Category Archives: Educator

Thanks to Neil Patel – His Forbes Article on Entrepreneurship References our Research

Internet entrepreneur Neil Patel wrote an article on Forbes, “10 Hard Truths About Entrepreneurship That No One Will Tell You.”

One of his talking points: Self-reliance isn’t easy

Whenever you work a 9-5 or even work as a freelancer, you have a boss or clients that you have to report to.

Whenever you are an entrepreneur, you are the alpha and omega of your business. You answer to no one but yourself. This is both incredibly liberating and incredibly challenging.

You have to have a deep intrinsic motivation to accomplish anything as an entrepreneur. You have to fight through the long nights, minimal income, and angry clients all by yourself. And that is not an easy task. Make sure you’re prepared for it.

Forbes Article: http://www.forbes.com/sites/neilpatel/2016/09/22/10-hard-truths-about-entrepreneurship-that-no-one-will-tell-you/

Twitter: https://twitter.com/neilpatel

Website: http://neilpatel.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neilkpatel

CrunchBase: https://www.crunchbase.com/person/neil-patel


Here is our research Neil referenced in his Forbes article.

GCASE Article: https://news.gcase.org/2011/04/09/what-motivates-entrepreneurs/

Discussion About What Motivates Entrepreneurs

Understanding common characteristics and what motivates entrepreneurs to start and sustain their venture is important to understanding the entrepreneurial life cycle. By definition, “entrepreneurs are optimistic and idealistic.” They have great commitment, and a vision and passion that can be observed.

According to Jack Stack, a judge for Ernst and Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year (EOY) Award Program, “You can see it in their eyes. You can see it in their confidence. You can see it in the way they talk.” Although this topic of discussion is best left to the many experts in the field of human behavior, our research of the literature on the subject turned up common traits among famous entrepreneurs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Michael Dell, Scott McNealy, Andrew Grove, and Larry Ellison.

Entrepreneurs place an enormous value on creativity and are willing to take risks if they know they can influence the eventual outcome of the event. They are innovative, aggressive, self-confident, willing to work long hours, fiercely competitive, and intensely focused.

Intrinsic Motivation

But what motivates an entrepreneur to take all the risks and launch a new business venture? The most successful entrepreneurs are often not the most talented, but the ones with an “entrepreneurial obsession,” who see an opportunity and pursue it with profound existence. They have conviction and believe in their ideas so much that “they will them into existence.” It is not a question of whether they want to do it—they have to do it.

This drive is called intrinsic motivation, defined as “the motivation to work on something because it is interesting, involving, exciting, satisfying, or personally challenging.”

This is the opposite of being extrinsically motivated, which means being motivated by expected evaluation, surveillance, competition with peers, dictates from superiors, or the promise of rewards. Entrepreneurs do what they love, and they love what they do.

For example, Robert Mondavi felt “reborn” after starting the winery that bears his name. “I was like a kid again, bursting with energy, ready to climb the mountain, conquer the world, go for the gold. Yes, at the unlikely age of fifty-two, the great adventure of my life had finally begun.” Michael Dell simply says, “Do you have any idea how much fun it is to run a billion-dollar company?”

The Mythic Quest of the Entrepreneur

MIT professor Edward Roberts studied MIT graduates who had gone on to start technology-related businesses. He discovered that the most successful ones did not seek “some intangible objective.” They were not interested in devising brilliant ideas that only other brilliant people like themselves could recognize. In fact, they wanted to create something “significant and tangible” and did not want to go after it if it was not a challenge.

Schumpeter recognized this too. In his 1949 classic, The Theory of Economic Development, he proclaims, “The entrepreneur-innovator’s motivation includes such aspects as the dream to found a private kingdom, the will to conquer and to succeed for the sake of success itself, and the joy of creating and getting things done.”

Van Doren accurately profiled Columbus. He writes, “Brilliant as he may have been, and mad as well, Christopher Columbus was one of the most remarkable men who ever lived. He never turned aside from the opportunity of wealth, but wealth was not what he sought, what he was willing to give his life for. What he sought was eternal fame, for he knew, as perhaps no one else realized in his time, that the discovery of a New World would bring him that.

