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November 29, 2007
Magazine news
From the Editor of Inc.: Our Entrepreneur of the Year
Posted by Jane Berentson at 11:00 PM
In the movie Groundhog Day, Bill Murray is doomed to live the same day over and over again until he finally “gets it,” “it” being an appreciation of love and life and small pleasures. The movie works not just because Murray plays a cynic better than anyone else, but also because it taps into the possibility that second and third chances are not out of reach, as long as experience leads to knowledge and change.
I don’t know that Elon Musk, our cover subject, would identify with Groundhog Day. Musk has been described as “really freaking smart,” shy, impatient, and intense, so I can’t really imagine him feeling a kinship with the bored-to-tears character Murray plays. But Musk, too, has had the opportunity to start over--and he’s taking advantage of it completely. After his first two companies were clipped short of the possibilities he saw for them, he made sure his next three--you’ll learn about them in our feature, which begins here--would be allowed to grow to their fullest potential. We chose Musk as our entrepreneur of the year because the potential of the companies he is building is enormous, almost breathtaking, and because he has the drive and intelligence to push them to success. If he does succeed, we could all end up living in a rosier world.
Continue reading "From the Editor of Inc.: Our Entrepreneur of the Year"
November 28, 2007
Don't Get Fleeced By Your Kids
Posted by Hannah Clark Steiman at 2:39 PM
Few of us will be lucky enough to live to 105, and hardly any will die with an estate worth $198 million. Then again, maybe it's not so lucky. Socialite Brooke Astor died in August, and now her 83-year-old son has been indicted for allegedly stealing millions of her hard-earned (well, hard-inherited-from-her-third-husband) dollars. For others blessed with such funds and such loving children, the Wall Street Journal offered tips this morning for protecting your estate from the very people with whom you've entrusted it. Of course, you can get fleeced by your relatives even if you're not a hundred-millionaire, most notably during a divorce. Here's a recent story we wrote on how to protect your company if you (or your kids) have a marriage on the skids.
And of course, if you have any interesting stories about being defrauded by your kids (or, for that matter, defrauding your parents), please share them in the comments section.
November 19, 2007
Today's news
Sweeter than Sugar
Posted by Sarah Goldstein at 3:48 PM
It used to be that by slapping a "diet" or "low fat" label on a popular food, you'd have yourself an instant market of would-be dieters and health nuts. But within the last decade a new buzz term has proliferated on grocery aisles across the country--let's call it the cult of "all-natural." The all-natural product, much like its diet predecessor, can be found in food categories from juice to poultry. Most recently, a slew of companies that produce all-natural sweeteners have tried to get in on the natural foods bonanza with mixed results.
Part of the difficulty for a natural brand like Zsweet, which we profiled in this year's start up package, is the competition it faces not from other natural brands, but from the artificial sweetener market. As today's LA Times examines, the artificial market has only continued to grow over the last fifty years, most recently due to the explosive success of sucralose-based Splenda, which hit the market in 1999.
Capturing a market for Zsweet and the like is more difficult because consumers who shop for a diet product are not necessarily the same as those who seek a natural product. In other words, if you buy Equal or Splenda for the low calories, you'll need some convincing that a natural alternative up to 30 percent more expensive is worth your while. Similarly, a consumer who buys natural sugar for the taste and to avoid artificial additives, may not be interested in the supposed health benefits of lower-calorie Zsweet, which, when all is said and done, tastes nothing like sugar. Complicating things, Coca-Cola is currently in the works to create its own all-natural, low calorie sweetener. If the product takes off and is sold for considerably less, it could pose a major threat to fledgling brands like Zsweet.
If you were at the helm of a natural sweetener start up how would you position the brand? How would you differentiate yourself from the competition? And what market segment would you pursue?
November 14, 2007
TheFunded.com Unmasked
Posted by Max Chafkin at 5:22 PM
A few months back, we told you about a new website that allows entrepreneurs to anonymously review VCs—sometimes in strikingly cruel fashion. The site, which has become a must-read for entrepreneurs thinking about raising capital and image conscious VCs, is called The Funded. Until now, its controversial founder had declined to reveal his identity.
“Ted,” as he is known, claims to be the CEO of a venture-backed startup, having created the site after a particularly bad investor experience. Despite rumors, he has thus far kept a low profile, granting only anonymous interviews and posting anonymously to the site. Over the course of several phone interviews this summer, he told me that revealing his identity would put his company at risk. But over the past few months, The Funded has grown to include nearly 3,500 members, job listings, and advertising. In short, Ted finds himself with a nifty little publishing business in the mode of Gawker Media or TechCrunch and looks poised to capitalize. Tomorrow, he promises to reveal himself at an event in Palo Alto (charging $500 a head.)
So who’s it gonna be? Well, we’ve gone on the record with four guesses: Mahalo's Jason Calacanis, Twitter's Evan Williams, Gawker's Nick Denton, and Digg's Kevin Rose. Look to this space for more details after the event, and we’ll let you know how we did.
