We all win if you can suggest local or nearby companies, particularly new companies, that illustrate some point that has come up in class. What are some interesting startups? Please use the comments area here to make suggestions, intersting new companies or recent failures. Xenon, for example (or was it Zenon), the restaurant at Broadway and Pearl that shut down a few months ago… why?

Please use the comments area here to add suggestions for additional resources you might run into: blogs, specific posts on blogs, books … guest speakers available locally? Anything else? I hope you can tell that I try to keep this class current, but that’s hard. Your help is really appreciated.

Use this discussion for questions about the main course content. Use the comments area here.

Every June for several years now the Lundquist Center for Entrepreneurship runs its undergrad venture quest event, a venture competition. It involves submitting a business plan for acceptance into the contest, then presenting for judges on a Friday morning in early June. There’s always been $500 in prize money. You can click here for the web page about last year’s contest, with pictures of two winners. It’s unusual that both of them were single-person entries last year; usually the better teams have three people on them.

The non-business-major entrants to this competition have always come exclusively from this class. They are open to anybody from the university, but I don’t think they’ve ever had an entrant except from this class.

The process starts with getting yourselves set up with a group — although you can do it individually as well — and agreeing on a business to develop. In early may, you submit a summary to enter the contest. As I’m writing this they haven’t yet set up the necessary web page, or submission deadline, so we’ll watch for that as spring quarter goes on. Groups are chosen from the summary, which is a lot like your assignment 4 for this class. Then a couple of weeks after they announce the finalists,usually four or five groups. The finalists submit written business plans — the same thing you do as the business plan for this class — and then present their idea in a 10 minute presentation, followed by 10 minutes of questions and answers, on the day of the event. Judges are volunteers from the local business community. By lunch time, winners are chosen and checks are distributed.

You’re welcome to use the comments are here to suggest ideas, open your ideas up for team members, and ask questions about the contest.

Please do me and your classmates and yourself a favor. Use this discussion forum — add comments below — to make suggestions, complaints, compliments, comments, or whatever. If you don’t want anybody but me to see it, say so in the comment. I read all of them, of course, but they don’t become available for anybody else until after I read and approve them. And, the other side of the same coin, If I don’t want the rest of the class to see them I won’t post them up here either, but I will see them.

Here are some of the areas you might want to comment on:

• The classes: my style, content, slides, speed, class discussions. Are there topics you’d like to see more of that we already covered, or topics you’d like to see that aren’t on the schedule? Am I boring? Add some comments here.
• The readings: too much, too little, something I’ve missed?
• Guest speakers: somebody you’d like to suggest?
• Assignments: too much, too little.
• Grading: does it creep you out that you don’t really know until the end? I figure you can’t complain about grading directly, because I don’t do it until the end; but maybe you don’t like that. Or maybe you do like it.

Or anything else … although you might look at the other discussions first, because you might find one that fits the “something else” better than this one.

Summary: comments welcome! Bring it on.

• 3 Weeks, Chapter 5, Getting Financed.
• Kawasaki, Chapter 5, The Art of Bootstrapping.
• Kawasaki, Chapter 7, The Art of Raising Capital.
• Life is Too Short to Deal with Non-Accredited Investors

Due by 10 a.m. April 8.

Explain your business opportunity in a single letter-sized page, in PDF format.  You can draw it yourself and write it yourself and scan it into PDF, or write a text, or use PowerPoint, or some other drawing program. preferably with illustrations, not just text. Leave your name off of the page, but keep it on the file.

Here are a couple of examples: College Prep Information Business and Australian Firefighter Business.

Thought provoking: Business Plans or Prayer Flags … see what you think. You’ve heard about the famous “business plan on a napkin?” Keep that in mind. You may also have heard about the one-page business plan, but you can let that one go. This is not a business plan, it’s a description of an opportunity. And I do want to have it in a single page, I’d expect at least one picture, and I want you to deliver it to me as a PDF document attached to an email.

Your grade will be based on how well you cover the following three points:

1. Identify and explain a problem or need that your business idea would solve.Remember you don’t have to limit yourself to true needs, because wants and intangibles – prestige, good looks, business success, etc. – are also valid.
2. Explain how your hypothetical new business fills the need or satisfies the want.
3. Describe the ideal customer, or user, or target market company. Ideally you invent or dream up a specific person, with age, gender, economic stratum, job (or not), media usage, preferences; or a company, with industry type, size, location.

And communication pizazz, sizzle, excitement, diction, wording, choice of pictures, and general look and feel will also count for the grade. It’s only a page.

Important additional details:

1. You can do this in Word, iWork, PowerPoint, Keynote, or any other tool that you like. Draw it by hand if you want.
2. However you do it, your final step is to get it into a PDF file format that takes up a single page maximum.  If you’ve produced it as something physical on actual paper, get it scanned into PDF to submit it.
3. Put your name on the filename, but not on the page as it appears printed.