GAP

How to Register a Start-Up

By KERMIT PATTISON

Published: March 31, 2010

Think registering your business sounds like a perfunctory and insignificant task? Think again.

Mustafah Abdulaziz for The New York Times For her spa, Debbi Ramsey of Philadelphia went through six names in two years before she settled on Natural Wellness & Spa.
The registration process forces you to confront a battery of questions that should be part of the bedrock of your business plan. Too often, new business owners regard registration as just another bureaucratic ticket to punch, and they fail to focus on important related steps like claiming a business name, choosing a structure and securing all of the requisite permits. This sort of rush-to-the-wedding approach has become more tempting now that online services allow businesses to do these tasks with little thought.

Unfortunately, these matters can rear up later as trademark disputes, tax problems, bureaucratic snags or costly name changes. “If you treat this as paperwork and box checking, you’re missing some of the issues that will be critical to your business,” said Therese Flaherty, director of the Wharton Small Business Development Center at theUniversity of Pennsylvania. “You ought to be inquisitive about that. If you’re not, it will come back and bite you later.”

Here are some issues you should think through before you register.

THE NAME GAME There are many examples of companies that picked a name without doing the proper due diligence and then were forced to change. This can be costly: You may have to throw out product, packaging, signs, stationery, business cards and all of your branding and marketing efforts. Or you may become embroiled in costly litigation and have to pay damages.

“The first thing you should think about is the name,” said Esther Barron, clinical assistant professor at the Northwestern University School of Law and director of its Small Business Opportunities Center. “Are there going to be trademark issues? Is somebody going to sue you for using that name? Can you stop other people from using it?”

Even small local businesses can be tripped up if they do not get the name right at the outset. Debbi Ramsey, the owner of a spa in Philadelphia, has gone through six names in two years. One choice had been taken. She switched to Bodyworks but customers said it reminded them of an auto body shop. Next she tried One Touch Body and Spa, but she got dirty looks when she went to the city for a permit. “They’re looking at me over their glasses with this ‘touching body’ in there,” she said. “I tried to explain that I do therapeutic massage and guys were coming up to the counter and saying, ‘Yeah, right, where’s your place?’ ”

Eventually, Ms. Ramsey settled on a more wholesome name: Natural Wellness & Spa. But getting the name right cost her more than $1,000 in expenses plus innumerable annoyances. “I had no idea,” she said of the ordeal. “It just added to the drama of starting a business.”

Do an Internet search. Check the United States Patent and Trademark Office database to see if your name is already trademarked. Scan trade association directories in your industry. Check with your county clerk’s office, state department of revenue and secretary of state to see whether your name is similar to that of an existing business. Search your state’s database of corporations and limited liability companies.

If you plan to do business interstate or on the Internet, consult registries in other states. If you plan to have a Web site — and you do plan to have a Web site, don’t you? — check to see if the domain name or something close is available.

In simpler cases, a layman can do the tasks associated with researching a name. good business or university librarian can help immensely. When more is at risk, you may want to hire a business or intellectual property lawyer to assure that an expert has turned over all the right rocks.

Peri Pakroo, a small-business consultant in Albuquerque and author of “The Small Business Start-Up Kit” (Nolo, 2010), suggests that businesses ask themselves a simple question: How disastrous would a name change be? If a change would be catastrophic, you should err on the side of more thorough search and consider hiring a lawyer and trademark protection.

PICK YOUR STRUCTURE Another central question to confront is your type of business entity. The choice should be a fundamental part of any business plan, something you think through before you register.

You must declare your form of entity (sole proprietorship, partnership, corporation or limited liability company) when getting a federal tax identification number and some business licenses. Different types of entities have different regulatory and tax requirements. In general, corporations, limited liability companies and limited partnerships must file with their state. Businesses that do not form corporations may be deemed sole proprietorships or general partnerships by default and have unlimited liability.

OBTAIN A FEDERAL TAX ID Most businesses will need a federal employer identification number — even if they do not have employees. Sole proprietors and some single-person limited liability companies can use their Social Security numbers.

You will typically need an employer identification number for local tax registration forms, federal tax returns and local business licenses. Happily, obtaining an E.I.N. is fairly easy and can be done online or over the phone.

