Welcome to Week4 – Entrepreneur Bootcamp

I’m glad everyone participated in the analyst bootcamp so energetically.  Some really good points were made about the ventures, but also the process of analyzing ventures (as this week was obviously practice for your A1!).  I trust the exercise was useful in getting you to assume the mindset of an analyst and investor.  Being an “angel” investor myself, I can affirm that the activity becomes much more focused when it is your own money and business savvy people are looking for!  I hope many of you seek the chance to do this yourselves (as an angel, partner, or “friends and family” investor).  The statistics are that well less than 10% of ventures ever return money to their investors, and less than 1% make a big return, so it’s useful to have a healthy respect for the risk that investors are taking.

Before I introduce our next bootcamp I’d like to cover some housekeeping points just so that we’re all on the same track together.

Tags/Categories:  Please try to use appropriate tags and categories when you make your posts.  If you look on the right hand side of this window under Categories there is now an “uncategorized” category populated by posts which haven’t been given their proper home.  Whereas these aren’t necessarily ‘lost’ (they appeared in the main stream of the blog), if they were meant to have impact in a specific area (such as one of our polls) they would have had no effect without being in the right category.  The authors of these uncategorized posts can go back and rescue them (edit them to give them a category home) if they wish.

Plugins & Experiments:  In the last week we used a new ratings plug-in for the first time (I’ll open up the cumulative ratings of the Pitch Pool ventures shortly).  WordPress has all kinds of special-duty plugins and extensions.  I absolutely can’t promise anything, but if you’d like to research available plugins and experiment with one for your EMT week (A2), I’m happy to explore with our technical crew whether this is possible.

Syncopation:  As a major element of courtesy and synchronous participation (hence my unfortunate abuse of the word “syncopation”) I’d like everyone to begin scrupulous observance of our week-to-week topic schedule.  Most specifically, please don’t post or reply to a topic which has already concluded, unless it provides some significant benefit to the subject of active conversation.  Especially as our EMT groups get started, it will be discourteous to interrupt the flow they’re trying to create with some post that is out of turn or a non sequitur.  If any given week has been so busy that you can’t participate by end-of-day Sunday (our transition time), it will be better for your participation mark (A4) if you simply don’t participate at all in that week.  Thanks!  

A1:   By now you should be working hard on your A1 assignments.  Don’t hesitate to email me if you have any questions.

For this coming week we’re looking at what it takes to be the biggest risk-taker: the entrepreneur, intrapreneur and innovator.  For any of you that have started or run a business, you’ll know that the personal burden on time, relationships, etc, is usually greater than the money. Yet people still do it, for lots of great reasons.   This week will allow you to explore and reflect on this, and perhaps discover more of the entrepreneur in yourself!

Have fun,

David

Posted in: Announcements, Week 04: Entrepreneur Bootcamp