And if you have other ideas of who Ted could be, let ’em rip.
UPDATE: Ted is Adeo Ressi, the founder of Game Trust. Read all about it here. More details to come.
The Browser
Building a Better Baby Bottle
Posted by Mike Hofman at 10:31 AM
Jennifer Morrill's father was constantly inventing things, from a wind generator to a baby bottle. That last product seemed to have legs, so he set up a company and attempted to recruit his daughter away from her corporate job at Yahoo. She demurred but, after he died, she decided to step in and run the business, Adiri. One of her boldest executive decisions to date was to scrap her father's original schematic and bring in an industrial designer to make the product, which had been sold primarily through doctors, more appealing as a retail item. The gamble appears to have worked and today the company is on track to grow twelvefold in terms of annual sales, according to the New York Times.
Adiri's tale illustrates two truths about innovation. First, successful inventors (and those who study the history of invention) have told me that the most prodigious innovators—the Edisons and so forth—were never wedded to a single idea. They wandered the invention waterfront, working on multiple ideas simultaneously, and dabbling in completely different fields over the course of a career. Some of the ideas that the great tinkerers thought would be huge hits turned out to be duds, while some of their more modest creations turned out to be major moneymakers. The point is that, like Morrill's father, most successful inventors don't devote themselves to one invention as much as the process of invention. They are comfortable designing wind generators, then turning to the task of perfecting the baby bottle.
The second aspect of this story that jumps out at me is the fact that Jennifer Morrill came to believe that the best way to advance her father's legacy was, counterintuitively, to scrap his original design. As I said, the bottle was initially sold through doctors, who supplied it to their patients. But after a buyer for Babies R Us expressed interest in the product, Morrill saw that the company's future was in retail. That meant making the product more appealing as an object that would be displayed on store shelves. As a daughter, Morrill may have had reservations about straying too far from her father's design. But as an entrepreneur, she didn't let any sense of sentimentality interfere with making the call to completely revamp the product. It's one of the fundamental lessons of business today: the innovation that got you where you are may not be the innovation that will get you where you want to go.
November 12, 2007
The Browser
Managing Those Pesky Millennials
Posted by Mike Hofman at 3:26 PM
The 80 million millennial workers born between 1980 and 1995 are now streaming into the workplace, and they are hellbent on rewriting the rules of American business. So reported Morley Safer on "60 Minutes" on Sunday.
These young, tattooed, flip-flop wearing workers are "about to attack everything you hold sacred: from giving orders, to your starched white shirt and tie," Safer asserted. And what's more, you aren't even going to put up a fight. Faced with this unruly group of unretainable recruits, businesses are relaxing dress codes, learning to lavish praise on even the most mediocre underlings, embracing work-life balance, and nurturing their reputations as fun "employer brands." (In a related story, Google's house masseuse just retired young and rich, according to the New York Times.)
Continue reading "Managing Those Pesky Millennials"
November 9, 2007
The Browser
Bullying Bosses Beware
Posted by Mike Hofman at 7:00 PM
Are you a screamer? Demanding when it comes to your assistants? Well, you may want to reconsider the old Leo Durocher management approach. That's because officials in New York City are saying that a high-profile murder investigation turns out to be a case of assistant rage.
Continue reading "Bullying Bosses Beware"
The Office Blog
Spam, Where Art Thou?
Posted by Leigh Buchanan at 4:52 PM
A couple of weeks ago I posted a message on a CEO bulletin board asking for e-mail marketing success stories. Yesterday I received a message from a CEO asking me if I had received his earlier message touting the company’s strategy for avoiding spam filters. I hadn’t seen the e-mail. Unless you’re living completely irony-free these days, I assume I don’t have to spell out why not.
Inc.’s parent company, Mansueto Ventures, installed an industrial strength spam filter a month or so back, which enhances staff productivity by quietly hoovering up anything that might distract us or offend our delicate sensibilities. Of course we had a spam filter before, but it was porous in a delightfully serendipitous fashion: leaving us to scratch our heads over why erectile enhancement ads made it through, while erectile dysfunction ads were barred at the door. (I have just discovered that Microsoft’s spell check function does not consider “erectile” a word. Interesting….) This new filter, by contrast, is very efficient; cleansing my inbox of undesirables and dumping them all in spam ghetto, from whence I receive reports several times a week. Occasionally I find something like my CEO’s note has become accidentally trapped, and I release it like a dolphin from tuna nets. Generally, though, I just scan the subject lines. The sheer volume of coarse come-ons, unleavened by less-provocative missives from friends and business contacts, makes me mildly queasy. It’s a bit like tugging a hair clog from the shower drain at the end of the week.
