Author: Brian

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123345784962836599.html

Finding a job in this economy — even keeping one — is tough. Tired of the uncertainty, some twentysomethings are going from job hunting to job creating by starting their own businesses.

Generation Y entrepreneurs have a few advantages here: They’re seen as tech-savvy, enthusiastic risk takers with fresh perspectives. But they also tend to lack money, credit histories and managerial experience.

Some pointers if you’re under 30 and starting a business:

Ask for advice. You may know your “great idea” inside and out, but you might not know as much about writing a business plan, incorporating a company, or managing employees. Reach out to more established business owners by tapping your college-alumni network or finding a support group such as Score, a group of about 11,000 volunteer business executives who counsel entrepreneurs in person or online at Score.org.

“I think the first challenge that I had was wondering where to start,” says Joel Erb, who started a Web design company at age 15 and has since expanded it to offer new-media marketing and communications services. Mr. Erb, now 25, taught himself computer coding but learned how to incorporate, finance and expand his company, named INM United, from his mentors.

http://www.businessweek.com/smallbiz/content/jan2008/sb20080111_262142.htm

Entrepreneurship holds increasing appeal for retirees. But they need to address four unique challenges to improve their chances for success

Ric Cox retired at 55, but he didn’t stop working. Instead, he launched ChicagoCondosOnline.com, a database that sells condo information to realtors and listings services. A first-time entrepreneur, he hoped to channel the same creative energy he brought to his 32-year publishing career into his new venture.

About 20% of the entire over-50 workforce in the U.S. is self-employed, and one-third of those workers made the transition to self-employment after turning 50, according to a 2007 RAND Corp. study commissioned by AARP. Switching to entrepreneurship is one way retirees stay active, says Deborah Russell, the AARP’s director of workforce issues. But she says people must know what they’re getting into: “For those who have not done this before, they may have a false expectation that working for yourself also means less stress and less demand, and it may be in fact the exact opposite.”

While starting a business is a challenge at any age, a first-timer starting a business later in life will encounter different obstacles than younger entrepreneurs, particularly when it comes to funding the business, securing health insurance, managing personal finance, and succession planning. Younger people can spend years trying to make a company profitable and can return to salary jobs if they don’t succeed, but people over 50 may not have the flexibility to deal with such a loss, says Julie Zissimopoulos, an economist at RAND and co-author of the study. Experts say older entrepreneurs need to plan carefully to align their ventures with their life goals.

Cox, who turned to the nonprofit Counselors to America’s Small Business (commonly known as SCORE) for guidance before launching his business, seemed like the ideal retiree-turned-entrepreneur: He was healthy, single, without children, and had a comfortable nest egg. Even with all those factors to his advantage, he says he still underestimated what it would take—in money and time—to launch a business.

“I think there’s kind of a rule of thumb that it’s going to cost you two to three times as much, at least, than you expect it to, so you have to have enough capital or access to it,” says Cox, who put about a quarter of his savings into his business. The time frame to recoup his investment also exceeded his expectations. Now 63 and in the eighth year of his business, Cox anticipates his first profits this year.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123466563957289181.html

It’s a scary time to own a business, and the knee-jerk reaction may be to just keep chugging along and wait out the financial storm. But that’s a risky decision.

This recession is expected to be longer, deeper and deadlier for businesses than any this nation has seen in decades.

The savviest entrepreneurs right now aren’t hunkering down. They’re rethinking their business models and hunting for new strategies based on the assumption that consumer spending won’t be rebounding to prerecession levels and that the types of products and services people want will be much different from before.

For a business owner, this can mean finding new sales channels, trying new marketing tactics and promotions, forming strategic partnerships and introducing new products that appeal to frugal shoppers.

“Unfortunately, bad news has this huge ability to paralyze people,” says Victor Cheng, a San Francisco business consultant. “I think it is very important for a small-business owner to be fast and nimble” right now. He suggests businesses do a hard evaluation of all segments of their businesses and focus in only on the ones that seem to be faring well in this economy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/04/fashion/04roles.html?_r=1&ei=5070&emc=eta1

THE office joker. The mother hen. The king. The rebel. The gossip. The peacekeeper. The dude.

Anyone who has ever been part of a workplace culture can probably recognize at least one of those characters in the cubicle next door.

