KnowNOW!

Global Economic Watch

Syndication

Recent Posts

Tags

View more

Other Useful Blogs

Archives

  • What Peter Thiel Looks for in Startups

    In an interview with the Wall Street Journal's Alan Murray , Peter Thiel --founder of PayPal, Clarium Capital, and the Thiel Foundation--shares the key questions he asks when considering whether to fund a startup. The one that jumps out at us: "Why will the 20th person join your company?" Watch more of the interview here .

  • Majority of Young Americans Have the Entrepreneur's Bug, But Barriers to Starting a Business Remain High

    We already saw Millenials as an exceptionally entrepreneurial generation, but young Americans may be even more focused on starting their own businesses than we thought. Over half of Americans aged 18-34 either want to start a business or have already started one, according to a new Young Invincibles report. However, the would-be entrepreneurs see several barriers in their way. Here's a look at what respondents to the Young Invincibles survey saw as the biggest barriers in their way: Many would like the US Congress to clear a path for them. 65% of the Millenials surveyed want Congress to "prioritize making it easier to start a business." 83% want Congress to make it easier to get loans. Given the struggles some in the generation are having with their student loans , this is a generation that understands debt. Student loan forgiveness for young people who start businesses was also a popular fix to a common barrier, with 81 percent of survey respondents supportive of the idea. Young people of color are more likely to strongly support these suggestions. More young African Americans strongly support increasing access to credit and student loan relief (62 percent and 63 percent, respectively). The majority of young Latinos also strongly support these ideas (53 percent for both). Among all young people who have seen their debt increase, school loans (42 percent) make up the most common amount of increased debt. This is even more common among people under age 25 (54 percent have seen increased student loan debt). Thirty-two percent of young Americans have more than $5,000 in personal debt, not including a mortgage, and 25 percent are very worried about being able to pay off their current debt. Read the full report here .

  • Social Entrepreneur Peter Thum on Using Consumer Behavior to Fight Global Problems

    Peter Thum sees water as the big resource challenge of the century. Thum founded his social entrepreneurship venture, Ethos Water , with the idea to sell water in developed countries to pay for clean water programs in places that need them. It took a bit of time for the plan to come together and provide enough real revenue to make a difference, but then Starbucks stepped in and bought Ethos and the model proved scalable. Thum recently talked about how his idea for Ethos came about with Big Think :

  • Tips For Aspiring Young Entrepreneurs

    Erin Albert , author of the new book Single. Women. Entrepreneurs. , wants more young women to consider starting their own businesses. At Entrepreneur she offers up five tips on how to prepare for startup: 1. Get educated. 2. Get "intrapreneurial." ("Thinking and acting like an entrepreneur while working for someone else") 3. Get comfortable with failure. 4. Get out there. 5. Get fully committed. Read Albert's explanations for these important steps here .

  • Small Business Trends: 7 Key Principles for Small Business Success

    Melinda Emerson is the author of Become Your Own Boss in 12 Months , and she offers up advice to small business owners and entrepreneurs via #Smallbizchat on Twitter. So she's a bit of an evangelist for entrepreneurship. And she has found there are seven core principles for successful small business owners. In other words, she finds that successful small business leaders have: An entrepreneurial mindset, Strict fiscal discipline, A kitchen cabinet of advisors, A defined brand, A niche market, Excellent customer service, and Cash position and a good banking relationship. Read Emerson's analysis of these key principles at Small Business Trends , here .

  • The Case for Employees Managing Their Own Personal Brands, With or Without Corporations

    In a column at Forbes , Glenn Llopis argues that the employer-employee relationship has changed so significantly, that many motivated employees have limited incentive to stay. Llopis--founder of the Center for Hispanic Leadership and the Center for Innovation and Humanity , and former executive with Sunkist and Norway Seafood, is bullish on the idea that employees should develop personal brands. And he believes most corporate workplaces today are ill equipped to ride the entrepreneurial spirit of its employees: In today’s ‘new normal’ workplace, reinvention of an organization has less to do with the organization’s brand, and more do to with its people. If an organization allows its employees to have a greater freedom of expression, they will be able to be more entrepreneurial and to contribute more. In order words, organizations must unleash control and allow their employee’s personal brands to flourish in meaningful and purposeful ways. If not, innovation will be short-lived and organizations will become more vulnerable to competitive threats in today’s short-term, rapid-paced, talent-dependent, fast changing, virtual, trust-demanding world of work. For the individual, there must be alignment between who you are (your true personal brand) and the opportunities you pursue. If there is not, you will overlook opportunities you must not miss, and instead seize opportunities of less significance. This is why most people in today’s workforce are not inspired, and why they are seeking employers that will give them more purpose to showcase their individuality. Unfortunately, most people spend too much time being accountable for what others want them to be, rather than what they seek to be themselves. We have allowed corporations to manage our personal brand for too long, at a time when we need to turn ourselves around. We must understand our individual relevancy and the role we play in today’s post 2008 economy. People are forfeiting the opportunity to create a fortune continuously and don’t even know it. Read Why America’s Corporations Will Lose Control of Their Employees here .

