Investing in university ventures is difficult but worthwhile. The following are a few things to consider when you are negotiating investment deals with universities. All of this comes from my own experience and might not reflect the engagement with your particular university.
Students who are interested in technology entrepreneurship are likely taking plenty of engineering, physical sciences, or computer science courses. But there are a few non-technical courses that I would strongly recommend to anybody aspiring to be an entrepreneur. Even as a technical founder, these five topics will be some of the most useful lessons in academia:
Are you a startup entrepreneur, have a great product, and want to sell it to the ‘big boys’? Selling to a Fortune 500 company is obviously not a walk in the park, but having one or more of them as your customers could be very rewarding and key to the long term success of your startup.
The National Sciences Foundation kicked off its first round of I-CORE awards this October, with an Entrepreneurship Bootcamp for 21 groups of university inventors. The idea is to develop a new generation of researchers who better understand how to develop and market their inventions for industry: researchers who are also skilled entrepreneurs. It will be interesting to see how the quarterly award will reshape the tech transfer landscape in the US by increasing researchers’ entrepreneurial skills. But the biggest payoff, at least in my mind, will be in terms of a cultural shift among academics (University inventors don’t have a reputation for pitching to industry).
You are managing a startup. It is growing quickly and you have personally become the entire human resources department. And admit it, you under estimated the time it takes to find the right person who will understand the business vision and fit in with your culture. Are you meeting one candidate after another? Asking the same questions over and over again? Are you wondering if you are too picky? If it would just be easier to just hire at random?
In a startup things move constantly, roles change and within a few months people swing from one side of the spectrum to the other depending on their immediate needs. This works well when the team is small and people feel ownership of the whole project.
Many entrepreneurs struggle to deliver an effective pitch to prospective investors and consumers. Whether your communication method is in-person or online, it is important to get your message across clearly and stand out from the crowd. Below are three effective strategies for formulating your pitch via your website, email, or face to face.
Planning an event is stressful and nerve-wracking, but after planning multiple successful startup showcases in the past several years, we thought that other startup incubators and accelerators can benefit from our past experience. Here are our top tips on how to plan and execute a successful startup showcase.
One of the pitfalls of many tech entrepreneurs is pitching their solution simply and clearly. What is it? What does it do? Is it actually useful? Often, we’ll get stuck either trying to explain it all at once or getting too technical for our audience.
A game-changing idea is only one of the ingredients you will need to launch a successful new business. Without the right team and a commitment to ongoing fundraising, your brilliant new venture will founder. This article is the first of five in a series by a venture capital expert who has both launched and funded new companies.