Their Gift to the World

Wendell Dunn, professor of entrepreneurship at the University of Virginia’s Darden Business School, believes that “entrepreneurs are in it to prove a point.” Steven Berglas, instructor at The Harold Price Center for Entrepreneurial Studies at UCLA, has devoted a career to understanding what makes serial entrepreneurs tick. He found they “leave as many intellectual and creative entities for others to derive developmental opportunities from as possible.”

After a ten-year period of teaching and studying entrepreneurship at Harvard Business School, Amar Bhide concluded that “it takes a really extraordinary individual to build a promising company—extraordinary in terms of someone who has an almost maniacal level of ambition. Not just an ambition to make a comfortable living, to make a few million dollars, but someone who wants to leave a significant mark on the world.”

As technology guru George Gilder describes it, “Because an entrepreneur can never be sure of a return on his investment, starting up a business is like offering a gift to the world, in the hope, but never the certainty, that the gift will be reciprocated.”

It’s About the Money Too

Entrepreneurs also want to be “rich.” Out of the richest one percent of Americans, more than nine in ten are entrepreneurs who made their fortunes themselves. In 1996 when Microsoft’s stock soared by 88 percent, Bill Gates made nearly $11 billion on paper, or about $30 million per day. He was earning about $347 per second; he could buy a Honda Accord every minute. At the end of December 2000, Gates was worth about $55 billion, or about $200,000 for every living soul in the United States.

On Fortune’s list of “Richest Under 40” for 2002, eight of the top ten were entrepreneurs. Number one was Michael Dell, worth $16.49 billion. Others were Pierre Omidyar of eBay worth $3.82 billion and Jeff Bezos of Amazon.com worth $1.66 billion. Entrepreneurs especially like cash for their hard work.

Jeong H. Kim founded Yurie Systems, a high-tech communications equipment company, in 1992. In 1998 he sold it to Lucent Technologies for $1.1 billion. Kim, who came to the United States from Korea with his family at 14, was asked why. “I sold out to Lucent for two reasons. One, it was $1.1 billion, and two, it was in cash.”

SOURCE: Roadmap To Entrepreneurial Success

Edmund Hillary Climbing Mt Everest on May 29 1953 – Climb Your Mountain and Plant Your First Prover Flag

For an entrepreneur, when times are good, cash flow is the oil that keeps a venture running smoothly. But cash is like oxygen at the summit of Mt. Everest, run out of cash and trouble brews really fast.

Every entrepreneur planning a new venture faces the same dilemma:
– What are the critical capital resources?
– How much cash (financial capital) is needed?
– When is it needed? How will the funds be used?
– How soon will the venture reach profitability?

Bootstrapping Yourself Up the Hillary Step on Mt. Everest

At 28,900 feet, just 135 feet below the summit of Mt. Everest where the South Summit takes a slight dip, is a 40-foot treacherous ice and rock face that can only be scaled one person at a time. It is the last obstacle all climbers who desire in making it to the true summit must climb. It is called the Hillary Step.

It was named after Edmund Hillary, a thirty-three-year-old beekeeper from New Zealand, who first successfully climbed Mt. Everest with Tenzing Norgay on May 29, 1953. Many times Hillary doubted that the pair would reach the top–deep ravines and crevasses, avalanches, and extreme rock walls stood in the way of their success. In View from the Summit, Hillary recalls in vivid detail, the account of that fateful morning in late May. “Ahead of me loomed the great rock step which we had observed from far below and which we knew might prove to be a major problem. I gazed up at the forty feet of rock with some concern.” A slip at this point would most certainly result in a fatality. There was no other way to the top but up, one footstep at a time.

Looking back on that day, Hillary commented, “I didn’t know whether we were going to be successful or not. I knew we were going to give it everything we had.” With this fortitude, scraping at the ice and snow with his ax, Hillary chimneyed between the rock pillar and an adjacent ridge of ice to surmount this daunting obstacle, which was later to be known as the Hillary Step. “I pulled myself out of the crack onto the top of the rock face. I had made it! For the first time on the whole expedition I had a feeling of confidence that we were going to get to the top.”

Following the first attempt to climb Everest in 1921 by the British, there had been at least ten major expeditions before Hillary’s. Since Hillary and Norgay, more than 1,200 men and women from sixty-three nations have reached the summit; a total of 175 climbers have died trying, with as many as 120 bodies interred on the mountain. Today, it takes more than six months to move the 30,000 pounds of gear up to 17,500 feet. More than 5,000 items are needed just to get a pair of climbers to the top. It is all about getting the resources in the right place at the right time. According to Todd Burleson, director of Seattle-based outfitter Alpine Ascents and organizer of more than 11 Everest climbs, “We take the bare minimum to make this work. But if you get up there and find you’ve forgotten, say even a fuel cartridge, you’ve just killed the expedition.”

