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Twenty Somethings ?

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 15:52:06 +0100

A great article appeared in this weekend's NY Times Magazine regarding Gen Y - twenty-somethings.

Read the entire story here or download it here.

Some insights from the article are below. Marketers beware - serving this market will be more difficult than ever.

"The 20s are a black box, and there is a lot of churning in there. One-third of people in their 20s move to a new residence every year. Forty percent move back home with their parents at least once. They go through an average of seven jobs in their 20s, more job changes than in any other stretch. Two-thirds spend at least some time living with a romantic partner without being married. And marriage occurs later than ever. The median age at first marriage in the early 1970s, when the baby boomers were young, was 21 for women and 23 for men; by 2009 it had climbed to 26 for women and 28 for men, five years in a little more than a generation."

What Motivates Us?

Wed, 04 Aug 2010 19:16:54 +0100

A couple of great messages to consider and think about for leaders of all types and all types of organizations.

What Motivates Us - Daniel Pink and his new book Drive - is great and offers useful insights for entrepreneurs and leaders.

Watch - http://youtu.be/u6XAPnuFjJc

A second article worth reading is from David Brooks in the NYTimes - which is a summary of two ways of thinking about life, one that emphasizes the individual and one that emphasizes circumstances.

Read - http://nyti.ms/b9IX4z

Bottom line - for entrepreneurs is to know thyself.

GradGuard - Some thing for Every Student at Every College

Wed, 21 Jul 2010 15:52:46 +0100

You may already be aware, but one of our companies is NGI Group which has created GradGuard. The news release below highlights a new product that is of interest to every full-time student attending every college in the nation. Read on for why all parents should consider insuring the cost of education.

Tuition insurance is now available to any student enrolled in an accredited higher education institution through the first-ever national group policy made available by GradGuard™, a service of Next Generation Insurance (NGI) Group, LLC.

The announcement, made by NGI Chief Executive Officer, John Fees, comes as families of more than 14 million full-time students prepare to send their sons and daughters to college this September. Until now, the family investment in tuition and related expenses — which averages between $15,213 and $35,636 for one year in a four-year undergraduate program, according to The College Board — was a gamble.

According to a 2009 study by Student Monitor, 27 percent of students had to themselves, or knew someone who had to, withdraw from college mid- semester due to health issues or a death in the family. Until now, tuition insurance was typically available only at select private colleges and universities.

Said NGI’s Fees, “Parents may mistakenly believe that colleges refund tuition in the case of unexpected illness, injury or even death. In fact, a 2010 study by College Parents of America indicates that most colleges and universities do not provide a full refund if a student is forced to withdraw from school for medical reasons. Through GradGuard, all parents and students now have the opportunity to protect their investment in education.”

GradGuard’s tuition insurance program provides up to $50,000 of annual tuition insurance for the non-refunded financial loss associated with the cost of attending college. The GradGuard plan is available to students nationwide and covers verifiable losses connected to the cost of attendance. This includes not only the loss of non-refunded tuition payments, but also academic fees, room and board, books and travel to and from the academic program.

“For many families, tuition is the largest expenditure after their home. We send our children off to school with a great deal of optimism, as we should. As with other standard insurance products – life, travel, auto – the concept is based on hoping for the best but being prepared for the worst," said Fees.or graduate programs, and can be purchased at any time with coverage for any accredited institution. It is also available to international students studying in the U.S. and to American students studying abroad. GradGuard also offers the Student Protection Plan™, a bundle of insurance and lifestyle benefits designed to protect college students including emergency medical evacuation insurance, identity theft protection and resolution services, and protection for their personal computers.

NGI developed the blanket tuition insurance policy for College Parents of America, a national membership organization of current and future college parents, in order to give members and their families a convenient and effective way to protect their college investment. GradGuard’s tuition refund plan offers families flexible coverage with levels ranging from $5,000 to $50,000 with affordable monthly or annual payment options.