But workplace roles and the dynamics among colleagues can go much deeper than those somewhat superficial stereotypes, especially in a nation where many people spend as much time with colleagues as they do with their families, where the office so often mirrors the family.

A boss is not just a boss, in the view of some psychologists who study workplace roles; he can be a stand-in for a disapproving and distant father. An unpredictable, easily angered manager can be a thinly veiled rejecting mother. Colleagues competing for the boss’s attention — or merit raises and bonuses — are siblings in rivalry.

The employees of a company acquired by another in a hostile merger? They can experience seething resentment toward what they feel is an unwelcome stepparent, according to psychologists working with companies to manage emotional fallout during a merger.

There is, too, the workplace spouse, a co-worker of the opposite sex who shares a kind of closeness achieved only through the intense experience of long weeks at the same office.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/14/technology/start-ups/14startup.html?_r+1&emc=eta1

SAN FRANCISCO — Alex Andon, 24, a graduate of Duke University in biology, was laid off from a biotech company last May. For months he sought new work. Then, frustrated with the hunt, he turned to jellyfish.

In an apartment he shares here with six roommates, Mr. Andon started a business in September building jellyfish aquariums, capitalizing on new technology that helps the fragile creatures survive in captivity. He has sold three tanks, one for $25,000 to a restaurant, and is starting a Web site to sell desktop versions for $350.

“I keep getting stung,” he said. And his crowded home office is filled with beakers and test tubes of jellyfish food. “But it beats looking for work. I hate looking for work.”

Plenty of other laid-off workers across the country, burned out by a merciless job market, are building business plans instead of sending out résumés. For these people, recession has become the mother of invention.

Economists say that when the economy takes a dive, it is common for people to turn to their inner entrepreneur to try to make their own work. But they say that it takes months for that mentality to sink in, and that this is about the time in the economic cycle when it really starts to happen — when the formerly employed realize that traditional job searches are not working, and that they are running out of time and money.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/12/arts/television/12plot.html?_r=2&ref=media

LOS ANGELES — Full-time moms are being forced to take part-time jobs, and corporate executives treat themselves to expensive wine after asking for a government bailout. Foreclosure signs are going up in the most familiar neighborhoods. Three neighbors, laid off and their houses foreclosed upon, take the chief executive of their mortgage company hostage, and out-of-work investment bankers have to stoop to low-level jobs as corporate interns.

The economic meltdown has come to prime time. While each of those situations seems real enough to have resulted from the global financial crisis, they are plotlines of recent or coming episodes of popular prime-time television series, including “Desperate Housewives” and “Ugly Betty” on ABC, “The Simpsons” on Fox, “Flashpoint” on CBS and “30 Rock” on NBC.

Popular entertainment often takes the form of escapism in tough economic times. But a growing number of broadcast network shows have recently incorporated more real-life issues into their stories — a reflection, producers say, of how widespread the current financial troubles are.

http://www.cnbc.com/id/28892911

Tim O’Reilly stood onstage in cargo pants, unshaven, a lumpy jacket sagging off his shoulders, and tried to rally about a thousand A-list tech players at a swanky San Francisco conference called the Web 2.0 Summit. In the audience sat many of the same entrepreneurs and venture capitalists who got financially walloped nearly a decade ago when the likes of Pets.com, Webvan, and Flooz circled the drain.

Sure, the economy stinks, O’Reilly acknowledged. But “many of our great companies did not start because there was a big pot of gold at the end of the rainbow,” he preached. “I feel like we’re at one of those inflection points where there are enormous problems to be solved—enormous opportunities.”

We should all be thankful that in the worst of times, a certain Silicon Valley breed remains undaunted, even a touch oblivious. I asked entrepreneur and angel investor Marc Andreessen whether the economic meltdown makes conditions horrible or favorable for starting a technology company. “It’s a great time to launch a high-quality startup and a terrible time to launch ­a low-quality startup—but then, that’s ­always true,” he replied in an email. He added a smiley face.

Much of America is looking at the economy with apprehension, terrified of seeing the return of breadlines or, worse, generic beer. Yet somebody will eventually have to lead the way out. Silicon Valley stands at the ready. If you want to find a ray of optimism, don’t look to Detroit, New York, or Washington. Instead, parachute into Palo Alto.

http://www.newsweek.com/2009/03/18/striking-out-on-your-own.html

Is now a good time to start a company? Absolutely, says Lynda Resnick, the founder of Fiji Water and POM Wonderful.