REGISTER A FICTITIOUS NAME Any company with a trade name that does not include the legal names of owners (for sole proprietorships and general partnerships) or the registered name of a corporation, limited liability company or limited partnership name must file for what is known as a fictitious business name (sometimes known as a trade name or DBA). Depending on the jurisdiction, this may be done at the state or county level.

Do not neglect this step. “That’s an important thing, because a lot of times you won’t be able to open a bank account without it,” Ms. Pakroo said.

Again, do your due diligence to avoid name disputes.

FILE REGISTRATION AND PERMITS Now comes the part you have been waiting for — registration. In most areas, businesses must register with the city or county tax collector. This step goes by several names including business-tax application, tax registration or business-license application. This basically allows local governments to keep track of businesses they intend to tax. You will have to pay a fee and, in some jurisdictions, you may have to pay estimated taxes.

In many states, businesses that sell tangible goods must also obtain a seller’s permit that allows them to collect sales tax from customers (service businesses may be exempt). “Do not blow the sales permit off,” said Rich Stim, a lawyer and co-author of “Wow, I’m in Business” (Nolo, 2008). “That would be a big mistake. You’re dealing with tax people, so it will get ugly quickly.”

Some businesses may face additional requirements like planning and zoning boards, regulatory agencies or professional licenses.

ASK QUESTIONS AND LEARN Unfortunately, these processes can be confusing. Ms. Flaherty of Wharton suggests that entrepreneurs view registration and all the related questions as part of the learning and networking of building a business. With that mind-set, a founder will add value to the venture.

“It’s tempting to just think this is a bunch of meaningless paperwork and bureaucracy,” she said. “But it’s a mistake to treat it like that. A little bit of inquisitiveness is important.”

 

A version of this article appeared in print on April 1, 2010, on page B7 of the New York edition.

 

Marketing Small Businesses With Twitter

By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER

Published: July 22, 2009

SAN FRANCISCO — Three weeks after Curtis Kimball opened his crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, he noticed a stranger among the friends in line for his desserts. How had the man discovered the cart? He had read about it on Twitter.

Peter DaSilva for The New York Times

Curtis Kimball, owner of a crème brûlée cart in San Francisco, uses Twitter to drive his customers to his changing location.

For Mr. Kimball, who conceded that he “hadn’t really understood the purpose of Twitter,” the beauty of digital word-of-mouth marketing was immediately clear. He signed up for an account and has more than 5,400 followers who wait for him to post the current location of his itinerant cart and list the flavors of the day, like lavender and orange creamsicle.

“I would love to say that I just had a really good idea and strategy, but Twitter has been pretty essential to my success,” he said. He has quit his day job as a carpenter to keep up with the demand.

Much has been made of how big companies like Dell, Starbucks and Comcast use Twitter to promote their products and answer customers’ questions. But today, small businesses outnumber the big ones on the free microblogging service, and in many ways, Twitter is an even more useful tool for them.

For many mom-and-pop shops with no ad budget, Twitter has become their sole means of marketing. It is far easier to set up and update a Twitter account than to maintain a Web page. And because small-business owners tend to work at the cash register, not in a cubicle in the marketing department, Twitter’s intimacy suits them well.

“We think of these social media tools as being in the realm of the sophisticated, multiplatform marketers like Coca-Cola and McDonald’s, but a lot of these supersmall businesses are gravitating toward them because they are accessible, free and very simple,” said Greg Sterling, an analyst who studies the Internet’s influence on shopping and local businesses.

Small businesses typically get more than half of their customers through word of mouth, he said, and Twitter is the digital manifestation of that. Twitter users broadcast messages of up to 140 characters in length, and the culture of the service encourages people to spread news to friends in their own network.

Umi, a sushi restaurant in San Francisco, sometimes gets five new customers a night who learned about it on Twitter, said Shamus Booth, a co-owner.

He twitters about the fresh fish of the night — “The O-Toro (bluefin tuna belly) tonight is some of the most rich and buttery tuna I’ve had,” he recently wrote — and offers free seaweed salads to people who mention Twitter.

Twitter is not just for businesses that want to lure customers with mouth-watering descriptions of food. For Cynthia Sutton-Stolle, the co-owner of Silver Barn Antiques in tiny Columbus, Tex., Twitter has been a way to find both suppliers and customers nationwide.