  • The Search for the Next Big Thing(s) at SXSW

    The digerati are all in Texas for an extended weekend of partying, gaming, and strutting their stuff. It's the South By Southwest Interactive festival, and don't let the good time vibe fool you: this is serious business. As Mike Swift of the San Jose Mercury News writes: The 17-year-old fast-growing South By Southwest (SXSW) Interactive conference was the place where Twitter first came to prominence in 2007. It was the place in 2009 where the concept of smartphone location check-in services was first popularized by the New York startup Foursquare. SXSW remains one of the most fashionable places to seek out the emerging trends in personal technology, particularly on the mobile and social web. Still, even some young entrepreneurs worry that the mushrooming event is losing its soul, as corporations and what Rosenberg called "the beautiful people" are drawn by the money and cultural interest behind the boom in online social media. Read At South By Southwest Festival, entrepreneurs are the rock stars here . So who are the entrepreneur rock stars at this year's festival? Maureen Farrell , who writes about entrepreneurs for Forbes , has her eye on Hashable : Hashable just launched to the general public a week ago, after five months of invite-only beta testing. Spend some time on Twitter, and you’ll inevitably find that those you’re following have #justmet or #raninto someone. (@Mikeyavo does all the time). The hashtag #justmet allows Hashable users to exchange business card information over Twitter. Using Hashable’s hashtag verbiage, users can introduce connections to one another or explain who they’ve reconnected with on Twitter. On the site, users can privately track meetings and connections. Over time, users could build out a comprehensive map of their personal and professional worlds. The billion dollar question is THE question for consumer web startups these days. It’s a question you’re more likely to entertain if your startup is backed by venture capital investor Fred Wilson of Union Square Venture, an early investor in Foursquare, Zynga and Tumblr. Union Square Ventures led Hashable’s $4 million financing round in November 2010 and has been an investor since 2008 when Yavonditte founded Tracked, a competitor to Yahoo! Finance and Hashable’s predecessor. “Union Square and Fred Wilson are clearly the best venture firm in New York City by a mile,” he says. “I honestly don’t see another firm here. I can’t name another one. If they exist, they don’t have any cache with me.” Beyond an investment by Wilson, Yavonditte has a proven track record as a CEO. He sold his firm, Quigo Technologies, a search engine marketing firm, to AOL for $340 million in 2007. His work at Quigo, he says, taught him that serious companies take time to build. “We’re five months into the development of Hashable. My last company took 5.5 years.” Read Hashable: South by Southwest’s 2011 Breakout Company? here .

  • The Meshy Future of Business

    Lisa Gansky says the future of business is meshy . Consumers will share more and more, just as they currently do through companies like Zipcar and tiredUP . And more companies will try to facilitate, and tap into the power of, peer-to-peer behavior. Gansky, former CEO of Ofoto and an executive for Eastman Kodak, spoke recently about her book, The Mesh: Why the Future of Business is Sharing , at TED@MotorCity.

  • Basic Guidelines for Buying a Small Business

    Entrepreneurs with the desire to run a small business have two choices: start their own company or buy and run a company. Among the advantages of taking over an existing business: you don't have to birth the company, you just have to make it grow up. But Entrepreneur 's Jennifer Wang warns that you better buy a company that is healthy. Citing data from a Northeastern University study, Wang places the failure rate for purchasers hoping to turn around a struggling startup at 85%. Wang shares some valuable advice from a business matchmaker: Buying a profitable business, on the other hand, is another matter entirely. You've got cash flow from Day One, an established reputation and, if you're lucky, a seller who will help finance the deal, says Ted Leverette, president of "Partner" On-Call, a franchise based in North Palm Beach, Fla., that matches buyers with sellers of small and midsize businesses. Leverette has several baseline requirements for a business purchase. First, no matter how glowing the sales talk, don't buy anything that hasn't been profitable for the last five years--and that includes the Great Recession. "Absolutely don't buy anything that has an annual pretax net cash flow under $100,000," he says. "That's the smallest you want to go." Read the full article here .