College Parents of America President James A. Boyle said, “Not all families need $50,000 of annual coverage, but nearly every student would benefit from having at least $5,000 of annual coverage. Even if a college has a generous refund policy, it is unlikely that a student will ever be refunded the cost for academic fees, books or room and board.”
“With college costs increasing annually, and the substantial number of students who are at risk of leaving college for medical reasons, it makes sense for parents to protect their investment in education with tuition refund insurance,” added Boyle.

"a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a ...

Sat, 08 May 2010 21:23:30 +0100

David Brooks, writing on April 6th in the New York Times wrote an optimistic article about the good news for the future of America and its economy. The article relies heavily on data from “The Next Hundred Million: America in 2050,” über-geographer Joel Kotkin - which he claims "sketches out how this growth will change the national landscape. Extrapolating from current trends, he describes an archipelago of vibrant suburban town centers, villages and urban cores." This and the data that supports that the American population is expected to grow to be over 400 million over the next 40 years should give us confidence to invest and believe in new forms of economic growth and opportunity.

Read the article for yourself but enjoy the quote that follows "the U.S. is on the verge of a demographic, economic and social revival, built on its historic strengths. The U.S. has always been good at disruptive change. It’s always excelled at decentralized community-building. It’s always had that moral materialism that creates meaning-rich products. Surely a country with this much going for it is not going to wait around passively and let a rotten political culture drag it down."
This last quote is also a reminder that the major issues facing our nation and society including, but not limited to, immigration reform, affordability of health care, energy independence and educational achievement / quality - our government seems incapable of addressing successful.

The moral of the story: Fail Fast

Mon, 26 Apr 2010 04:13:24 +0100

Today's New York Times has a great article - posted below regarding a new model for starting companies. I am not sure it is a new model or a reminder of adapting to customer focused feedback. My view is that the real theme captured by the thinking below is to "fail fast". Which means, most entrepreneurs have a great hypothesis for creating a business - they identify a problem, they have a solution and they choose a medium and price to deliver it at. The challenge is not to over design the solution - but to create an MVP - the minimum valued product - that which a customer will pay for and that which demonstrates to investors and others the value being created. The article below is another great reminder of this theme for all entrepreneurs and investors. Enjoy.

By STEVE LOHR

ERIC RIES and Steven Blank think they have a better way to build a start-up, one that takes less time and money to try new ideas and find paying customers. They are leading proponents of the “lean start-up” — a fresh approach to creating companies that has attracted much attention in the last year or so among Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, technologists and investors.

The concept is gaining a following beyond the Valley as well. “If it works, it will reduce failure rates for entrepreneurial ventures and boost innovation,” says Thomas R. Eisenmann, a professor at the Harvard Business School. “That’s a big deal for the economy.”

The term “lean start-up” was coined by Mr. Ries, 31, an engineer, entrepreneur and blogger. His inspiration, he says, was the lean manufacturing process, fine-tuned in Japanese factories decades ago and focused on eliminating any work or investment that doesn’t produce value for customers.

“This is lean manufacturing for start-ups,” explains Mr. Blank, 56, a serial entrepreneur.

Since 1978, he has been a founder or early employee in eight start-ups, both winners and losers. To cite a couple, Rocket Science Games, a once-promising video game maker, founded in 1993, cratered amid losses a few years later, while Epiphany, a business software company, founded in 1997, was acquired by a larger corporation for $329 million in 2005 — “one my grandchildren will be grateful for,” Mr. Blank notes.

Today, he advises start-up companies and teaches at Stanford and the University of California, Berkeley.

Technology animates the lean start-up process. Free open-source programming tools and easily distributed Web-based software drive down the cost of developing new products and services. The early companies embracing the principles live largely on the Web, which makes it possible to measure and track customer behavior constantly and to invite suggestions and criticism.

Internet companies have steadily taken advantage of the falling costs of getting up and running — often spending just hundreds of thousands of dollars instead of the millions that were required several years ago. But the lean start-up formula adds management practices tailored to exploit the Web environment.

The concepts apply both to designing products and to developing a market, and emphasize an early and constant focus on customers. To be sure, the methods often build on the work of others.

