Guerilla Basics: Handing Out Fliers @ Redskin’s Training Camp

FamilyFantasySports.com, my startup, has now stepped up to the plate. Our game engine is going live this week and people will have the ability to form teams and join/create leagues for the NFL 2008 season.

On Saturday, I took a small guerilla team and headed to Redskin’s Park in Ashburn, VA for Fan Appreciation Day. NFL training camp started recently and the teams offer many opportunities for fans to come watch their favorite teams and players practice. The Redksins, though they have an incredibly loyal fan base, have one of the most ‘closed’ training camp policies — meaning the fewest ‘open’ practices.

The description of Fan Appreciation Day and the limited schedule made it clear there were going to be a lot of fans there and probably a lot of families (free summer entertainment). Turned out to be true.

Because we decided to hit training camp rather late, we were limited in what we could use a marketing tool. We wanted to order mini-footballs, but given the short time frame we had to get them (we decided on footballs about a week before Fan Appreciation Day) they would have cost about $3.50 each. Normally, the footballs would be about $1 each, but the rush nature of the job and the express shipping ballooned the price.

Clearly we didn’t have the budget or time to pay to be an official sponsor. I am sure the Skins were negotiating with this year’s sponsors before I decided to launch this biz.

Moreover, the Redskin’s owner (Dan Snyder) has a reputation for being tight (in the past the Redskins have charged fans to attend training camp and park — very unheard of in the NFL from what people tell me!) and controlling of the Redskins, their brand, and media related to them. Of course, that is his right, he paid something like $800 million for the team.

Storeadore.com — HBS Entrepreneurs

Found out about this company on the Style page of the WSJ. Storeadore.com is a website that will help people find great shopping when they are visiting other cities. According to the Ins and Outs column by Jennifer Sarnow and Ray Smith,

The site, launched earlier this year by avid shoppers Meredith Barnett and Cristina Miller, who roomed together at Harvard Business School, profiles boutiques in New York City, the Hamptons, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, Philadelphia and Washington, D.C., as well as online stores. San Francisco will be added in August and Miami, Dallas, Houston and Atlanta in the fall.

Here is their website and here is a little bit about them.

Campus as New Frontier for Entrepreneurs

Earlier this year, Zoltan and I were discussing a possible paper for me to write as part of a ‘directed reading.’ Over time Zoltan recommended that I look into Frederick Jackson Turner’s The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Turner argues it is the frontier experience, rather than European influence, that led to the development of America’s unique political, social and economic systems.

I am in the midst of finishing the draft of a paper in which I use Turner’s frontier attributes/frameworks to analyze the university/college campus environment from an entrepreneurial perspective. Found the money quote below while reading through the 1921 book edition of his thesis.

The pioneer was taught in the school of experience that the crops of one area would not do for a new frontier; that the scythe of the clearing must be replaced by the reaper of the prairies. He was forced to make old tools serve new uses; to shape former habits, institutions and ideas to changed conditions; and to find new means when the old proved inapplicable. He was building a new society as well as breaking new soil; he had the ideal of nonconformity and of change. He rebelled against the conventional.

Besides the ideals of conquest and of discovery, the pioneer had the ideal of personal development, free from social and governmental constraint.

More to come on this subject as I flesh out the paper over the next week or so, but this sounds like a lot of campus entrepreneurs. Especially the newer wave of social entrepreneurs.

Bad Economy? Launch a Biz!

Found this article about eccentric British Media entrepreneur Felix Dennis in which he states that “the best time to get started is in a recession.”

From the article,

Despite what he anticipates to be his fourth recession—“we are talking ourselves into it”—starting in America, Mr Dennis remains bullish on the land of the free. “For the rest of my lifetime I’m betting on America,” he says, noting the country’s “pervasive aura of optimism”.

One of the reasons now is a great time according to the article is that large and medium sized firms pull back in these environments, trying to conserve and survive. This leaves lots of opportunities for entrepreneurs.

BA Degree Losing Value; U Better Be Entrepreneurial

Greg Ip of the WSJ writes, ‘A four-year college degree, seen for generations as a ticket to a better life, is no longer enough to guarantee a steadily rising paycheck.” The article (free via AZCentral) then goes on to highlight the declining value of a college degree in the US.

There are many factors behind this (the massification of college degrees, technological change, economic change, etc.), but what the article neglects to mention is that a degree only has value if you know how to leverage it. In other words, you must have an entrepreneurial mindset.

The people covered in the article bitch and moan that their degree is not getting them jobs that they once could easily get. Duh! In order for your education to work for you, you must work to differentiate it, sell it, etc. Again, you must have an entrepreneurial mindset.

So even if you are not starting a new firm and plan to take a more traditional career path, you must be able to spot opportunities, organize people and resources, and basically make your own destiny, if you are going to hold a position that the author and others once considered ‘guaranteed.’

At WSJ they have some other interesting links related to this idea of the declining value of a college degree.

Knowing Your of National Innovation System

Last year I took a great course with Prof. David Hart on Science and Technology Policy. One term that comes up often is National Innovation Systems; basically the resources (physical, financial, institutional, educational, human capital, rules/laws, etc) that a nation has and how they are organized and deployed in support of innovation (typically scientific). The idea is that better, more efficient systems should yield higher growth rates and increases in living standards for national populations (and the world for that matter).

While many entrepreneurs don’t often think about the national innovation systems that they access, much of the technology and science that we make use of in the commercial markets are offshoots of directed policy made by politicians, lobbyists, non-profits, government agencies, venture investors and syndicate leaders, etc.

