Celebrating Failure

         Just this past week I had a presentation for one class which is mostly case-based and in which presentations are worth more than the exams in terms of the grade. I had a lot of work into it together with my group to write the paper we were going to present on and then we also put a lot of effort into making sure then presentation would go smoothly. The morning of the presentation I woke up feeling unwell and yet I was not worried because I thought I had prepared well and by this time with the experience gained over the years I had overcome my fears of speaking before others. However as I approached the end of my segment, I phased out for a moment and forgot the last two points I was going to make. I took a moment to try to remember and could not even though had I just looked at one of the screens in front of me, these points were highlighted in that slide. I just had a moment of total black out and passed it over to the next person in the group. Although I was told the class barely noticed, I couldn’t help but blame myself for not having rehearsed enough and affecting our group’s overall performance. I learned that there is no substitute for practice and despite sickness sometimes you just need to pull it together and put forward the best you can.

My Exit Strategy

           I believe that exit strategy is something I would develop at least three years in and that it would a direct result of the progress made at that point. My thought at the moment is I would be willing to test the acquisition market and see if there is a potential large corporation who would be willing to pay a fair market price and who would have a lot to gain from integrating this firm into theirs and are willing to include that value in their valuation. The reason I would sell it so is so I get back to my list of ideas and the pick one that I would like to go with but which I couldn’t because it was too capital intensive for me to afford when I started this one. My entrepreneurship model is Elon Musk, who built company after company with the proceeds of the last one he sold in order to create the capital needed to go after the biggest, craziest ideas he had in mind. I don’t think my exit strategy would affect the way I make decision about the firm, at least until the very end before exit time is up.

Week 12 Reading Reflection

This week’s reading was about the strategic growth in Entrepreneurship. One major theme discussed is that this process is obviously new for all young companies have a first time at going through it and because of its complexity and the inexperience there is a lot of ways in which this can go wrong and important it is to be strategic and visionary along the way. The author lists misunderstanding industry attractiveness, pursuing unattainable competitive competitive position and failure to communicate the venture’s strategy to employees as few of the fatal visions to in growing a company. On the other hand a successfully growing venture is able to handle community pressures, learn continuously, manage time and plan well. There was distinctions drawn between an entrepreneurial style of leading versus managerial style.

Venture Concept No. 1

Venture Concept No. 1

-       Opportunity

When I first arrived in college, about 4 years ago, I signed up for classes, read the classe’s syllabi and quickly began to stress out about all the books I needed to buy. I realized that the cost of books was very high at the bookstore in campus and all out of sudden was faced with the reality of outrageous cost of education in this country, but as an unaffected foreigner up to that point I had just not experienced what the sources of these costs were. At first, I did what mostly all lost freshman do; buy the books wherever I could find them, at any cost, just because I thought it was super important to have them as soon as the semester starts. In the next semesters I realized, there was ways to save by using some of the online options, renting, seeking to buy from other students and so on. Never have I spent hundreds of dollars in books again before exploring all the options out there. However all these other options were very time consuming and so and inconvenient that often times I felt like giving up and just get them wherever I can. I realized that most students feel that way and that given the resources and technology we all have access too nowadays, it doesn’t have to be that way. We can build an integrated platform to facilitate the book sharing and in the process of making other people’s lives easier, helping reduce waste and damage to our only planet, make some money as well. The college student population was an enormous 50 million in 2015, and most of them could use some help in reducing college cost. The window of this opportunity is as long as we don’t entirely switch to e-books, which despite recent trends is difficult to see happen before the next decade is over.

Innovation

The only thing that is innovative about this concept is putting together a number of resources that we have been using a long time now, to create a service that facilitates a process that is utterly scattered at the moment and very inefficient. The examples of not so genius concepts  that have turned into incredibly successful business models are plentiful; Facebook is one of them, there had been plenty of social networks before it and after it, but Facebook simply happened because of few details it got right, better than the competition combined with other circumstantial  factors such as timing and context. Our website Care2Share.org is going to be a place where you find the books other people no longer need by just searching by class code and avoiding all the searching effort it takes anyplace in internet to put each class’ materials together. Similarly, those who want to get rid of these books will just as effortlessly be able to list those books in that website by just submitting them whereas the listing is done online. Whenever an order is made and a transaction takes place, 20% of the of it will go to Care2Share for the services provide and the other 80% will go to the supplier of the book a much better deal than anyone in the market currently provides.

Venture Concept

Currently college students are mainly purchased in three ways, bookstore, online (amazon and chegg) or bought from peers via Facebook posts or cragslist. The direct competitor to our concept are amazon and chegg, which have been widely successful. Their weakness is essentially their strength; they are large companies with a tremendous reach and penetration of the market that I believe they are not inclined to look at the problem with the customers’ eye anymore. To go and post in any of the platforms for each individual book is pretty tedious process and same goes with other end of the process which is searching for a book you need. Given the amount of the books these websites have listed there is always to get the wrong book because of a mismatching author, ISBN or whatever other minor characteristic of the book. Also, although economies of scale these companies have reached do have their benefits, the fact that they store their books in few large warehouses means that there is shipping cost involved that we do not incur. I have heard people say that shipping is free; that is a good marketing trick but nothing comes free my friend, for Amazon you’re paying the prime membership which depending on your shopping volume may or may be not worth it, and for any other platforms that claims free shipping, it just means the shipping cost is included in the product or service price itself; to counter that we will have to prove that our cost is lower by at least however much the shipping cost for Amazon would be. I think this is a major selling point for us not just for it proves why we would be cheaper but also more environmental and less wasteful. Why should you buy a book that comes from a warehouse in Minnesota when the same number of students take that same finance class every year; with our platform these books never leave Gainesville because and they shouldn’t have to.

As for the secret sauce of the company, I frankly right now believe it is the mere fact that people are too stuck in the status quo in the moment and won’t realize before it is too late that this actually works. It is the same secret sauce Tesla had. People had failed making cars electric, why would Musk succeed? Oops, they work, well now it is too late to rival Tesla’s position in people’s mind as the absolute leader in the section of the market.

The next thing for the venture would be expanding this service to lower levels of education and go beyond college textbooks. Another layer would be partnering with schools and government to make collective effort to reduce cost of education which is a good to society as a whole.

In five years from now, assuming this venture is successful, I see myself going back to my list of start up ideas that aim at making a contribution to the people and the planet. I want to use the experience and resources to help developing countries like my own (Kosovo) catch up with the world, create opportunities and value for other aspiring people like myself.