In product development, for example, Mr. Ries is an enthusiast of so-called agile programming methods, which emphasize rapid development, small teams and constant improvement. But, he adds: “The agile practices have to be adapted, shifting the focus somewhat from generating stuff to learning about what customers will want. Most technology start-ups fail not because the technology doesn’t work, but because they are making something that there is not a real market for.”

So the lean playbook advises quick development of a “minimum viable product,” designed with the smallest set of features that will please some group of customers. Then, the start-up should continually experiment by tweaking its offering, seeing how the market responds and changing the product accordingly. Facebook, the giant social network, grew that way, starting with simple messaging services and then adding other features.

The goal, explains Mr. Blank, is to accelerate the pace of learning. “A start-up is a temporary organization designed to discover a profitable, scalable business model,” he says.

Mr. Ries points to his own experience as a study in contrasts between the traditional start-up model and the lean approach. He was a senior engineer at There.com, a 3-D virtual world, from 2001 to 2003. There.com raised $40 million and spent years in stealth mode, building impressive technology, he recalls. But it had so much invested in one technology path and one business plan that the company lost its ability to change, Mr. Ries says.

To switch course, Mr. Ries joined a founder of There.com, Will Harvey, and in 2004 they started a company called IMVU, a social network in which users chat online and create personalized avatars. By design, it raised no outside money in the early going. “I didn’t want us to have the freedom to go for years without customer feedback,” recalls Mr. Harvey.

IMVU began as a bootstrap operation, a forerunner of the lean start-up model. Its early revenue goals were just a few hundred dollars a month. (Users buy clothing and other virtual goods for their avatars.) Today, while There.com has folded, IMVU claims one million active users — and is profitable, says Mr. Harvey, the chairman.

Many young Internet businesses have embraced the lean start-up principles of beginning small and getting products into the marketplace quickly in pursuit of paying customers. Several gathered last week at a conference in San Francisco, including representatives from Grockit, an online education network; KISSmetrics, a Web site measurement business; and Dropbox, an online file storage and sharing service. Others represented PBworks (Web collaboration tools), Flowtown (software for social media marketing) and Aardvark (a social network search service, recently acquired by Google).

THE rise of smaller, fleet-footed companies in the lean start-up mold is also bringing changes in venture financing. These companies are typically funded with $500,000 or so from professional angel investors instead of traditional venture capital firms, which are geared toward investing millions at a time. The venture capital investment may well come later, when the companies need money for expansion.

But, according to some Silicon Valley veterans, this means a shrinking role for venture capitalists in seeking and backing promising young entrepreneurs. That vital task in the food chain of capitalism, they add, is increasingly being taken over by major angel investors like Ron Conway, Dave McClure and Mike Maples Jr.

“Venture capital has to reinvent itself for this world,” says Mitchell Kapor, an angel investor who has made 25 investments in lean start-up companies in the last two years.

Financing Higher Education & Health Care Reform?

Mon, 29 Mar 2010 16:38:13 +0100

Last week attached to the Health Care bill was a little noticed or discussed reformation of the nations student lending business. I won't debate the merits of either financing option (federal or private), but the public remains distracted by the main topic which is the rapidly increasing cost to attend college.

Just this weekend, the Boston Globe wrote about "the number of schools in the region that charge upwards of $50,000 annually for tuition, room and board, and mandatory fees is expected to more than double, according to a Globe survey of 20 colleges and universities. Just two years ago, less than a handful of schools cost that much (though many hovered just below the threshold.) Among the latest members of the $50K Club: Harvard, MIT, Wellesley, Brandeis, Brown, Dartmouth, and Holy Cross. They join Tufts, Boston University, Boston College, Smith, Mount Holyoke, and Babson, which all broke the barrier this year."

The only similarity to health care is the failure to let markets work. Both health care and higher education suffer from the price elasticity that comes from 3rd party payer systems. In the case of education, as long as there is a way to finance (borrow) to complete your education the costs seem to continually rise.

