Week 8 Reading Reflection

As an aspiring entrepreneur this the chapter I looked most forward to read. Source of capital is usually the first problem people bring up when you introduce an idea to them: “where are you going the money they ask?”. It was revealing and relieving to find out the sources of capital are numerous, diverse and at the same time challenging because I would not want to be just be funded and waste someone else’s hard earned money in a project that I have pursued without much thought or hard work put in it. The abundance of options, not that it easy to get to each of them at any time, makes it a little difficult to decide which one to aim for. Both debt and equity financing have have their (dis)advantages. The myths about venture capitalists were an interesting list of things to be aware of before approaching one. It is indeed important they for example they don’t only focus on technology projects and if you have a different idea you can still present it to them, as long as you can convince them how it would work to make yourself (and them) more money. I would like to ask the author how are important are synergies and skill/knowledge/background of people are they most satisfied to see in a project team before they make a decision?

Half-way Reflection

To be completely frank I wasn’t aware the class involved anything that it does when I signed up for it. It was one the last days of the drop/add and I was undecided about an extra class I wanted to take because I had too few credits left to graduate. Someone I asked for advice brought it up and I immediately liked the idea because it actually is something I want to pursue right after graduation. Having been raised in a very entrepreneurial family, creating and running a business has always been my ultimate goal and everything else as a means to it. However my organizational skills are not great and hence I found the number of assignment to do and share and declare at the beginning a little overwhelming. However I quickly realized I had to structure myself and take on these assignment one by one. Then came the part when you need to interview random people. On camera. At first I thought this was simply not going to be possible. I know myself I wouldn’t answer any such request positively easily. And in fact since week 3 I have yet to miss an assignment, that includes all the ones where you needed to approach people in the street and ask them to interview with you on camera. And every next time I did it, it felt a little easier. I reproved to myself that there is no skill or challenge that you can’t better at by doing more of it. And I believe that’s the way to become a more tenacious person. It is by realizing that you may be rejected and turned down or obstructed for and by various reasons and factors but if you stick to what you believe and have propose something of value your path to success will eventually clear. If you do not approach your goals and what drives you with this attitude, you may find yourself in a dead road, when the road is not really dead, you just haven’t tried hard enough to arrive at the next turn. My first tip to develop such a mindset is think about whether you know yourself well enough. Are you really doing what you love or what a combination of family, society and media opinion have forced upon you. Second, get yourself out there. Go and approach people, lack of experience can only be overcome by working on gaining that experience, and every new challenge will make anyone uncomfortable, but there is no other way around it than facing it. Thirdly, do not take anything negative personally. People who will try to put you down either are suffering inside themselves or trying to challenge you think your ideas further. Whatever the reason, take nothing personally, incorporate feedback into your future analysis and march on.  

The Twenty Percent

            For this assignment I interviewed the owner of a Mediterranean restaurant in midtown. To the question about who's their target customer he told me it was students and university staff mostly. He said they use no marketing whatsoever, all they rely on is word of mouth and location which in fact is not exactly noticeable easily since the restaurant is not in University Avenue but one of the streets that take you behind midtown. Then I asked about what they think their customer problems were. According to himself the only problem is they have no parking. When asked him whether this was a major problem, he replied with a strong yes, saying to many people it's their only problem, however when I asked him whether they have done anything about it he replied with a dismissive no claiming it wasn't something they were responsible for. On whether the customers have a budget allocated to the problem he replied most people don't want to pay for parking when they go to eat and this is a common problem for any business in mid town where parking is very scarce.

      Then I went on to interview the customers. He was right about the fact that students represent the largest customer base since all three customers I talked to were UF students. You can see the interviews recorded above. Parking was only mentioned by one of the three customers I interviewed. The other two complained about taste and the excessive use of oil in the the foods. In my question to whether they have voiced those problems to the restaurant they all responded negatively. Hence I believe that the restaurant has perhaps not sought actively for feedback and it is something they need to change. Also they probably should try to at least ease the parking problem if at all possible instead of neglecting it entirely and leaving it up to the customer themselves. To summarize I would say they only know one issue and should do more to adequately understand their customers's full experience of their offering; they need incentivize more feedback and make an effort to address customer's issues.  

Free Money

  This assignment was one that I was for some reason most concerned about. Although you are simply giving away something however little, valuable, I thought it was going to be difficult to approach people since it wasn’t food or another freebie you were offering but money. It doesn’t often happen that someone comes up to offer you free money without asking anything in return like getting attention to something they would be promoting or whatever be the case. For that reason I felt like whatever reason I would find would sound rather untrue and that approaching someone with money would always end up in the assumption that you were suggestive of something in any way. So I thought long and hard on finding a good reason why I would offer someone a dollar bill. We obviously couldn’t reference the class as a reason, and few first ideas that came to mind were that I was feeling charitable for some reason. Then I thought of something that is actually true about me, I hate to carry cash around. So I decided to go out and try if that would be a reason good enough that people would believe and not run away from me. I managed to get to give away 3 and was rejected twice. The people who accepted it were simply buying my story and did not over think it, free dollar, why not, was their reaction. The people who ran away basically, they didn’t even want to hear me out because perhaps they were suspicious of my motives, but it may also be that they too focused going to their next destination and thought there was a catch to my offer, which they would want to avoid. We do often walk past people who we believe are just going to waste our time with something we are not interested in. After the interaction was over and they were already walking away I would ask for their attention once again (those on camera), so I could let them know it was for class if I had the permission to use footage. This way I wanted to avoid anyone feeling they were taken advantage of, if they happen to run into the video online.