I confess I miss my spam. I like to ease into my work day by sitting down at the PC and whacking away a few low-hanging fruit. Deleting messages titled “Re: Your pharmacy order #390842083;” “Your assistance is needed;” or, perhaps most provocatively, “S&WE&2789ueruu” took only a few seconds and required virtually no brainpower. Yet I felt as though I was accomplishing something: sweeping clean the stoop of my day. No comparable amuse bouche now exists between me and the heavy meal of actual labor. In addition, whenever I’m alerted to the arrival of a new message, I know it’s probably something I’ll need to deal with. Gone is that pleasurably sense of dodging a bullet: “Phew, it’s just junk. Nobody wants something this minute. I haven’t screwed anything up.”
Mind you, this is no invitation to send me junk mail or a dare to try and circumvent our filter. Just a bit of nostalgia for wilder times past. Times Square is a brighter, safer, more profitable place since Guiliani cleaned it up. But we can still miss the sleaze that gave it character.
November 8, 2007
Is it Bush's fault?
Posted by Hannah Clark Steiman at 3:10 PM
Joe Stiglitz likes to toss blame around for the economic woes that plague our world—but I'm not sure the blame is always aimed in the right direction. In his book, Globalization and Its Discontents, he heaps curses on the IMF for its treatment of poor countries, but barely implicates his former employer, the World Bank.
In this mostly excellent article in Vanity Fair, he valiantly attempts to blame Bush for all of America's economic woes. It's difficult to argue with many of his points: Bush did take a budget surplus and turn it into a deficit, thanks only partly to the war in Iraq. He also adds that Bush doubled agricultural subsidies, which is misguided economic policy at its finest.
But I think he gives the Iraq war too much credit for causing the rising price of oil. And it's disingenuous to blame Bush for the housing boom (and bust), or the liquidity boom (and bust). He claims Bush's bad economic policies forced the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates, thereby fueling the consumer spending binge that's marked the last few years. Shouldn't Alan Greenspan, National Hero, get a little bit of the blame for that? Not to mention the investment banks that got so money-crazy they forgot to think about risk? Not to mention consumers themselves?
What do you think? Are we headed for the economic doldrums, as I argued last week on this blog? And who's to blame?
November 7, 2007
The Browser
The Modern Dilemma: "Who Owns What?"
Posted by Mike Hofman at 11:41 AM
At first blush, the concept of a writer's strike strikes me as, well, funny—pencils of the world unite! And I happen to be a writer. I imagine for most business owners, the whole brouhaha in Hollywood seems a little absurd. TV show scribes do not seem as oppressed as, say, coal miners or factory workers. But maybe the strike isn't as trivial as it seems. Maybe it's a sign of things to come.
Continue reading "The Modern Dilemma: "Who Owns What?""
November 5, 2007
Executive Summaries
Office Munchausen Syndrome
Posted by Mike Hofman at 11:33 AM
Years ago, a co-worker and I used to joke about a boss who constantly swooped in to "get everyone back on schedule." We felt that the manager's efforts, which typically involved a series of meetings, actually added to overall organizational delays, plus they had a deleterious effect on morale, making various employees feel as if they were failing constantly. Perhaps this was unfair of us or unkind or self-delusional. But I could never shake the suspicion...
Continue reading "Office Munchausen Syndrome"
November 1, 2007
Economic doomsday cometh
Posted by Hannah Clark Steiman at 11:00 AM
A lot of people are focused right now on whether we're heading into a recession. To me, a more important question is whether we're careening toward a major economic collapse--maybe not this year, maybe not next year, but soon, and for a looong time. (Think 1929, not 2001.) A recent New York Magazine article explored the reasons this might happen: the housing market could continue to fall, the derivatives market could collapse, consumers could finally stop spending like there's no tomorrow, the dollar could crash further. This is probably an unpopular view among Inc.'s readers, since entrepreneurs are relentlessly optimistic. And so, it seems, are Americans in general. In the discussions surrounding the country's current economic woes, there is talk about recession, but rarely does anyone mention the prospect of anything more serious.
Recessions are unpleasant; no one likes them. But in the last two decades they have been relatively short and mild, and followed by years of incredible prosperity. Past performance, however, is no guarantee of future results. Could something much worse be in store? A few prophets of doom seem to think so; Peter Schiff is one of the most commonly quoted. If the economy does collapse, he'll be hailed as an oracle, which may be why he seems almost gleeful when he makes his predictions.
But I'm starting to believe him, and the main reason is that I recently read Collapse by Jared Diamond, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Guns, Germs and Steel. When a society collapses, it is sometimes slow and steady, sometimes fast and furious. The signs are there, but few people heed them--understandably, since before the collapse, the society has usually reached the peak of its power. While reaching that peak, the society has completely destroyed the environment upon which it depends. That's happening today. Sure, it's trendy to fight global warming. But as this excellent BusinessWeek article explains, many corporate green efforts are a penny more than worthless. We're still destroying more of the environment than we're saving, which in my book means we're still headed in the wrong direction. We're starting to think about decelerating, but no one has put on the brakes.
Thoughts?
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