Today we interview Allan Levy, a serial entrepreneur who came from a family of entrepreneurs. Allan talks about moving from a small business to a large business by becoming passionate about people and team building
How do you go from Wind Surfing Instructor in Greece to creating one of the most respected brands on the London Stock Exchange? Founder Tink Taylor discusses his career and how he insures that dotmailer is a dotFamily.
What does it take to revolutionize an industry? How about a little True Grit? This week we interview Movable Ink Founder, Vivek Sharma and learn the three qualities he looks for when hiring and building his team.
Bootstrapping into a $30 million enterprise with 175 employees isn't easy. In this latest installment of Interviews with Entrepreneurs, find out how Ross Andrew Paquette, Founder of Maropost did it. ;
It was Woody Allen who said, “if you're not failing every now and again, it's a sign you're not doing anything very innovative.” And he clearly knew his stuff. As a young writer for Sid Caesar, he, along with fellow comedy cohorts Larry Gelbart (of MASH fame), Mel Brooks, and Carl Reiner – to name just a few - created the most innovative environment in the Golden Age of Television.
The first step in developing a profitable business idea is to spend some time validating the concept. Long before you spend the first dime building a prototype you should be spending time actually talking to your target market. But when I talk to aspiring entrepreneurs about validating their business ideas, one of their biggest concerns they have is talking about their idea: “Someone will steal my idea!”
I know many entrepreneurs and am struck by a common thread that runs through their lamentations. When entrepreneurs struggle, they inevitably point to not enough capital as the major reason for their struggle. I believe this is wrong.
If a lack of capital is not the number one problem for entrepreneurs, what is?
Entrepreneurship runs deep within my family. In the past five generations, four of those have listened to the call of being one’s own boss. What follows is my first attempt at trying to explain what I believe it takes to be an entrepreneur.
I’ve been writing about Digital Marketing for over 20 years, starting in the mid 90’s when my columns on 3D Animation on the Web landed me a job as Silicon Graphics World Wide 3D Evangelist. While at SGI, I helped develop some of the first “rich media” banners and went to write articles on Rich Media Advertising for publications such as Clickz and Mediapost.
But starting around 2003 I pitched the editors of Mediapost on a column idea I had come up with called The Email Insider. The column took off, eventually spawning all the other “Insider” columns Media Post launched, and for years I wrote every week on Email Marketing. And I’ve been writing and publishing literally hundreds of articles on Email Marketing ever since.
"There is an old saying that Email was the first Social Network. But for all the discussions about building community, increasing Facebook Likes, driving people to your online “forum”, and building your Twitter following, nothing is said about one of the oldest technologies on the web, the simple Listserv."
In 2006, I raised over $1 Million with the New York Angels.
At that time that was the largest amount ever raised through the New York Angels group, and as far as I know, it still is the record. In this post, I'll be exploring the process of raising funds through an institution like the New York Angels.
This week, Bill continues the story of his biggest failure.
“In Dreamland we trace the life of our protagonist, Chad Holloway, from birth to his apparent suicide at the wheel of a high performance sports car. Like a jigsaw puzzle, the player constructs the arc of Chad’s life: the mystery surrounding his birth, his rise to political power and his eventual tragic fall, and the source of the terrible guilt that has driven him to despair. These events unfold against the backdrop of an abandoned amusement park which is governed by a strange and enigmatic caretaker named Virgil. “
Nearly every Entrepreneur lives with failure. Not in some abstract notion of failure, but real, house on the line, in your face, everything-everyone-told-you-would-go-wrong-does kind of failure. As an entrepreneur, you have the same chances of being a Zuckerberg right out of the gate as you do being born the Prince of Wales. Chances are you are going to rack up some mighty big failures. Cataclysmic failures.
Here is one of mine:
Today was the official announcement that eDataSource has acquired Boxbe. Congratulations to eDataSource's CEO Carter Nicholas who was instrumental in this: what started as a conversation at a trade show 2 years ago has led to a reinvention of eDataSource.
This weekend I took a ride up to Gardiner, NY to visit the Tuthilltown (pronounced Tuttle Town) Spirits Distillery. I was expecting a quick 5 minute tour of facilities followed by a tasting of their Hudson Whiskey. What I got was instead was one of the most interesting stories in entrepreneurship I've ever heard about.
"Perhaps you are just starting out in your career. Or perhaps you are approaching your 40's, thinking your career and your life are set in stone. But you never know what life has in store:"