Since she joined Twitter in February, she has connected with people making lamps and candles that she subsequently ordered for her shop and has sold a few thousand dollars of merchandise to people outside Columbus, including to a woman in New Jersey shopping for graduation gifts.

“We don’t even have our Web site done, and we weren’t even trying to start an e-commerce business,” Ms. Sutton-Stolle said. “Twitter has been a real valuable tool because it’s made us national instead of a little-bitty store in a little-bitty town.”

Scott Seaman of Blowing Rock, N.C., also uses Twitter to expand his customer base beyond his town of about 1,500 residents. Mr. Seaman is a partner at Christopher’s Wine and Cheese shop and owns a bed and breakfast in town. He sets up searches on TweetDeck, a Web application that helps people manage their Twitter messages, to start conversations with people talking about his town or the mountain nearby. One person he met on Twitter booked a room at his inn, and a woman in Dallas ordered sake from his shop.

The extra traffic has come despite his rarely pitching his own businesses on Twitter. “To me, that’s a turn-off,” he said. Instead of marketing to customers, small-business owners should use the same persona they have offline, he advised. “Be the small shopkeeper down the street that everyone knows by name.”

Chris Mann, the owner of Woodhouse Day Spa in Cincinnati, twitters about discounts for massages and manicures every Tuesday. Twitter beats e-mail promotions because he can send tweets from his phone in a meeting and “every single business sends out an e-mail,” he said.

Even if a shop’s customers are not on Twitter, the service can be useful for entrepreneurs, said Becky McCray, who runs a liquor store and cattle ranch in Oklahoma and publishes a blog called Small Biz Survival.

In towns like hers, with only 5,000 people, small-business owners can feel isolated, she said. But on Twitter, she has learned business tax tips from an accountant, marketing tips from a consultant in Tennessee and start-up tips from the founder of several tech companies.

Anamitra Banerji, who manages commercial products at Twitter, said that when he joined the company from Yahoo in March, “I thought this was a place where large businesses were. What I’m finding more and more, to my surprise every single day, is business of all kinds.”

Twitter, which does not yet make money, is now concentrating on teaching businesses how they can join and use it, Mr. Banerji said, and the company plans to publish case studies. He is also developing products that Twitter can sell to businesses of all sizes this year, including features to verify businesses’ accounts and analyze traffic to their Twitter profiles.

According to Mr. Banerji, small-business owners like Twitter because they can talk directly to customers in a way that they were able to do only in person before. “We’re finding the emotional distance between businesses and their customers is shortening quite a bit,” he said.

Lost in ‘startup’ translation: What to know before going to the US

Published April 15, 2013 Uncategorized 

“We can’t raise money from local VCs.  Can you introduce us to some investors in Silicon Valley?”

I often receive this question from Founders outside the US, and cringe almost every time. If you are a Founder of a startup and you are not among the ranks of Rovio, SuperCell, Spotify or Skype (in otherwords: 99.99% of startups out there), take a moment and see yourself from the perspective of the VC.

You see in your startup an exciting, high potential idea that is ready for  ’smart’ VC money.

A US investor, however, sees a startup that has not yet been endorsed by its local investors community, a founding team with few, local, trusted references, an offshore corporation subject to completely unknown laws, and a 16-hour trip to get to their headquarters.

Hm.  Can you see why a US VC may be reluctant?

The next time I cringe is when Founders say:

“We want to move to the US market – probably Silicon Valley.  We plan to send a few locals to start closing key accounts, hire an A-class team and really get our company going in North America!”

Seriously?  Most startups vastly under-estimate the time, cost and difficulty of entering the US market.  Here are just some of the challenges:

Hiring.  How will you hire A-class talent, when the A-players in the Valley have little interest to work for a foreign startup from a country they’ve never visited and for a CEO they know very little about?  There are thousands of local startups competing for the best talent, what makes you believe they will join yours?  Most importantly, A-players actually almost never interview for jobs; they are brought in by VCs or ‘networked-in’ by other A-players.

Sales culture.  Do you really understand how to sell in the US?  Most international startups do not.  They often confuse being fluent in English with being able to sell to Americans.  Selling in the US isn’t about being able to speak the language.  It’s about knowing how to create trusted relationships and build a trusted brand with customers.  Knowing how to find the right contact within a large organization and having someone in your network who can connect you.  Making that cold phone call and delivering the right message, tone and attitude.  And naturally, knowing when to banter about last night’s Niner’s game too.