When Lynda Resnick brings her own water to an interview, she really brings her own. That is, when she produces a bottle of Fiji, she owns the entire company—as well as POM Wonderful, maker of pomegranate juice and antioxidant supplements. She’s a serial entrepreneur who also owns the Teleflora floral service and a number of other ventures. Resnick’s new book, Rubies in the Orchard, details a lifetime acquiring businesses and transforming them with a keen eye for value, marketing and community. The writing can be flat—especially compared with how charismatic Resnick is in person—but the ideas are so sound, and the track record so full of success, that the book is still a fun read, and highly instructive to anyone wishing to start a business in these bleak times. Resnick spoke to NEWSWEEK’s Nick Summers about the Bush administration’s economic legacy, balancing risk with reward and why now is a great time to be running your own business. Excerpts:

How long were you working on the book?
Of course it took me my whole life, but six months. I turned in the manuscript, and my editor said it was the cleanest he’d ever seen. I thought, “Is that a compliment?” The corrections took about half an hour; that was it. There was a page and a half that he took out that was a little too strident.

What was it strident about?
I get carried away. The Bush administration—I was hysterical during the entire eight years. Beating my chest, crying, screaming at the television. I saw the end. I did. I have a Cassandra complex. Do you know who Cassandra was?

I do!
And do you know what happened when she broke up with Apollo, what he did to her?

I don’t.
He gave her the gift of prophesy, but made it so that no one would believe her.

So you saw the end—of what?
I didn’t see the debacle the way it is today, but I did—every time the stock market went up another 300 points, I would get sick. I was very upset, because I’ve lived through so many bubbles. I knew that there was no way that this was going to last. You can’t expect to make 20 percent a year, year in and year out.

http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1874835,00.html

Renewable energy, it turns out, does grow on trees. The fruit pods plucked from jatropha trees have seeds that produce clean-burning diesel fuel. But unlike corn and other biofuel sources, the jatropha doesn’t have to compete with food crops for arable land. Even in the worst of soils, it grows like weeds. Sound too good to be true? That’s why brothers Paul and Mark Dalton chose to name their Florida jatropha company My Dream Fuel.

If President Barack Obama’s green-energy rhetoric is on the level, this should be the year the U.S. gets clued in to what much of the rest of the world is already betting: that jatropha, like other nonfood sources such as algae, will revive a biofuels movement battered of late by charges that it diverts too many crops from too many mouths. India has set aside 100 million acres for jatropha and expects the oil to account for 20% of its diesel consumption by 2011. Australia, China, Brazil and Kenya have also embraced it. In December, a Boeing 747 was successfully test-flown by Air New Zealand using a 50-50 blend of jatropha and aviation fuel.

“This is a superior biodiesel,” says Roy Beckford, a University of Florida researcher and expert on sustainable farm development. He has been studying different varieties of jatropha and in February plans to publish his findings that trees like those the Daltons are growing (since 2006 they’ve planted 900,000 near Fort Myers) thrive so well in Florida that they may yield up to eight times as much oil as they do in places like India and Africa. That translates into as much as 1,600 gal. of diesel fuel per acre per year, vs. 200 gal. for stocks that grow in the wild.

This news is likely to be the buzz at the National Biodiesel Conference, which convenes in San Francisco on Feb. 1. Given how record diesel-fuel costs literally drove up food prices last year–tractors and delivery trucks run on diesel–suppliers hope the new Administration will consider jatropha as stimulus-worthy as wind or solar power.

http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/02/googles-power-p/

Every year, Google Inc. invites a group of global A-listers to its own Davos-style conference to think big thoughts. The event, called Zeitgeist, tends to be as pretentious as its name—captains of industry, finance, and government chattering onstage in front of about 400 of Google’s friends and customers about the fate of the internet and the world.

The 2008 version bordered on the surreal. The stock market was tanking, the bond market had flatlined, and the price of gold was surging to its biggest one-day jump in nearly a decade, an indication that investors everywhere thought the global economy was going to hell.

Yet here was Eric Schmidt, Google’s chairman and CEO, on a sparse stage at the company’s Mountain
View, California, headquarters, in a green-energy love-in with his counterpart at General Electric Co., Jeff Immelt. The pair bathed in the glow of each other’s affirmation, convinced that the two companies, working together, can save the planet.