Everest veteran Ed Viesturs said, “You don’t assault Everest. You sneak up on it, and then get the hell outta there.”

Entrepreneurial leadership requires marshalling resources cooperatively toward a goal while simultaneously preserving and encouraging a strategic vision. To successfully execute a business plan, in order to translate the business concept into a reality, entrepreneurs have to surround themselves with the right mix of resources, which includes people, capital, and partners. But they first need to assess the resources that the venture will require, and they are often required to do more with less. In fact, many successful entrepreneurs pursued their new business opportunities relentlessly, without becoming deterred by the limited resources that they initially controlled. Simply put, by definition, entrepreneurs are attempting to achieve goals that will require considerably more resources than they currently control.

Managing and Controlling Critical Capital Resources

One of the key skills of entrepreneurial success lies in distinguishing between those resources that are absolutely critical and those that would be nice to have but are not so critical. The other skills are knowing how to get the resources, and knowing how to manage or allocate them. Because resources are scarce, entrepreneurs must make clear choices as to which resources they must obtain, and in what time period they are needed.

There are five basic types of capital resources that are absolutely critical to the entrepreneurial process.

They are:
–  human capital
– opportunity capital
– economic capital
– financial capital
– and entrepreneurial capital.

Entrepreneurs who fail with their first venture almost always put the blame on lack of financial capital, saying they were undercapitalized. But all too often we hear about entrepreneurs who create wildly optimistic sales projections, to cover their fear of failing, and then go out and spend their money on noncritical capital resources like fancy offices, computer systems, new cars, global-travel, slick brochures, and launch parties.

Every entrepreneur planning a new venture faces the same dilemma:
– What are the critical capital resources?
– How much cash (financial capital) is needed?
– When is it needed?
– How will the funds be used?
– How soon will the venture reach profitability?

For an entrepreneur, when times are good, cash flow is the oil that keeps a venture running smoothly. But cash is like oxygen at the summit of Everest, run out of cash and trouble brews really fast.

Serial entrepreneurs understand that all resources are scarce to a start-up, and that cash must be as cherished as the oxygen that is required to reach the summit of Mt. Everest. Weight on a climb to the summit is like overhead to a start-up. David Breashears, the first American to scale Everest twice, says that climbers cut their toothbrushes in half to save weight.

Tom Siebel, “We didn’t spend much money. We had the crummiest space in Silicon Valley. All of our furniture was the crummiest furniture that we could buy at auction.” Siebel founded Siebel Systems in 1993 with $50,000 in East Palo Alto, California. Ten years later his company had nearly $2 billion in revenues, with 8,000 employees working out of some 136 offices in twenty-four countries.

What is Bootstrapping For Entrepreneurs?

This “bootstrapping” is self-financing by employing highly creative ways of gathering and allocating critical capital resources without raising equity from outside investors, or borrowing money from traditional banking sources. Bootstrapping requires a different mindset and approach, because the principles and practices imported from the corporate world will not serve well. Entrepreneurs need to become a “cash management fanatic.”

One report on successful bootstrappers found that 73 percent tapped into their personal savings, 27 percent used credit cards, 14 percent had repayable loans from friends or family, 7 percent had a loan against personal property, 5 percent had a bank loan, 2 percent found equity investors in friends or family, and 14 percent found other sources of cash. Almost two-thirds, 63 percent, started their business in their homes; 49 percent did not start paying themselves until a year later; and 33 percent waited more than a year to pay themselves.

Additional research on bootstrappers found that 87 percent of the CEOs leading high-growth ventures had on the average 43 percent of all their personal assets at risk in their start-ups. About 28 percent of them raised their seed money from co-founders, 24 percent from friends and family, and about 7 percent raised seed money from strategic partners and customers.

Two-thirds of them launched using $50,000 or less, and 22 percent needed more than $100,000. It takes, on the average, twenty-eight months for successful ventures to grow from the seed stage to sales ranging between $1 million to $50 million. Another recent study found that ventures with seed capital of $100,000 or more grew, on average, some 2,074 percent over five years, employed about 150 people, and had nearly $21 million in annual sales.