The latest National Dialogue on Entrepreneurship newsletter shares a great new paper by Block and Keller called “Where do Innovations Come from? Transformations in the U.S. National Innovation System of the US 1976-2006″

The way that new products, services, and technologies emerge has changed, and innovation policies need to change in response to this transformed innovation ecosystem. A new study sponsored by the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation analyzes forty years of data from R&D Magazine, which has annually ranked its top 100 innovations since 1976. This historical perspective yields some interesting insights. One major finding is that the role of Federal investments in supporting innovations has grown rapidly. Also, collaboration is more important.

It looks like a pretty interesting paper and entrepreneurs should read it. There are some solid findings and its pretty clear that universities, their campuses, and players are a major part of successful national innovation systems.

Does Your Biz Need a Golden Toilet?

Fascinating article by Jonathan Cheng about a Hong Kong based entrepreneur, Lam Sai-wing, in the gold business who created a gold toilet and scored a marketing coup for this business. Something outrageous like a gold toilet (and an entire golden palace) helped grow Lams business by differentiating it from others in the retail jewelry market.

Those odd prices (ie $3.68) at Wal-Mart (which they may be dumping) were created by Sam Walton to grab attention — as did the elephants and other things that Walton used to build the base of small town Wal-Marts that would eventually become the world’s largest retailer. Walton had to do something drastic as he entered the retail market full of new competitors. Wal-Mart, Target, and KMart were all founded in 1959 — and these are just the large, successes that prospered.

I believe that any business, regardless of industry or customer base, can use a golden toilet.

From the article,

He has spent the past decade constructing a palace of gold, decked out in six tons of the precious metal. In recent years, the palace has become an attraction mainland Chinese tour groups couldn’t miss, and a boon for Mr. Lam’s retail jewelry business…

As far as Mr. Lam is concerned, the golden toilet is more than a Guinness World Record-certified, 24-karat, fully functional flushable throne.

Mr. Lam, a former goldsmith, came up with the toilet gimmick in 2001 as he was pushing his jewelry-manufacturing business into a fierce retail market…

As a boy growing up in Cultural Revolution-era China, Mr. Lam, now 53 years old, was obsessed with gold. He says he found himself transfixed with one sentence in Vladimir Lenin’s writing: “When we are victorious on a world scale, I think we shall use gold for the purpose of building public lavatories in the streets of some of the largest cities of the world.”

Lenin’s words alluded to a socialist utopia with no need for money, but Mr. Lam read them as an indictment of the poverty-stricken existence he found himself in. He rarely had meat to eat, and after he turned 7, Mr. Lam struggled to help his single mother and six siblings sell bananas and peanuts.

English Profs Get Entrepreneurial/Monopolistic

The textbook market on campuses has always appeared distorted. Hundreds of dollars on books that students often barely touch. Frequent new editions, ‘forcing’ waves of students to purchase new, rather than used, books.

John Hechinger of the WSJ has an interesting article on the rise of custom textbooks and the toll it is taking on students/parents. Basically, specific departments at specific schools are having custom versions of ’standard’ books printed and assigning them to their students (keeping them out of the increasingly global market in textbooks). Moreover, in many cases, the books cannot be sold back and resold on the used market.

The point of sharing the article is to highlight a truth about campus entrepreneurship: EVERYONE IS DOING IT. The article highlights english and other social science departments following this strategy. So students should always keep an entrepreneurial perspective when on campus.

Read below for some excerpts from the article.

Business Plan Competition Reality Show

Just found out about The Next Tycoon — a reality show business competition that will be filming in Atlanta in August and will air in September. (the name is a little ‘Trumpish’ for me, but I am just one)

The show/contest is being produced by an Atlanta-based entrepreneur, W. Cliff Oxford whose firm spent three years on the Inc. 500 list. (he also endows the Executive MBA program at Emory’s Goizueta School of Business.) From the article at Marketwatch.com:

The Next Tycoon is a new reality show that will give entrepreneurs from all ages and backgrounds a chance to present their business ideas to key decision makers and outstanding business and media leaders. The show will be a valuable educational resource as well as a fun opportunity for all participants to share and discuss new, exciting business plans…

While the competition is based and will be filmed in Atlanta, it isn’t limited to the region. Anyone who applies through the Web site, www.thenexttycoon.biz, is eligible as long as he or she has a plan for a viable business venture to present onsite.

It appears there is an $85 fee to apply, but that sounds more like a weeder fee more than anything else. This is another example of the various models and actors experimenting and extending the business plan competition.

Check out the site, there are some interesting things in there. For example, there will be at least 100 people presenting in preliminary rounds and they are not allowed to use ppt. Information on participating can be found here. Let us know if you apply.

No Venture Backed IPOs in Q2 — 1st Time in 30 Years

For the first time since 1978, no venture backed firms completed an IPO during the second quarter. Mark Hefflinger over at Digital Media wire has a nice posting on this ‘non-event.’

I have always believed that the focus on venture funding is overblown as a vast majority of new firms do not access the VC markets. That said, the statistic (from the National Venture Capital Association) is pretty staggering and underscores the stalled mentality that has gripped our markets (credit and equity).

From the post:

For the first time since 1978, there were no venture-backed initial public offerings (IPOs) during the second quarter, according to a new report from the National Venture Capital Association (NVCA).

The absence of IPOs follows an exceptionally slow first quarter, in which just five venture-backed companies went public.

In the first half of 2007, 43 companies went public.

The NVCA characterized the trend as a “capital markets crisis” for the start-up community.