  • NYT: Japan's 'Silver Democracy' and Struggles of Younger Workers

    Japan's economy continues to struggle with weak growth and young workers are having a difficult time finding jobs. According to the New York Times 's Martin Fackler , those young workers who do find jobs are likely to hold so-called "irregular jobs" well into their thirties, with the regular jobs held for older workers. Fackler: An aging population is clogging the nation’s economy with the vested interests of older generations, young people and social experts warn, making an already hierarchical society even more rigid and conservative. The result is that Japan is holding back and marginalizing its youth at a time when it actually needs them to help create the new products, companies and industries that a mature economy requires to grow. So one big casualty of this demographic inequality may very well be entrepreneurship, and Fackler points out that the characteristics of Japan's economic growth in the Twentieth Century--namely, innovation--seem nonexistent today. While many nations have aging populations, Japan’s demographic crisis is truly dire, with forecasts showing that 40 percent of the population will be 65 and over by 2055. Some of the consequences have been long foreseen, like deflation: as more Japanese retire and live off their savings, they spend less, further depressing Japan’s anemic levels of domestic consumption. But a less anticipated outcome has been the appearance of generational inequalities. These disparities manifest themselves in many ways. As Mr. Horie discovered, there are corporations that hire all too many young people for low-paying, dead-end jobs — in effect, forcing them to shoulder the costs of preserving cushier jobs for older employees. Others point to an underfinanced pension system so skewed in favor of older Japanese that many younger workers simply refuse to pay; a “silver democracy” that spends far more on the elderly than on education and child care — an issue that is familiar to Americans; and outdated hiring practices that have created a new “lost generation” of disenfranchised youth. Read In Japan, Young Face Generational Roadblocks here .

  • The Young Entrepreneur Council and Putting Recent Graduates to Work, For Themselves

    The New York Times has an interesting profile of The Young Entrepreneur Council . The council was started by Scott Gerber , who created the promotional video company Sizzle It after graduating from NYU (and moving back in with his parents in Staten Island). Hannah Seligson gives the details of the council: The council consists of 80-plus business owners across the country, ages 17 to 33. Members include Scott Becker, 23, co-founder of Invite Media, an advertising technology firm recently acquired by a Google unit; Lauren Berger, 26, founder of the Intern Queen , a site that connects college students with internships; Aaron Patzer , the 30-year-old who sold Mint.com to Intuit for $170 million; and Josh Weinstein, 24, who started CollegeOnly.com , a social networking site that is backed by a PayPal founder. The council, which has applied for nonprofit status, serves as a help desk and mentoring hotline for individual entrepreneurs. People can also submit questions on subjects like marketing, publicity and technology, and each month a group of council members will answer 30 to 40 of them in business publications like The Wall Street Journal and American Express Open Forum, and on dozens of small business Web sites. Council members assert that young people can start businesses even if they have little or no money or experience. But whether those start-ups last is another matter. Roughly half of all new businesses fail within the first five years, according to federal data. And the entrepreneurial life is notoriously filled with risks, stresses and sacrifices. Read No Jobs? Young Graduates Make Their Own here .

  • From Entrepreneur to Trusted Resource

    David Garland of The Rise to the Top is comfortable pushing for attention, and he thinks all entrepreneurs should embrace celebrity. Not the US Weekly version of celebrity, but rather celebrity as a "trusted resource," and a "go-to person and company," as Garland writes at Small Business Trends . And Garland believes a trusted resource does the following: Educates, entertains and inspires. Makes a lot of money because people know, like and trust him or her. Is often a person as opposed to a faceless company. Is accessible and transparent on social media sites, via e-mail, etc. Is not all-knowing and stuffy, but instead friendly and helpful. Read Garland's advice on how to become a trusted resource here .

  • Educating Young Entrepreneurs by Paying Students to Take a Break from College

    Risk taking is an important part of developing innovative ideas. And Peter Thiel , President of the venture capital firm Clarium Capital , believes that some young people are forced to be risk averse when they take on enormous debt to attend college. So he's encouraging some of them to drop out of school for a couple of years, and paying them to take on entrepreneurial pursuits: Watch the full interview from Big Think here .

  • Whole Foods CEO on Free Markets as Means to Human Progress

    John Mackey says that when he started his career in business over thirty years ago, it caused him to rethink and reconsider his ideological views. But somewhere along the path from owner of one health food store to CEO of Whole Foods , Mackey came to believe that entrepreneurship and capitalism provide a path to real global progress. He recently argued his case for the potential of free markets to spur "human creativity" and achievement : This interview is part of a series on the "Future of Capitalism" at Big Think . Watch the full interview here .

  • Seth Godin on Spreading Ideas

    In the information age, ideas may be seen as fuel for the digital economy. But only when they spread. And we need people to spread our ideas. The singular Seth Godin has listed 20 reasons people spread ideas. Here are a few choice selections: #4...because I have no choice. Every time I use your product, I spread the idea (Hotmail, iPad, a tattoo). #5...because there's a financial benefit directly to me (Amazon affiliates, mlm). #9...because both my friend and I will benefit if I share the idea (Groupon). #12...because your service works better if all my friends use it (email, Facebook). and #18...because the tribe needs to know about this if we're going to maintain internal order. Read the full list here .
1 2 3 4 Next >