There’s actually only one way to build a business

Business is best defined as: “Creating wealth through profitable transactions.”

I came to this definition many years ago after winning a job as General Manager of a medium-sized company and later boasting to a friend that revenue had increased threefold under my guidance. “Great,” he said, “but what about profit?”

This was a great question.

Business is about profits, and indeed every department within a business should be contributing to that, even if they are so called “offline activities”, such as perhaps the training manager or the IT Department.

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10 Principles For Not Killing Your Startup

Everywhere you look these days, people are attempting to start innovative businesses and nonprofits, working on putting team, product and financing together, and generally trying to change the world - or, at least, their world - through entrepreneurship.

Meanwhile, I strongly suspect that the mortality rate of tech startups is as high as ever (no rigorous scientific tracking there, just common sense and observation - please do share stats if you know of some). In any case, one failed startup is one too many.

Guest author Greg Boutin helps startups and early-stage ventures defy a certain death, through strategy and marketing services. He blogs on entrepreneurship and on semantic technologies. He thanks Arnold Wytenburg, William Mougayar of Eqentia, Fabien Tiburce of Compliantia, and Ceara Scullion for their priceless input on this post.

So, wouldn't it be great if we could align on a guiding set of principles on how not to kill a startup? Think Hippocratic Oath for entrepreneurs - just not strictly an oath, and more in the spirit of "Doing Good" than "Doing No Harm" (or "Doing No Evil" for that matter). After all, unlike humans, doing nothing to a startup is a sure path to death, so we need to be more proactive.

And yes, I know, blanket business principles can sometimes be silly (if you haven't yet, I recommend you read the Halo Effect by Rosenzweig), but as the recent book The Checklist Manifesto argues, situations can also sometimes be improved with the introduction of simple, field-tested guidelines. I can personally tie every startup failure that I know of to the principles below not being respected.

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High-Growth Firms Account for Disproportionate Share of Job Creation, According to Kauffman Foundation Study

(KANSAS CITY, Mo.), March 9, 2010 – As the American economy continues to send out mixed signals about recovery, job creation has emerged as the country's most pressing economic issue. Not only important for employment itself, job growth also drives recovery in other sectors, including housing. But, while hope for spurring the U.S. economy toward recovery focuses squarely on job creation, policy discussions center primarily on measures that would expand job growth in existing companies.

According to a new study released today by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, the current national conversation would be more productively focused on creating a favorable environment for entrepreneurship—and particularly high-growth entrepreneurship—because top-performing companies are the most fertile source of new jobs.

High-Growth Firms and the Future of the American Economy, the third in the Kauffman Foundation Research Series on Firm Formation and Economic Growth, draws on a special tabulation conducted by the Census Bureau at the Kauffman Foundation's request, calculated from the Business Dynamics Statistics (BDS) database. Author Dane Stangler, a senior analyst with the Kauffman Foundation, found that in any given year, the top-performing 1 percent of firms generate roughly 40 percent of all new jobs.

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Why You Should Start a Company in... New Orleans

It used to be, if you were serious about starting a tech company, you went to Silicon Valley. But emerging entrepreneurial hubs around the country are giving startup aspirants options. In this series, we talk to leading figures in those communities about what makes them tick. Here, part eight in our series.

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Israeli venture capital fundraising down 72 per cent in 2009

The downturn hit Israel’s venture capital market hard in 2009, with domestic funds only managing to muster $229m, a sharp drop of 72 per cent from the $803m raised in 2008.

The depressed figure is the third lowest annual amount raised in the past decade, according to recent data from the IVC Research Center.

Only three Israeli venture capital funds completed their fundraising efforts in 2009. Sequoia Capital Israel, an Israel-dedicated US fund, announced the final closing of Sequoia IV, a $200m vintage 2009 fund. Other 2009 vintage funds were TriVentures II, a $25m medical device fund with American medical technology company Medtronic Inc as its main investor, and Startvest 09, the Targetech Innovation Center’s new fund, which raised $3.7m.

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The Top Angels in Tech

It’s no surprise that most angel investors are successful entrepreneurs. You can see that in the list of names below—Jeff Bezos, Reid Hoffman, Marc Andreessen, to single out a few. But are they as successful in the role of angel investor? Bloomberg BusinessWeek asked researcher YouNoodle to analyze the investment track record of this group of well-known tech personalities whose activity as angels has stayed largely hidden until now.

Editors Note: There is a great interactive chart on the BusinessWeek Site.  Go to it here.

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Venture-Capital Firms Caught in a Shakeout

The technology bubble popped a decade ago, but the venture-capital industry that helped finance the boom stayed largely intact. Now venture-capital firms are going through their own brutal culling.

