PhD-Plus Course @ UniPi

Why start-ups fail?

one of the most common decisions is to co-found with someone you have a prior social relationship with — friends or family – and not a prior professional relationship. But that type of team is the least stable. It’s the most likely to end up in disaster.

Diagnose your situation

This document helps frame the set of assumptions that keep your team from realizing its maximum potential.  It may be used to help you understand your own perspective and level of engagement of your business venture.

What's wrong with European venture capital?

This article is very biased and perpetuates some myths about Silicon Valley investors on Sand Hill Road but it may have a few things that are valid, generally that focus on the entrepreneur versus on financials.

The main difference, which the articles misses, is the lack of exit scenarios in Europe for venture backed companies, this requires either a very health M&A market with companies that either have lots of cash or valuable stock, both are in short supply across Europe.

The Encyclopedia of Venture Capital

VC Experts provides an excellent introductory tutorial on venture funding.  The website is useful for lawyers who are seeking to learn about the legal aspects of venture funding but it is also useful for entrepreneurs who want to be well versed in these important issues.   Understanding the legal framework of venture funding helps to facilitate the process of asking, negotiating, and receiving venture funding.

Many entrepreneurs miss this important aspect of forming and growing a business.  The process is complex, confusing, full of traps.   Investors want to control their risk and in doing so ask for legal protection that put off entrepreneurs.   These are all subject to negotiation and the more the entrepreneur knows that better.

The reason why serial entrepreneurs get funding is that they know this process.  They understand what the investors expect and how to make use of the legal frameworks to receive the funding.  This experience removes risk for the investor.

Model Legal Documents for VC Funding

The National Venture Capital Association provides a set of standard documents that are used in venture funding.  These are somewhat involved but they can act as a primer for the entrepreneur who wants to become familiar with the issues before speaking to a lawyer.

Scvngr Game Mechanics

Some companies keep a playbook of product tips, tricks and trade secrets.  See Scvngr example at the link.  It includes some insights that are interesting to consider when designing products for consumers.

Phd+ 2012 Intensive edition Pitch Exercises

These are the exercises for the pitch session on April 19th.  I included all the exercises for anyone who is already advanced and started their business.  For people who are just starting this for the first time focus on the first 12 slides and use them as a template to get some business concepts designed.

Basic laws of human stupidity

This work by Carlo M. Cipolla anticipated several areas of current research in economics, behavioral economics and the study of the fairness economy of open source technology.   Some of his assertions are clearly off and should be disputed but as a piece that provokes discussion it is worth reading and contemplating.  The writing is satirical and as many acts of humor has seeds of truth.

MIT Video - The Akamai Story: From Theory to Practice

If you have ever wondered what it means for a website to become “Akamaized,” this lecture about the company’s origins explains much of the mystery. But before there was an Akamai, there were research problems lots of them. Nearly 15 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee, architect of the World Wide Web, asked Tom Leighton to think about solutions to future — and now familia r— Internet issues: bottlenecks that form when users flood to a particular site, often along a single Internet supply line. Leighton’s team generated algorithms (and publications and advanced degrees) while figuring out the fastest means to move information from here to there. Along the way, they learned some tricks to outsmart Internet service providers who slow traffic down by bumping competitors’ data from their network lines. Akamai (which means clever and cool in Hawaiian) got its start in the MIT 50k competition, and took off when some big name clients decided to give the company a trial run. Paramount, ESPN, Apple, and Microsoft recognized the importance of Akamai’s Internet optimization strategy: distributing servers and routing software to the “edge” or end users, rather than centralizing services. Akamai survived the stock market “bubble” and collapse, and now serves a diverse global market