One of the posts in response to the article is something that I have also been concerned about. That is "Education is another bubble waiting to burst. It is a close parallel to the housing bubble, as some have noted. People are taking on debt they won't be able to pay and the colleges are like real estate agents, they don't care as long as they get their fees and pass the students on. More and more students will discover they've got a lifetime of debt as the lending interests have paid Congress to make these debts inescapable. Goldman Sachs can walk away from billions in commitments if they wish, but an ordinary person will be hounded for their college debt forever."

I also agree with the final analysis, that is "while there may be good strategies for a few individuals to avoid the worst of the bubble, there are not enough alternatives to take care of most students."

Bottom line, is that education is a great national resource and vital to the strength of our society and economy. However, the emphasis of colleges and public policy makers on the private benefits of a college education indirectly undermine the support required to keep it affordable for all. No easy answers here, but it is certainly worth expanding the scope of the discussion.

The Big Short - the value of being an outsider

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 04:05:56 +0100

I have enjoyed reading The Big Short by Author Michael Lewis. I recommend the book to everyone, not to learn about CDO's or even the money laundering machine that was built on Wall Street, but to discover the value of being an outsider. The value of being outside the system, immune a bit to the group think of heards / of the momentum of markets. Maybe that is why it is good to live in Omaha or other places where you can get perspective on how to create real value and identify opportunities.

I think the same applies not just to investing, but for entrepreneurs. I particularly like entrepreneurs who are new to markets and consequently outside the group think that also happens in an industry. Read on or view the link below for more insights on the value of being an outsider.

On Wall St's Delusion - CBSNews
URL: http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/03/12/60minutes/main6292458.shtml

Former trader-turned author Michael Lewis writes about a handful of Wall Street outsiders who realized the subprime mortgage business was a house of cards and found a way to make millions betting against it.

Best Year Yet?

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 14:46:00 +0100

I am keenly interested in innovations in how society approaches learning. Outstanding content is always the starting point for great learning. With content as the base assumption there are many considerations for how which mediums to convey this content to students. The written word is still very powerful and I believe an integral part of many of the most effective approaches. Three companies that I have invested in approach learning in different ways. Flypaper enables content to be delivered in through powerful presentations. Atheneum Learning and Expert Negotiator are both experts in their respective fields.

So why the question - Best Year Yet? In part because I read the book in 2009 and think it has an effective model that integrates good content with multiple-mediums. It isn't the best example of the potential of online learning, but it is a good example of what works and importantly includes the follow-on tools necessary to improve the effectiveness of the online learning. I recommend reviewing - Best Year Yet and consider for a moment what learning objectives you have not only for yourself but for your organizations.

New Business - the engine for jobs and recovery

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 18:08:37 +0100

This is a useful insight by the Koffaman Foundation regarding the real source of new employment. For anyone worried about a jobless economic recovery, we should take the focus off of just small business and look to how our nation supports innovation. Today's WSJ article by Carl Schramm, Robert Litan and Dane Strangler correctly points out the facts behind job growth. "The conventional wisdom is that such businesses account for half of the labor force and are therefore the engine of future job creation. That's not quite the case. The more precise factor is not the size of businesses, but rather their age. According to the Census Bureau, nearly all net job creation in the U.S. since 1980 occurred in firms less than five years old. A Kauffman Foundation report released yesterday shows that as recently as 2007, two-thirds of the jobs created were in such firms. Put more starkly, without new businesses, job creation in the American economy would have been negative for many years." Let's focus the discussion on job growth and innovation. I believe this means less government regulation and disincentives for creating businesses. Without getting into the politics of it all, just think of what is involved to create a business the legal, financial and regulatory risks are overwhelming to most entrepreneurs.

No matter what type of leader you are - find the people with the Eggs and move them out of your ...

Thu, 22 Oct 2009 20:28:05 +0100

This article by David Koretz posted on MediaPost, struck me as something that would benefit my entrepreneurial friends, so I am passing it along not as a (tweet) but as something that will help make us think about our own companies and the organizations we are involved in building.

Organizations require different types of people at different stages. Although my business life is mostly spent in the first category, I am thankful to have always had a good team surrounding me that were strong 2s that helped us build real and enduring businesses. In terms of 3s' - that was the old corporate life and I think it gives us a good idea of what we should all be looking for in our own organizations - the folks walking around with the eggs!