Venture firms are struggling to raise new cash, hampered by poor investment returns and a difficult economy. Last year, 125 venture funds in the U.S. collected $13.6 billion, down from 203 funds that raised $28.7 billion in 2008 and down from 217 funds that raised $40.8 billion in 2007, according to data tracker VentureSource.

"There are a lot of firms that have dropped off," says Rebecca Lynn, a principal at venture capital firm Morgenthaler Ventures in Menlo Park, Calif. "We'll see a continued shakeout as a lot of firms that aren't the top firms won't be around."

There were 794 active venture-capital firms in the U.S. at the end of 2009, meaning they have raised money in the last eight years, down from a peak of 1,023 in 2005, according to Thomson Reuters and the National Venture Capital Association.

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Why Google Terrifies People -- A 166 Second Explanation

Google (GOOG) is going to study your DNA to figure out how to better target ads to you. Or, at least, that's the message of a recent segment about the search giant on Australian news program The Hungry Beast.

As the Google Operating System blog's Alex Chitu points out, many of the stats in the video are quite dated. And while Google definitely doesn't have a perfect record on privacy issues, this is more than a little over the top.

But this clip is very well done, and its worth watching through to the end:

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A Vision for Personalized Medicine

Leroy Hood has been at the center of a number of paradigm shifts in biology. He helped to invent the first automated DNA sequencing machine in the 1980s, along with several other technologies that have changed the face of molecular biology. And in 2000, he founded the Institute for Systems Biology, a multidisciplinary institute in Seattle dedicated to examining the interactions between biological information at many different levels, and to moving forward a new perspective for studying biology. The next revolution he plans to help shape is in medicine, using new technologies and new knowledge in biology and informatics to make its practice more predictive, preventative and personal.

Hood says that with each of the major transitions he's been a part of, he has faced skepticism. The human genome project, for example, had many naysayers. But he says the best way to overcome doubts is with results. To that end, Hood has founded a startup called Integrated Diagnostics, which is developing cheap diagnostics that could be used to detect diseases at earlier, more treatable stages. He has also developed a partnership between the Institute for Systems Biology and Ohio State Medical School, where he hopes to show how combining existing medical and genomics technologies can affect the practice of health care today.

Hood contends that digitizing medical records--the health-care industry's major push at the moment--is just one small part of the informatics overhaul the field needs to undergo. And pharmacogenomics--the practice of using an individual's genetic makeup to choose drugs --provides only a limited example of the potential power of personalized medicine.

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Electric cars 'no greener than diesel', study claims

S witching from diesel to electric cars will not dent transport's carbon footprint over the next 15 years as long as Europe's electricity supply remains based on fossil fuels, according to Danish analysis.

The study, prepared for the Danish Petroleum Industry Association by consultancy Ea Energy Analyses, compared the CO2 emissions of cars using different engine technologies from petrol and diesel to hybrid, plug-in hybrid and electric cars.

It found that carbon emissions per kilometre barely differed between the different cars when considering the full 'well-to-wheel' energy production cycle, a trend that they expect to continue until 2025.

According to the analysis, CO2 emissions from hybrids and electric cars are similar, while diesel cars emit 8% more carbon. Emissions from petrol cars, on the other hand, are around 35% higher due to less efficient use of energy compared to diesel, they said.

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Eight Things Your Employees Want From You

I often have to remind the dedicated, smart CEOs I work with that leading takes time and energy. Directing the feelings, attitudes, actions, and behaviors of a team is a big task. Often, I also hear the secrets of these CEOs' employees, about what truly aggravates them and what they love about their bosses. To keep top executives on track, I've created this list of what employees want their leaders to do.

1. Tell me my role, tell me what to do, and give me the rules. Micromanaging? No, it's called clear direction. Give them parameters so they can work within broad outlines.

2. Discipline my coworker who is out of line. Time and time again, I hear, "I wish my boss would tell Nancy that this is just unacceptable." Hold people accountable in a way that is fair but makes everyone cognizant of what is and isn't acceptable.

3. Get me excited. About the company, about the product, about the job, about a project. Just get them excited.

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IdeaPaint all over your office walls

(CNNMoney.com) -- In 2002, a group of Babson College entrepreneurship students ran out of room on their whiteboard. They had spent hours brainstorming new business possibilities, and the sudden space crunch threatened to cramp their creativity.

Instead, it sparked a new idea: Why not make paint that turned walls into giant whiteboards? The ideas kept popping: you could paint chairs, doors, tabletops, playrooms, entire corporate offices. Any surface could be a canvas for inspiration. The company would be called IdeaPaint.

