Monthly Archives: January 2016

14 Key Insights From The Lean Entrepreneur Author Brant Cooper

14 Key Insights From The Lean Entrepreneur Author Brant Cooper

The Startup Grind San Diego hosts monthly fireside chats, featuring successful local founders, innovators, educators and investors.

The Startup Garage Team had the pleasure of attending Dec 10th event featuring San Diego Startup pioneer Brant Cooper.

Brant is the author of The Lean Entrepreneur, which supports organizations in jump-starting their innovation practices. He travels the globe helping to teach and educate entrepreneurs and intraprenuers,
through the simple objective of empowering individuals to make the change they want to see in the world.

We found Brant to be humble, entertaining, and very inspiring.

The TSG team couldn’t help but share 14 Key Insights we picked up from his talk.

San Diego Startup Community Verse Silicon Valley

The comparison needs to stop. We’re not Silicon Valley, we’re never going to be Silicon Valley. We don’t want to be Silicon Valley or we would be living in Silicon Valley.

Women Entrepreneurs

We’re one generation away worldwide from woman dominating entrepreneurship.

Women Entrepreneurs
are now economically empowered to start their own businesses.

Large Enterprise & Startups

Help Larger Enterprise by teaching entrepreneur skills. Make large enterprises value creation machines, so that they can give back new value to customers, as opposed to just being focused on wealth.

The Transformation to Value Creation Machines

It’s fun to be in a startup, but you can start being this way in a large organization too by being more entrepreneurial, closer to their customer, faster, and more agile.

College and Entrepreneurship

The real unicorn is someone who drops out of high school and hits it big.

Incubators and Accelerators – Mentorship

The biggest difficulty around the world aside from Silicon Valley and maybe NYC is the mentors, finding quality mentors that really know how to do startup mentoring is really hard.

Most Eco-systems are pulling people from large businesses, their heart is in the right place, and they can give great advice on a particular industry, but when it comes to founders issues, entrepreneurism, specific technologies, a lot of mentors don’t know what a startup is all about.

Entrepreneurship Best Practices

Top Ten Things Entrepreneurs Don’t Do…Read a Top Ten List.
The thing that’s overlooked the most is hustle.
It is the relentlessly pursue part that is actually going to make your idea a success.

We’re in a Customer Centric World

The rise of UX & Design.
The productivity gains we’re going to find are on the end user side.
You’ve build a satisfied customer experience, now you need to surpass the threshold and build passion, not with your product.

Crowdfunding a Book

It’s a great way to get a marketing budget, while helping build a community around the value proposition of the book. Be cautious, taking money from people that aren’t in your market segment is always a big no no, and actually dangerous.

Lean Principles

The idea around lean is the elimination of waste. Don’t waste your time, money, resources, creativity, inspiration in building products nobody wants.

Emerging Industries in SD

There’s a lot of people that think an eco-system can choose what industry to develop. Rather An eco-systems gets chosen, industries are chosen based upon who exits.

Entrepreneur Complaints

Entrepreneurs no matter where they are alway complain over a lack of money.
You can build your startup here (SD) and not have to move if you build out your business model.
You can complain about a lack of seed money, but if you build a successful business model you can raise money, bottom line.

Government and Startups

There’s a lot of mythology around the government money and innovation. The government even in the US has funded in some way almost all innovation we have ever done.

Startup Marketing

You should be able to see some organic growth that shows that there’s some buzz around the product, without spending any money on marketing.
Too quickly we’re into building the product and all the features, then now I need a marketing budget, and I need to spend a bunch of money on marketing in order to create a buzz.
Rather, the product better start the buzz, marketing is for amplifying the buzz the product creates, not for creating it’s own buzz.

Watch the complete interview here>>
Brant Cooper at Startup Grind San Diego

If you have a question about your raising capital for your Startup or you’d like to discuss our business plan writing services, feel free to contact us for a free consultation!

Why To Take Caution With Investor “Finders”

Why To Take Caution With Investor “Finders”

There are many service providers that offer to help startups with attracting investors, colloquially referred to as “finders.”

While they prefer to be called business brokers or consultants, most finders are either CPAs, insurance brokers, retired executives, or former entrepreneurs. They mostly operate in the Angel landscape, targeting deals between $100K to $2M.

Typically, they will either require a large retainer, an upfront fee, a percentage of capital raised, or some combination of all three.

The service they provide ranges from screening investors and setup meetings to developing a list of high-net-worth prospects for entrepreneurs to call on.

Unfortunately, there is a lot of controversy when working with finders. First, a sizeable majority of finders are not actually licensed as a securities broker by FINRA and are therefore in violation of federal and state security laws, whether they know it or not. Second, many finders are not capable of delivering on their promises or simply disappear as soon as you hand them a retainer check.

How This Affects You:

The issue that Startups face when working with unlicensed finders is that their legal problems can quickly spread to the startup as well. Payments to an unlawful finders can cause an entire transaction to violate securities law, giving investors a right to undo the deal as well as sue the Startup for damages.

Even if an investor does not undo the deal, these unlawful transactions can come back to haunt the company if and when the company decides to sell or go public as it may be forced to disclose the violations, thereby jeopardizing the pending deal. On the other hand, working with less than honest finders will clearly be a waste of time and money.

Advice:

Retain a good corporate securities attorney before you engage with a finder. Your securities attorney should be able to:

A) help you understand the full scope of risk of using finders in financing transactions.

B) help you verify that your potential finder is licensed with FINRA and your local state’s regulators.

C) ensure that your finder does not have any substantial complaints against them.

If you have a question about raising capital for your Startup or you’d like to discuss our business plan writing services, feel free to contact us for a free consultation!