuous, given Congress’ rather poor record of oversight in maintaining the [...]