Successful entrepreneurs know that new business venturing cannot be taught, even at the best business schools, and it cannot be learned from working at the biggest and best-run organizations in the business world. It can only come from experiencing and surviving a climb to the top of the world at Mt. Everest. Nothing gets an entrepreneur more focused than uncertainty and fear. And at no other time in the entrepreneurial life cycle is there more uncertainty and fear when the entrepreneur and venture has to commit to climbing the Hillary Step.

Climb Your Mountain And Plant Your First Prover Flag

German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said, “That which does not kill me, makes me stronger.” Sir Edmund Hillary proved that Mt. Everest can be climbed. Psychologically, making it up the Hillary Step is vitally important. It gives you the assurance that you can fight and be successful, that you can believe in yourself as an entrepreneur, and that your team is a winner. The Nepalese saying goes, “The summit of Everest can deliver you from the prison of ambition.”

Today’s entrepreneurs need to figure out the pathway to successfully launching the venture, and then bootstrap themselves to the summit and plant a first prover flag.

SOURCE: Roadmap To Entrepreneurial Success
PHOTOGRAPH: SummitPost.org

Social Entrepreneur – Global Entrepreneurship Institute

We are a non-profit that promotes the advancement of entrepreneurial education. Working as a global business incubator we facilitate introductions to investors, professional service providers, and other entrepreneurs. Using our exclusive “Roadmap to Entrepreneurial Success” we have helped entrepreneurs raise over $100 million.

Supporting Entrepreneurial Capitalism Around the World
We feel that it is not enough to just focus on inventors and breakthrough innovations. We found that entrepreneurs need to be cultivated as well, so that innovations can be turned into jobs and economic growth. We have helped entrepreneurs raise more than $100 million and create companies that are worth hundred of millions of dollars. We are supported by sales of publications, entrepreneurs, venture capitalists, investment bankers, angel investors, and individual donors.

We Are The Trusted Source For Educating & Supporting Entrepreneurs
Our books and course materials are used in the Top 10 best graduate programs in the USA that teach entrepreneurship, and 8 of the Top 10 best undergraduate programs in the USA that teach entrepreneurship.

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entrepreneurial capitalism: private capital, investing in private start-ups, with potential for a viable harvest
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Our Value Line
“Dream It! Plan It! Do It!”

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Our Vision
We believe that entrepreneurship is the link between inventors, innovation, and economic growth. Our Vision is to research, organize, and share valuable knowledge in an “open-source” format that advances the studies on entrepreneurship, and bridges the gap between theory and practice.

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Our Mission Statement
“Learn Local – Share Global”
To spread wealth creation around the world by encouraging entrepreneurship and sharing knowledge to those who support and educate entrepreneurs.

Global Community For Advancing Studies on Entrepreneurship
http://www.gcase.org

Our Educational Activities
Entrepreneurship is the cornerstone of the free enterprise system. We have found that more than 500 million adults were engaged in some form of entrepreneurial activity around the world each year. Good entrepreneurial management is therefore vitally important to the economic health not only of American businesses, but also of businesses in the rest of the world.

Because of its importance, entrepreneurial management should be thoroughly understood, but this is easier said than done. The field is relatively complex, and it is undergoing constant change in response to shifts in economic conditions.

In addition, there is a substantial body of knowledge, concepts, and tools that entrepreneurs need to know in order to launch and grow a company successfully. All of this makes entrepreneurship stimulating and exciting but also challenging and sometimes discouraging.

Our educational activities include:

– Publishing educational books, textbooks, newsletters, articles, white papers and other public interest materials to increase awareness of entrepreneurship

– Serving hundreds of educational institutions, thousands of students studying entrepreneurship, and potentially millions around the world

– Providing our Online Incubator Program and other advisory services to the general public worldwide as an educational service

– Leading and producing public discussion groups, forums, panels, guest lectures, radio programs, and educational workshops

– Developing and leading formal instructional and educational activities with our Community Partners

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Our Community Members
Entrepreneurs embody the true dream and passion for living. Fired with ideas, they are the engines to economic growth. Entrepreneurship is the vehicle for creating new jobs, generating revenue, advancing innovation, enhancing productivity, and improving business models and processes.

Despite the challenges, entrepreneurship has never before been more vital to our global economy than it is today. It is our best offense for economic progress and our finest defense against the status quo. Promoting entrepreneurship is in everyone’s best interest.

