Few businesses are really one-person businesses. Even those with no employees are still likely to need bookkeeping and accounting help, an attorney, and business allies.

This session covers gathering the initial team, working with your required professionals, planning for and then recruiting employees, and a review of the legal implications of the employer-employee relationship.

For this topic area the readings are essential.

Online Videos

You are required to go through the web video presentations as follows:

1. Basic business numbers
2. Guy Kawasaki on The Art of the Start

Have you heard about death by PowerPoint? Or have you suffered it, perhaps, with people reading long and boring lists posted up on the screen by a projector.

We’re doing two things in this class:

1. focusing on the classic pitch presentation, the new darling of the venture capital and investment world, as highlighted by the readings; and
2. developing good presentation techniques, the opposite of death by PowerPoint and boring.

This will be our final preparation for your participation in the venture competion at the end of the course (those of you who are chosen) and also our own final event, the presentation you give for the class.

This class starts with reviewing business ideas as turned in for assignment one, sharing with the class those that lends themselves to group efforts for the Quest for AdVenture competition. Then we’ll divide the class into teams for the competition, and discuss setting up teams for your companies. Your management team should include capabilities to administrate, sell, and produce.

This is a web-embedded video from an entrepreneur who is also an investor, talking about what investors want to know, and what they want to see in a pitch.

If for whatever reason you don’t see the video here, you can click this link to go to the source video on the TED site.

What do investors want? A common topic for blogs, entrepreneurs, and investors. So here’s another view on it, from somebody who knows:

Naval Ravikant, the speaker, has been through the ringer a few times, on both sides of the investment table. I watched one of his ventures, epinions.com, very closely, because my daughter and son in law were employees. So I now, a few years later, I follow his Venture Hacks blog.

Most of what he says here is pretty standard. And if you’re interested, his fellow blogger transcribed this interview on venture hacks. Some highlights:

“I look for two things that are paramount above all:

1. Great team. It’s obvious. It’s a tautology. Everybody says it. You have to be working with some of the best people in the industry you’re in.
2. Huge market. Niche markets just don’t work because the first idea never works. You always have to change the idea, so you need room to maneuver in a big market.

“There are three more factors that I look at. Not all three of them are required but I prefer a company to have at least two of them:

1. Difficult technology that is compounding over time.
2. A proprietary distribution channel. A clever viral marketing, or SEO, or partnership, or whatever strategy that gives them a leg up over competitors.
3. A direct monetization model. Something more than throwing up 10 cent banner ad CPMs.

Naval has more authority on this than I do, but his reference to niche markets bothers me a bit. I like niche markets in a world that is constantly splintering and dividing itself finer and finer. Some of the biggest markets there are started as niches: Facebook, for example, focused first on a few university campuses. Yahoo was a niche — the Internet — when it started. Starbucks was once a niche (gourmet coffee, affordable luxury) in the Northwest.

• Kawasaki, Chapter 10, The Art of Rainmaking.
• Kawasaki, Chapter 11, the Art of Being a Mensch.

Required:

• Kawasaki, Chapter 4, The Art of Pitching.
• Really Bad PowerPoint

Optional

• PAYG, Chapter 5, pages 233-236