(Note that I’m referring to startups that need to personally meet actual customers, channels and partners in the US.  If your business is completely web-based, you will likely be able to scale without having to relocate to the US).

If I were the Founder of a US startup and wanted to enter, say, the Finland market, I would not think to send a few Americans to Helsinki to try to build trusted customer relationships, hire the best possible talent and raise local venture capital.  It puzzles me why Finnish/Nordic/Singaporean startups think they can do this in the US.

Equity culture.  Do you understand equity culture in the US?  I find that most international startups don’t have a clue because when I look at their cap table, I see only the Founders owning equity.  Incredibly short sighted.  I rarely see the hard working, rank-and-file employees with equity.  It will be difficult if notimpossible to build an A-class team in the US with a ‘Founder’s-take-all’ attitude.  Not even the B-players will find your startup interesting.

As an aside, the US truly stands ahead in this attitude of sharing wealth among all employees, from the CxO down to the newly hired administrative assistant.  I think it is a key advantage of the US startup culture:  sharing the rewards of success widely, and in turn creating a healthy, vibrant and motivated ecosystem.

Network.  Do you have a strong network in the US?  Personal connections to your first 25 customers? Those who have these valuable connection receive a subtle but critical advantage.  Many Europeans have a difficult time understanding this because they cling to a belief that a good product will sell itself.  Beyond those great products that customers run to purchase/sign-up, (think: Dropbox, Facebook, Angry Birds, AirBnB, etc..), the vast majority will need to win through good customer, channel and partner relationships.

International Founders often make the assumption that the skills that made them successful in their smaller home markets will translate successfully to the much larger US market.  A subtle but important shift needs to occur when entering the US market.  If you don’t understand this, you can easily get lost in ‘startup translation’.

Some of the differences are quantitative: valuations, term sheets, compensation expectations, cost of working/living, and depth of business networks.  Others are more qualitative: the role of sales, negotiation styles, equity culture, the role of the Board & Advisors, credibility with the investor community, etc..

These are some of the most common ‘translation pain points’ I’ve seen international teams face when they relocate to the US:

Translation 1:  The market is much larger than you realize.  Although the US (313M) is smaller than the EU (505M), South America (387M) or Asia (Bn+), its seamlessness surprises most international entrepreneurs.  The US is a single, tightly integrated market bound by one set of laws, language, currency, culture and mindset.  This often throws off the European entrepreneur who is used to crossing borders, languages and cultures on an almost daily basis.  I worked in Europe for Cisco Systems for 6 years and witnessed, sometimes painfully, the significant diversity of each national culture and the friction this causes in reaching scale.  The US market is large and efficient, which is why one can often reach scale much faster than in Europe/South America/SE Asia.

Translation 2:  Raising venture capital is (much) more difficult than you realize.  The US VC market has more venture capital and does more deals than anywhere else in the world.  However international startups face more barriers than their US counterparts.  First, there is risk in investing in an unknown team, whose core operations are far from the VC’s home.  It is not just geographical distance, but cultural, operational and legal differences that make investors wary.  VCs prefer to invest near their home base, which offers a rich ecosystem of startups that are known, trusted, accountable and accessible.

Second, many startups – particularly those from Europe and Singapore – often receive their first investment rounds from their Government and this creates unique problems.  For starters, cap tables look odd.  Operating Agreements have strange and cumbersome rights and protective provisions that may be a deal-killer for later stage investors.  There are often bureaucratic reporting requirements.  The company Board still consists of only the Founders.  No one from the Government has stepped in to guide the startup, bring in a deep network of stakeholders or push the Founders (hard) to exceed their goals. Founding teams are weakened by this lack of guidance, accountability and healthy control structures.  Government venture capital feels good in small doses but is destructive in larger quantities.

Finally, many international startups are unprepared for the rigorous selection process of venture funding, particularly in Silicon Valley.  The US market is the most mature in the world.  Its VCs are deeply experienced – and its Startups benefit from this more mature ecosystem.  They know how to play the funding game better.  Many international startups come from countries where they are large players in a smaller market, and find it difficult to transition to being a smaller player in a very large ocean.