The risk: Finding the right formula was more than half the battle. For three years, former classmates Morgen Newman, John Goscha and Jeff Avallon sought help from specialty paint and chemical coating laboratories. Two labs claimed it was impossible. Whiteboards are made using high-intensity ovens. IdeaPaint needed something that could be applied with a roller in a single coat. That wasn't going to happen, the scientists said.

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Most Innovatitive Companies: Top 10 By Industry

For our annual Most Innovative Companies package, we amass and assess information on thousands of businesses, looking for creative models, real-world impact, far-sighted risk taking, and paradigm-busting execution. We found so many inspiring examples that we couldn't include them all. So we created top 10 lists of the most innovative companies in 24 categories. Below, you will find the business that stand apart from the rest and provide a snap shot of the creativity at work in the global marketplace.

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Should You Blog: Both Sides of the Table

I guess let’s file this under sales & marketing advice.

I recently wrote a piece for Mashable on how to create a company blog.  Since it’s already written (and since I promised not to republish on my blog other than a summary) if you’re interested please have a read over there.  I have a very detailed article that covers stuff I won’t cover in detail in this post.

Summary notes and then I’ll extend:

Should you blog? Yes.  As Brian Solis is fond of saying,“PR stands for public relations, not press release.” That’s right. In the era of two-way communications people expect an authentic voice and not the Wizard of Oz pulling levels behind the curtains. Blogging is an important way to build an audience and also drive SEO traffic. It’s also a great way to build relationships with people interested in your topic area.

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How Many Enterprise Workers Will Work in the Mobile Cloud? Try 130 Million

Juniper Research has come out with more analysis that shows just how big the mobile enterprise market will be for cloud computing.

According to Juniper, the advent of collaboration tools will mean that 130 million enterprise workers will use the mobile cloud by 2014.

The steep climb will be in part due to the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offerings from companies like Google and Microsoft.

The rise is already evident as more people adopt smartphones. In particular, Juniper points to the iPhone and the App store as catalysts for the growth. People are using their iPhones to use a variety of applications for the work they do.The report also cites the iPhone user interface and how it has spurred adoption and lead to a higher level of quality in smartphones across the wider market.

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The Innovation Delusion

Huffington Post ((Ralph Gomory, Research Prof. NYU, Pres. Emeritus, Alfred P Sloan Foundation, Former IBM SVP Science-Tech) - Specializing in innovation is an attractive idea, but a misleading one; an idea that blinds us to what we really need to do. We need to do more than produce exciting new ideas; we must also be able to compete in large productive industries. This requires us to both balance trade and to motivate our corporations not only to innovate, but also to produce in this country. While this is hard to do, it can be done. Specializing in innovation, though often recommended, is in fact a delusion, an alluring path that in reality will lead us straight downhill...

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Tuning the energy innovation engine at MIT

BOSTON--The MIT Energy Conference here on Saturday covered a little bit of everything--"China speed," climate change, financing gaps, government policy, nuclear and natural gas, and, of course, science experiments--as entrepreneurs, business people, and academics tried to get their arms around big-picture energy challenges.

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has become a hotbed for clean-energy innovation over the past four years, attracting students and faculty to the field, some of whom have spun out promising companies.

At a showcase there, local companies and researchers working in wind, solar, biofuels, storage, and efficiency displayed some of their ongoing work. But at the conference, discussion focused more on conventional energy sources, policy, and financing.

Science fiction?
The nature of global energy picture is well understood: growing demand in coming years, particularly from developing countries, is expected to result in more fossil fuel consumption and continue to increase greenhouse gas emissions. Governments around the world are expected to devise policies that improve national security by cutting imports of oil and other fuels.

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Stop saying 'innovation' by Scott Berkun

Einstein, Ford, Picasso and Edison rarely said the word innovation and neither should you. Every Fortune 500 crowd I've said this to laughs and agrees. The abuse of words like innovation, disruption, game changing and breakthrough is killing us. We're tripping over our own egos, lost in the ignorance of romance for the vagaries of pseudo-thinking associated with these words. The more often people in a company use this word, the less likely anything worthy of that label is actually happening, as it's often the confused and the desperate who believe simply saying a word again and again like a magic spell causes anything at all to happen.

There are four ways to return to sanity and put more ideas to use in your world:

1. Ask people who say innovation what they mean. If ever anyone says the word in a meeting, ask "Can you give an example of what you mean by innovative?" If they can't, you've just saved everyone in the room hours of time. Using the i-word is often a cop-out for clear thinking. They are trying to signify creativity, without actually being creative.