Week 7 Reading Reflection

     Perhaps because this piece was an excerpt of a larger work, it was most difficult to read and thoroughly understand. I believe the authors wasted too much time explaining how complex and unpredictable what they do is instead of getting to the point. I liked the fact they made many references to the past and brought to light how we often think to have developed quite uniformly across all fields of business but in fact there is many large corporations who do not understand segmentation in depth despite their immense financial resources, and as a result end up throwing good money after hopeless projects. I liked the Toyota example and their approach to selling a Prius, a car that was an electricity-combustion hybrid with less power and acceleration that similarly priced in United States. The car came out in the 90s, at a time when few people cared about the environmental footprint of using cars. However, Toyota found out that there is a segment out there who did care, and if they could be reached effectively, they would drive significant sales, which eventually proved true and materialized.

Elevator Pitch No. 2

          It was great to see all three comments on my last elevator pitch give me encouraging but also very constructive criticism. All three of them brought up the issue of lack of clarity on how this is going to work. On this elevator pitch I addressed that but explaining briefly how it will actually operate. Indeed that was difficult to do again, in 1 minute but I believe I have tried to summarize it best I could.

Customer Interviews No. 3

To those who haven't had the chance to read my previous posts, my idea is creating a marketplace for college textbook exchange, where you can list the books you no longer need and find the books you need for next semester, at a supposed lower cost that you would find in another alternative place (whether in store or online). In the the third and final round of interview my interviewing strategy was based on getting full and unbiased feedback, so as instructed I used an index card where I explained a little bit of technicalities of the service that I was proposing and how the exchange of books would logistically work (the steps to be taken in the websites). After the index card would be read, I would simply ask the potential customer what's their opinion without asking any specific question at the beginning. However after they had given their independent opinion  I did ask occasionally some questions in an attempt to maximize feedback.

Week 6 Reading Reflection

            Porter’s five forces represent an excellent piece of comprehensive approach to business strategy. I believe what Porter has brought is a pioneering approach is taking into account the buyer’s power of bargaining, before it actually became an obviously important factor with advent of giant online retailers like Ebay and Amazon and their customer review feature. All the five forces are the broken down in smaller, easy to understand and to also quantify to some extent, giving any strategist of a company a way to divide and conquer a task that’s rather complicated and hard to structure the work for. To me an important lesson from this reading is that there is different life stages of any company and depending on where you stand you must be aware of your strengths and weaknesses and then be aware when you the power to turn the tables around to advance your goals based on your earned advanced position with regard to your suppliers, competitors, substitute products and potential entrants. What I would like to ask the author is, if you are in an industry that is not so obviously positioned with regard to all forces, how would you go about finding where exactly do you stand, or at least where do you approximately stand?

Idea Napkin No. 1

            Growing up in a very entrepreneurial family has definitely shaped much of my perspective in life and my aspirations for the future. Neither of my parents have ever held a paid job and they have never grown comfortable of whatever situation they have ended up in. It is that type of spirit that has been embedded in me growing up. I try to look opportunities in every situation where an unmet need appears or a chance to introduce something new and useful to our lives. One such opportunity I see after having been in college for four years, is the lowering book prices for students. They are often outrageously high and there is system in place that helps them share a resource that by nature is very easy to share. What I believe would the solution to this is a platform where everybody can list the books they have used and no longer need and in return get the books they need for up coming semester. Basically this will create an exchange market space for students, where the company that is organizing this exchange takes a small percentage of the transactions. I believe this platform would quickly become the name of the game because educational costs in United States are overall very high and students are always mindful to ways of cutting cost. I intend to bring together a group of individuals that are similarly passionate about what’s possible, and who have a diverse variety of skills to put in this project.

               I believe the time has come that come together as students and join forces against multi billion industries that use every possible strategy to drain more out of squeezing bank accounts. By sharing what can be easily shared, we not only decrease cost we make this market more efficient and create value by lowering the environmental footprint and creating more room for spending in other areas.

Interviewing Customers No. 2

    In the second round of interviews with customers I decided to extend my questions further and be more detailed about what my offer plans as opposed to just focusing in identifying the unmet need. I also noticed a consolidation of my confidence in approaching random people and asking them for the interview. It was satisfying to find out people found the idea generally interesting, though some of it is may have been sugar coating as much I as tried to ask the questions neutrally.

Week 5 Reading Reflection

            This chapter serves as sort of a reality check and brings the discussion of opportunity and entrepreneurship to a more analytical level. The chapter does start by highlighting the tremendous number of startup (averaging at 1500 new ones per day), the high fail rate and the reasons why that happens. What I found interesting personally is performance is among things a result of the reasons for a start up, though I haven’t been exposed to this argument before, I strongly believe it must hold true for motivation must really drive most of any adventure, including an entrepreneurial one. I also find it important that the author points out the importance of research of the market as many entrepreneurs get carried away by unrealistic and subjective optimism and sometimes fail to account the need of insight in the market, adequate understanding of technical requirements, financial understanding etc. I found the eBay Entrepreneurship reading pocket very informative, and just as I was reading it I got inspired to think that opportunity in more detail. Importing Good Ideas reading pocket was quite interesting, and is something I think a lot about having lived in 5 different countries I have always seen ideas that I believe are very transferable as we as people mostly appreciate and like many of the same things. It was shocking to find out that poor timing (premature entry), according to a study, made for 40% of failure causes for new ventures.