Translation 3:  The sales culture.  Earlier in this post I discussed some of the differences in sales culture. There is another subtle but key difference worth mentioning.  I’ve observed in many European startups a somewhat negative perception of the sales role, that ranges from tolerance to outright disrespect.

In general, you will find a very different attitude towards sales in the US.  Sales and Engineering are at the heart and soul of most US startups.  These guys are the rock stars.  When sales execs make over a $1M commission per year, the rest of the company cheers loudly.  Why?  Because when sales are pouring in, the people who make the real money are the equity holders and in the US, that is everyone.  Which is a good reason to cheer (see the next ‘Translation’ below).

You probably already love your engineers.  When you move to the US, learn to love your sales team, too.

Translation 4:  Equity culture.  The US startup community thrives on equity and international Founders need to be ready to allow employees to become owners.  Every employee!  Plan on an Employee Stock Ownership pool of 10-20% and be ready to negotiate single digit ownership percentages to critical, senior employees.  And don’t forget that if you start to offer the US employees stock, you will need to offer the same to your employees back home.  Do the math.  It will add up to significant dilution.  If you don’t want to offer equity to employees, perhaps you should not be in the US.

When international founders get nervous at diluting their ownership, I tell them that the ultimate goal of dilution is to create a stronger network of stakeholders who all share the common goal and motivation to increase shareholder value.   I remind them that 10% of a billion is much more interesting than 100% of a million.  Do the math.

Translation 5:  More expensive than you realize.  The US market is expensive. Salaries can appear astronomically high in markets such as Silicon Valley and New York City.  Even in cities like Austin, Boulder and Seattle, executive salaries are much higher than what you pay to equivalent person back home.

And there are other costs.  Office leases in prime areas are extraordinarily high.  San Francisco is a fantastic city to live – and also fantastically expensive.  A studio in SOMA is around $2,000/month; a two-bedroom apartment around $4,000.  Mountain View may be a tad less expensive. The cost of healthcare is spiraling relentlessly out of control.  Companies are generally expected to offer healthcare plans to employees, which adds to the cost structure.  And expect to spend a significant amount of time decoding the US healthcare system, because it is complex: how to buy insurance, the myriad of plan options available, rules on where to go for healthcare, etc.

Visas.  You will need a small army of lawyers to help ensure that you and your team can arrive legally and stay legally in the US.  Google “Sarbanes Oxley”.  When your company grows, you will be required to comply with this law that requires costly and detailed accounting, auditing and internal compliance reporting.

Our legal system is driven by an insane need to provide liability protection, which results in long, complex documents.  Finally our tax system is among the most complex in the world.

Fortunately the US has many accountants, tax experts and immigration lawyers who can help you through all these issues.  But it is still complicated!

Translation 6:  Networking.  This is perhaps the most difficult to describe.  In the US, we have a drive to constantly meet and mix and talk and openly share ideas.  It is in our genes and it is our lifeblood.  It is the casual banter over a business meeting coffee, which to a foreigner feels full of seemingly random talk.  It is the speculation about next week’s Giants game or chatting about which colleges our children are applying.  It is a distinctly different approach to work-life balance and a tendency to mix business and personal life much more than other cultures.  I wrote a longer piece that attempts to illustrate our networking culture.  See: http://generationsiliconvalley.com/2012/10/04/create-your-own-coupa/.

In closing, I see many international startups abroad that are indistinguishable from their US peers:  driven, customer-focused, networked and perfectly capable of integrating into the US market.  Equally, there are many international startups that do NOT need to enter the US market.  They will do just fine building a global brand from their home countries.

However I continue to meet startups that have a dream of ‘going to the US’.  It is likely the market size, the abundance of venture capital, the ‘cool’ factor of living in young, hip SOMA, the great weather in Silicon Valley – or some combination of the above.  But if this is your startup, be prepared to shift your expectations of what it will take to enter, gain grow and scale in the US.

Don’t get lost in translation in your journey of becoming a great, US-based startup.

Chris Vargas

Helsinki, Finland

 

Marc Andreessen: Not every startup should be a Lean Startup or embrace the pivot

by Eliza Kern DEC. 3, 2012 - 6:49 PM PDT

SUMMARY:The Lean Startup has become somewhat of a bible for Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, but famed investor Marc Andreessen notes that sometimes founders misappropriate the ideas or don’t apply them correctly, resulting in some common problems he outlined Monday in San Francisco.