We help anyone who stands to benefit and/or profit from the confluence of entrepreneurial activities including:

– Founders and entrepreneurial leaders of startups, nonprofits, and fast growing ventures
– Corporate executives in charge of leading new business development, research and development programs, and new product innovation
– Scientists and technology transfer specialists from academic and research institutions
– Venture capitalists, investment bankers, and angel investors
– Educators and professional service providers from consulting, law, accounting, and financial firms

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Our Global Presence on the Internet
We are an “open-source” community and therefore organizations around the world are free to use our ideas, our information, and our online support to advance entrepreneurship.

Our work has been cited in key papers, articles, and numerous research studies around the world. Our Web site is recognized as one of the best resources on the Internet for entrepreneurs, academia, and researchers around the world.

Roadmap To Silicon Valley Travel Course

Roadmap To Silicon Valley
Exclusive Travel Course To Silicon Valley & San Francisco
Provides a real-world introduction to the process of financing entrepreneurial ventures and the functions of the major venture capitalists. The class will visit Silicon Valley, California for one week. Interviews will be scheduled with a variety of firms including venture capitalists, investment banks, professional service providers, and master entrepreneurs. The class will also feature a series of classroom lectures and online assignments.

Course Objectives
– First, students will learn about the importance of Silicon Valley and even the connection to Dr. Arnold Beckman, who funded the area’s first silicon transistor company. For the past fifty years Silicon Valley has been the world center for venture capital, technology investment, and innovation. The Silicon Valley “model” of financing deals and supporting entrepreneurial capitalism is widely used around the world. Getting a business plan funded by a venture capitalist is an “eyeball-to-eyeball” process. This travel course will provide students a chance to learn about the world of financing entrepreneurial ventures through the eyes of Silicon Valley’s visionary venture capitalists, leading professional service providers and master entrepreneurs.

– Second, this course teaches students how to become better prepared entrepreneurs by focusing on the “venture drill process” which consists of: packaging (preparing a business plan); placing (finding the best venture capitalist for the deal and getting introduced); and presenting (face-to-face discussions with a venture capitalist.) It is preferred that the students have a prepared business plan or presentation before making the trip. In this course students will have the opportunity stress test their ideas, and/or refresh a business plan, update presentation slides, business modeling, and financial modeling. The venture capital world is a highly networked industry. Students will have the opportunity to build viable contacts with venture capitalists, professional service providers, and master entrepreneurs.

– Third, students will review entrepreneurship and ethics. Learn how to manage ethical challenges of launching and growing an entrepreneurial venture in the 21st Century. Students will learn how to create value, act honestly, and deal by mutual consent. Presents a framework for thinking about and acting on business ethics. Students will learn how to evaluate the available evidence, identify what is important, and learn how to recognize what is ethical and how to act accordingly. Students will be exposed to tools that can help them identify and explain the principles that support an ethical basis for supporting capitalism in the global market.

Content Major Study Units:
– Discuss the evolution of the venture capital industry from France to Silicon Valley
– Explain the economic impact of venture capitalists and their investments in America
– Review how the venture capital industry functions
– Review the venture drill process: packaging, placing and presenting a deal to a venture capitalist
– Explain how to negotiate with investors and how to manage the deal process at the “deal table” through mutual consent
– Describe and review why entrepreneurs fail in securing funding (lying, dishonesty, and unethical business practices)
– Explain the importance of delivering the business-building and value promised beyond the closing of the deal
– Learn how to manage ethical challenges of launching and growing an entrepreneurial venture in the 21st Century

>>LEARN MORE

Composites Training Center (CTC)

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Composites Training Center (CTC)
Advanced Composite Materials (ACM) Program

Presenter and Instructor:
– Strategic Planning
– New Product Development

The Cerritos College Composites Technology Center in Norwalk, California is well prepared to serve the needs of those who are new to the composites industry as well as the experienced professionals. Sponsored by The Navy Center of Excellence for Composites Manufacturing Technology, the Center provides a national resource for the development of expertise and dissemination of information on composites manufacturing technology through composite-related course work and 20 annual technical seminars open to industry. Utilizing true factory “manufacturing cells” to demonstrate the various composite technologies and by assisting industry in its first steps into the use of composites through a “test bed” operation, the CTC seeks to lower the initial risks of adopting a new technology.

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