Cisco, Oracle, Lotus, Atari: all technology businesses that were start-ups during economic downtimes.  BusinessWeek's Spencer Ante spoke with some entrepreneurs who saw opportunities during recessions and shares some of their advice.  The article is yet another reminder that a lot of top American businesses owe some of their success to the decisions their founders made that ran against the economic tide.  As Harvard Business School's Tom Nicholas tells Ante, "Recessions can be really useful strategic opportunities."  Ante goes on to write:

Entrepreneurs, financiers, and historians point to several reasons for this phenomenon. For starters, everything is cheaper during a downturn, including the cost of labor, materials, and office space. There's less competition, both from incumbents that are trying to put out their own fires and from startups that find it harder to raise money. And the tough times force entrepreneurs to work on their business models earlier, so they end up reaching profitability more quickly than when money comes cheap. "The companies are tougher because they were tested during a tougher time," says Carl Schramm, president of the Kauffman Foundation, an organization that promotes entrepreneurship.

The advice in the article, though not necessarily brand new, serves as a good reminder to entrepreneurs to match up core strengths with clear opportunities.  And most of all, believe in what you are doing as you build a company and a culture. 

Another key lesson is to pick markets strategically, says Umang Gupta, who joined database maker Oracle (ORCL) in 1980 as employee No. 17 and wrote its first business plan. Ultimately, the company wanted to build a database program that would work with multiple types of computers, from minicomputers to PCs to mainframes, those hulking machines that crunched massive amounts of data. But Oracle couldn't do it all at once. It started out creating a database that worked on minicomputers such as Digital Equipment's PDP-11. Then Oracle methodically went upstream, pursuing mainframes next, rather than going for mainframes and PCs at the same time. "We concentrated our bets," says Gupta, now CEO of Internet measurement firm Keynote (KEYN). "We built a culture of an extremely focused, aggressive company."

Read the full article here.