The Lean Startup philosophy and Marc Andreessen are themselves two institutions in Silicon Valley, so when one weighs in on the other, it’s good to take note. The famed investor spoke Monday about his three pet peeves in investor pitches, most of which are related to entrepreneurs misappropriating or misusing the Lean Startup approach, an approach that encourages quick scaling to achieve success.

“I feel like we’ve discovered the theory of relativity,” Andreessen joked on the Lean Startup approach, noting seriously that he admires Eric Ries’ now-ubiquitous approach to building startups. Ries’ model, which encourages quick iteration and inexpensive prototyping before investing big money, has become somewhat of a guiding principle for many companies in Silicon Valley.

But Andreessen, speaking with Ries Monday at the Lean Startup conference in San Francisco, noted that there are three ways entrepreneurs can run astray:

Not all startups can be Lean Startups

Andreessen noted that as popular as the theory can be, there are still some areas where it can’t really apply.

“I would serve this as a challenge for the Lean Startup community. Especially the ones with the really audacious goals. Sometimes they start audacious because otherwise the product will never get to market. The Macintosh, that product had to exist in its entirety for people to wrap their heads around it,” he said, pointing to modern entrepreneurs like Elon Musk’s ventures as ones that can’t be done on a small scale at first. “You got to get the rocket into space.”

And Andreessen noted that investors should be careful not to take the theory so far as to reject companies that have ambitious aspirations.

“I don’t think the Lean Startup idea, as brilliant as it is, and as widely applicable as it is, should halt us from investing in these big ideas right out of the gate,” he said.

Don’t use the Lean Startup as an excuse to skimp on sales and marketing

While focusing on the product and getting it right before hiring on lots of employees is a good idea, Andreessen said he’s seen companies use it as an excuse not to care at all about sales and marketing, when in fact they do need to think about those when growing a business.

“We see Lean Startup methodology being used inappropriately as an excuse to not take sales and marketing seriously,” he said. “Founders tell us that all that matters is product, and sales and market will happen automatically. The ‘if they build it it will come,’” mantra, which he noted is not always an acceptable approach for those looking to grow.

And for those hoping their product will speak for itself and grow virally?

“I’m totally in favor of viral, but it’s really hard to find a real-world example for someone who gets the money without taking this stuff seriously,” he said.

Don’t develop a “fetish for failure”

Part of what makes Silicon Valley special — or especially insane — is a general willingness among the startup community to fail and fail often. But Andreessen noted that sometimes, founders take this too far, and use it as an excuse to not keep trying.

“The pivot. It used to be called, ‘the fuck-up.’ Taking the stigma out of failure is very exciting,” he said. “But we see founders who give up too quickly. It’s permission to give up very fast. Are they really going to do the heavy lifting over time?”

Andreessen said it’s certainly okay to fail, as long as those lessons from failure lead you down the path to success — not just another series of failures.

“We joke around the office that the worst is the fetish for failure,” he said. “You want to preserve the good of the idea when it comes to pivoting, but you don’t want people to be intentionally encouraged to fail. Maybe it’s time to add a bit more stigma. The entrepreneurs I admire, I admire the ones who pivot but I really admire the ones who have persisted.”

 

 

What is "Entrepreneurship" in the 21st Century?

Faisal Hoque Entrepreneur; Author; Founder & CEO, BTM Corporation

Posted: 05/20/2013 5:28 pm

The buzz about entrepreneurship is everywhere nowadays -- from magazine covers to conferences, hotel lobbies to the White House, and of course, kitchen tables. The French word entrepreneur first appeared in the French dictionary in 1723 to describe a person who organizes and operates a business by taking a financial risk. Since then the word entrepreneur -- and the world -- has completely changed. Today, entrepreneurship is celebrated like never before and it is defined in so many ways -- social entrepreneurship, intra-entrepreneurship, knowledge entrepreneurship, micro-entrepreneurship -- you name it.

In 1975, Harvard professor Howard Stevenson defined entrepreneurship as "the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources currently controlled." "Resources currently controlled" can be interpreted as limited resources. From that point of view, almost all of us have some level of entrepreneurial challenges.