Enjoy the reading and let me know if you agree or disagree with the summary.

_____________

http://www.mediapost.com/publications/?fa=Articles.showArticle&art_aid=115543

Every business and nearly every businessperson can be neatly put into one of three buckets.

While we all hate being categorized, most of us fit better than we would care to admit. In business, there are three buckets: 1s, 2s and 3s.

Ones are start-up types that are trying to go from zero-to-interesting. Twos are growth company folks that are attempting to build a scalable business. Threes are large, mature company people.

1s Manage Chaos
When a company is in this first phase, everything is messy.

You are trying to become an expert in your market, grow your team, outrun the competition, find the biggest problem to solve, and build a product to solve this problem all at the same time, and before you run out of money.

Inevitably, things are going to break. Mistakes are going to be made. Tons of them. This is healthy, normal, and completely terrifying to someone who is risk-averse or loves process and order.

What makes 1s great is their ability to do two things: make thousand-dollar mistakes instead of million-dollar mistakes, and, more importantly, correct quickly.

1s have huge energy, creativity, an extremely high tolerance for risk, and an overly optimistic worldview that often blinds them to that risk.

I am a 1. It is messy, awkward, terrifying, and the most fun I could possibly imagine.

If you are a 1, you know it instantly. You read this nodding your head, and you can spot another 1 from a mile away.

2s Create Structure
At some point in a company's evolution, the same hypomanic energy that created the business will ultimately destroy it if left unchecked.

That is why 2s are equally important. Twos love order, process, and structure. They are great at identifying broken processes and improving them. They are good at aligning an organization around a strong culture. They are experts at putting just enough structure in place to balance speed and risk.

When 2s take over, 1s start to flee. This is the healthy evolution of a business. It is why the oft-hyped employee turnover at Facebook, Twitter, Google, and others is often not a reflection of the health of the business, but rather an indication that the business has evolved and needs a new set of skills.

The challenge for a company in this phase is to retain some of the 1s that drove the innovation, and develop a culture that respects the vast chasm that exists between 1s and 2s and enables both to be happy and effective.

3s Carry Eggs
My first-grade class was given a bizarre assignment: carry a raw egg around for 24 hours.

We had to drag this egg from class to class, to our after-school activities, to friend's houses, and then back to school the next morning. It was supposed to show us how hard it is to raise a child. In reality it was just a major pain in the ass, as I had neither the desire nor the opportunity to become a father in the first grade. I was still wearing sweatpants and thick glasses, so even a first date, let alone procreation, was a stretch.

As a klutzy kid, there was nearly a 0% chance of me returning this egg intact. I broke it, cleaned up, and replaced my broken egg with one from our refrigerator three times before I got smart and just left it in the refrigerator and grabbed it on the way to school the next morning.

It is incredible how distracted you get dragging around an egg. You become fixated on trying not to break it -- and end up missing all the things happening around you.

Most large company's CE's are egg carriers.

Their No. 1 goal is to not drop the egg. Any CEO can survive an earnings call that disappoints the street, or schmooze analysts about the lack of growth -- but drop the egg, and you're toast.

As a result, success breeds a fixation on maintaining the empire, and in the process creates complacency and a huge aversion to risk.

The more money you make, the more time you spend protecting your assets and the less time you spend growing them. Ultimately, you spend all your time just trying not to break the egg.

This is what kills mature companies, and what is strangling today's media companies.

Among the many problems, they are trying to hang on to a CPM pricing model that is clearly broken. They are creating ridiculous metrics to try and defend their value. They create industry associations to analyze and reanalyze the problem. They spend their time at industry conferences debating how we got to this sad state. They cling to thousands of small ad networks, rich-media providers, ad agencies, and dynamic ad companies as potential solutions that only divide an ever-shrinking pie.

If you spend all your time and energy trying to keep the world from changing, you prevent yourself from innovating.

And in the process, you drop the very egg you were trying to protect..