Category Archives: Entrepreneurship

Startup Financing Options

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Startup Financing Options

Looking at starting a new venture and need to sort out the financing? In a recent webinar Jana Mathews from the ANZ Innovyz Start program in Adelaide went through the five main startup financing options.

Bootstrapping

The goal of bootstrapping is to generating enough money inside the company that you do not need to find other sources of funds. All expenses are minimised and pursuit of cashflow is critical. Not all companies can bootstrap – large initial CAPEX requirements can often preclude it. Continue reading →

The Reputation Economy

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The Reputation Economy

Rachel Botsman on how online reputation is becoming a currency

AMP Amplify Festival 2013

Online reputation is becoming a bigger and bigger problem (or opportunity) for organisations and individuals. Rachel is here to open our minds to where this could be going. First, a little on Rachel:

Named by Monocle as one of the top 20 speakers in the world to have at your conference, Rachel Botsman has already presented at high profile events including The Clinton Global Initiative, TED, HP, Google, and No.10 Downing Street.

She received her BFA (Honors) from the University of Oxford, and undertook her postgraduate studies at Harvard University. Her work has taken her to every continent, except Antarctica.

Rachel opens by stating that she thinks reputation will become a currency more powerful than our credit histories. To help paint the picture of what might happen, she asks – what is reputation?

Continue reading →

Emerging Shifts for Money and Wealth

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This year I was lucky to attend AMP’s Amplify Festival in Sydney. My first session is ‘Emerging Shifts for Money and Wealth’ with Dr Tim Jones. Some notes on Tim:

“Tim is Founder and Program Director of the Future Agenda – the world’s leading open foresight project… Tim is a recognised expert in innovation and future growth. He is the author of numerous articles and eight related books and is a regular speaker at corporate events and public conferences on innovation leadership, growth platforms and future trends. He has a PhD in Innovation Performance and Masters Degrees from Cambridge, Imperial College and the Royal College of Art in London.”

Dr Tim starts off his talk, focusing on the difficulty of predicting and anticipating future changes and trends:

Continue reading →

ANZ Innovyz Demo Day Live Blog

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The ANZ Innovyz Demo Day, 18th of April, 2013. The ANZ Innovyz Start is an accelerator program for innovative startups located in Adelaide, South Australia.

This blog post is my live blog of the ANZ Innovyz Demo Day.

What is demo day? See http://www.innovyzstart.com/what-is-demo-day-jana-matthews-explains

I thought all the companies did a great job! To read how it all happened, see below!

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Leadership Lessons From Game of Thrones

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With the start of Game of Thrones Season Three only hours away it is a good time to revisit and update one of my old blog posts 4 Leadership Lessons From Game of Thrones.

When I originally read the five available books in George R.R Martin’s ‘Song of Ice and Fire’ I found myself thinking about the leadership and life lessons that could be extracted from the series. Quotes like ‘Kill the boy’ haunted some of my more boy-like decisions, and Ygritte’s ‘You know nothing Jon Snow’ played through my head whenever I took issue with a management decision.  I would reflect on the possibility that many more factors were at play than I could see, and that I still had some distance to travel in my journey to be a more effective person (and leader).

So here is my list of seven leadership lessons from Game of Thrones, expanded from my original list of 4: Continue reading →

Minimum Viable Product – You’re getting it (partially) wrong

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MVP. Minimum Viable Product.

Terminology from the startup world is finding its way into the language of Business. Managers are latching onto the key words such as pivot, disrupt and the idea of the minimum viable product.

Unfortunately, few managers fully understand what each means to the startup world. The idea of the minimum viable product is widely misunderstood. It’s pretty easy to get most of its meaning, but unfortunately the point gets missed.

About the Minimum Viable Product, Eric Ries in his book ‘The Lean Startup‘, says: Continue reading →

Social Media Marketing – Mal Chia

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Social Media Marketing

This is the second in a series of posts from Adelaide University’s MBA Entrepreneurship Intensive program.  Professor Becky Ruber has kindly allowed me to sit in on the guest speakers arranged for students in her course.

On Friday the 1st of March, the guest speaker was Mal Chia from NoQ:

Mal Chia – Digital Marketing Manager@ NoQ (noq.com.au)

Mal Chia is working as the Digital Marketing Manager at the Adelaide startup NoQ.  He has a Masters in Commerce (Marketing) from Adelaide University and is one of South Australia’s most respected digital marketers. Continue reading →