I have been practicing entrepreneurship since I was 14 years old. I know all too well about the pursuit of opportunity without regard to resources. Author Steven Pressfield (author of the Legend of Bagger Vance) writes:

"We duel adversity every day, you and I. We get bloodied; we experience casualties -- and we have to get up and find a way to fight again. We might not be wearing body armor or carrying M4 carbines, but we know in our bones that the warrior virtues of patience, resolution, tenacity, selflessness, capacity to endure hardship, etc. serve us every day of our lives."

Steven's description of the warrior's virtues describes the practice of entrepreneurship quite well. At a fundamental level all entrepreneurs try to overcome adversity to pursue opportunity with limited resources.

As a devoted student and life long practitioner of entrepreneurship, this is what I have learned over the years:

Becoming an Entrepreneur

Most ventures fail. Most entrepreneurs make a lot less money than if they worked for someone else. The road to success is often long and lonely -- brutal hours; massive amounts of stress; and a huge amount of personal sacrifice. So, why would you want to become an entrepreneur?

To Survive: In my teens and early twenties, I became an entrepreneur (although I didn't know the word or the meaning of it) to simply survive. Around the globe, many people become entrepreneurs in order to survive. They have no job prospects, or little means to earn a living. Therefore, entrepreneurship for many is the only alternative.

To Pursue a Dream: In my mid-twenties, I caught the 'Silicon Valley' bug, and I pursued my dream to become a tech entrepreneur. Many entrepreneurs (in all industries) pursue entrepreneurship to fulfill their personal dreams. They have something to prove to the world and to themselves. They have the mental and intellectual capacity, the drive and the resourcefulness to invent and to create differentiating ventures.

To Make a Difference: In my mid-thirties, the idea of entrepreneurship completely changed for me. I wanted to make a difference, to do something that has a positive and long-lasting impact. Making a difference as an entrepreneur can be very rewarding -- as all great entrepreneurs will ubiquitously agree. However, making a real difference perhaps is also the hardest to thing to do and most challenging. It requires a different kind of mindset. It is not about just making money, or becoming famous, or inventing new things. In our changing world, the definition of entrepreneurship has evolved as the need to "make a difference" has never been greater. In my travels I have met 'entrepreneurs' from all walks of life -- in government, in academia, in NGOs, in corporations, in labs, on stage, and, yes, in ventures that are quietly working away to make a difference with very limited resources.

Entrepreneurial Ethos

The U.S. Army Warrior Ethos states:

• I will always place the mission first;
• I will never accept defeat;
• I will never quit; and
• I will never leave a fallen comrade.

I believe that this warrior ethos applies to an entrepreneur's personal and professional lives as well. It defines who we are and who we aspire to become. Driven by their core ethos, an entrepreneur must:

Find Resources: By making, maintaining and leveraging contacts, in both the short and long term, for mutual benefit, entrepreneurs find ways to exploit opportunities despite adversity.

Manage Risk: They accept and take responsibility for calculated risks. Great entrepreneurs are focused, learn from their mistakes, and move on without regrets. Their risk perhaps is far greater than an average person -- but they are hardly gamblers.

Create 'Wealth': The definition of wealth, capital, and value has forever changed. Money is no longer the only currency nor is the valuation of a company the only measure of wealth. Beyond financial value, entrepreneurs need to create 'wealth' with knowledge, sustainable assets, and social impact.

The Entrepreneurial Makeup

"The entrepreneur is then a complex combination of interacting factors." -- writes David Butler in his book Enterprise Planning and Development. He explains the makeup of an entrepreneur as follows:

Personality: in terms of possessing resilience, tenacity, opportunity spotting, and risk taking.

Attitude: having awareness of the importance of customer focus, the application of creativity and imagination, defined personal standards and values, the perception of enterprise as a positive activity.

Skills: such as the ability to network, to think strategically, to gain access to resources, business knowledge and acumen, interpersonal skills and people management capabilities.

Motivation: personal drive and ambition, the desire to make an impact, the need for achievement or self-satisfaction, a desire for status, to create and accumulate wealth, and social responsibility.

Butler continues, "the presence, combination and interaction of these factors will determine both the way in which an entrepreneur engages in enterprising activities, and ultimately the degree of success that will be achieved."

But at the end, there is no exact formula for entrepreneurship. It is unique for each individual. You cannot follow someone else's journey to success, either. That journey is uniquely yours and yours only.

Happy trails...

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