How would an entrepreneur apply for a job?

Posted on February 5, 2012 by dougneal

First of all, the title of this blog doesn’t make sense. Entrepreneurs don’t typically apply for jobs – they create them! That said, I wanted to use this subject to illustrate something we talk about a lot at the University of Michigan – the entrepreneurial mindset.

Too often I hear from people who are frustrated in their job search and it is amazing to me that they don’t approach getting a job in a more entrepreneurial way.

Typically, people who are looking for a new job will look at the available opportunities, identify several that look interesting and then apply through the provided application mechanism for that opportunity. After that, they usually complain that they never hear back from the employer and then eventually move on to the next opportunity.

I’m sure that many of you who embrace an entrepreneurial way of thinking would read that last paragraph and scratch their head. It just doesn’t make sense.

Someone with an entrepreneurial mindset would identify what type of job they believe is a good match for their passion and skillset; Select a company that appears to be the best match and then create the opportunity to join them.

How would you create an opportunity like that? Here are some suggestions:

1) Learn everything you can about the company. What is their history? What value do they provide? Where are their challenges? Where are they going long term?

2) Use business networks like linkedin.com (or social networks) to connect with people who are in the company you are targeting and create a connection with them.

3) If you can’t find someone directly connected start creating connections via the same network… if you make a good case for a connection such as “I’m very interested in your company and want to learn more” you can get a connection.

4) If the company exhibits at a tradeshow go to that tradeshow and attend. Meet the people, who work for the company, talk to them. Find out how you can get involved.

5) Find out when key executives are going to be at a trade show and walk up and say “Hi, you don’t know me but I’ll give you 10 reasons why you need to hire me!”.

Will this work 100% of the time? Absolutely not, but that isn’t what matters. You’ll still get rejections and it will require a lot of work but it may lead to some surprising opportunities.

What people don’t realize is that employers are looking for people who show initiative, think creatively and are passionate about the same things they are passionate about.

Employers are looking for people with an entrepreneurial mindset!

An Entrepreneurial Tsunami in A2 is Coming

Posted on December 3, 2011 by dougneal

Its not often scientists get to witness seismic events in our Earth’s crust that produce tidal waves. Although our science is getting better they are still hard to measure and even harder to see up close and personal.

I, however, had the distinct pleasure of personally witnessing a seismic event in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of Ann Arbor today at MPowered’s inaugural 1000 Pitches 21e Summit event held at the University of Michigan’s TechArb facility in downtown Ann Arbor.

About 200 students and more than a dozen entrepreneurs and mentors from the A2 entrepreneurial ecosystem descended upon TechArb for the first 1000 Pitches 21e Summit event — an opportunity for finalists and participants in the 1000 Pitches Video Idea Pitch competition to network and participate in workshops to help take their ideas forward.

At first I didn’t notice the seismic shift, it was subtle.

The event itself was amazing. Here, in the center of Ann Arbor, on a cold early December Saturday almost 200 students were attending workshops and skill building events to perfect their ideas. Very cool!

Here’s the amazing part and why I’m sounding the Entrepreneurial Tsunami warning bell for A2…

The growth in entrepreneurial activity at UM has been significant during the last several years and over that time a pipeline of entrepreneurial activity and talent has emerged that we have embraced. 1000 Pitches and Entrepreneurship Hour, for example, are two important feeder programs for the start of this talent supply chain and contribute roughly 4,000-5000 students / year. This fall, for example 1000 Pitches collected 3,303 video pitches… a new world record!

The seismic event I noticed was not that we had collected a new world record worth of video pitch ideas… the event was that 200 entrepreneurial students (the semi finalists and other contributors) were actively investing significant time on moving their pitched ideas forward!

Sure, many of these ideas are very raw and may not hold up through the journey but that is not the point. The point is that the number of active entrepreneurial student engagements due to one of the largest entrepreneurial feeder programs the University of Michigan holds just shifted its conversion metrics upwards – significantly!

Its unclear how this energy and activity will materialize itself in the coming months and years but you can count on this having a tidal wave effect in follow on participation in other entrepreneurial events, classes and programs on campus.

Congratulations to the MPowered students! Everyone else — either prepare to head for higher ground or start getting ready to scale your entrepreneurial programs… a big wave is coming!

Observe Trends When Scaling Up Good Ideas

Posted on November 7, 2011 by dougneal

When I co-founded Mobile Automation in 1997 we had developed an idea (and some technology) to allow IT Administrators to send large files to mobile employees with laptops when they were away from the corporate office.

Back then, high speed Internet access outside of your office ethernet connection was very rare and the few employees who were starting to carry laptops had to depend on slow, unreliable dial-up Internet connections. Getting large application updates or installations was very difficult and we saw a huge opportunity to fix that problem.

As we started to ponder the future direction of our company and product line we did some soul searching on what trends were happening in the industry and asked ourselves some very basic questions:

What if the speed at which mobile users could connect to the Internet increases dramatically? If it does, what would happen to our market? What would our target customers do? What would our company’s value need to be in order to remain compelling?

This exercise was very helpful for us as it forced us to take our initial “good idea” and think about it in the context of time and technology always improving.

It was during this brainstorming session that we determined that two major things would most likely happen:

If users could connect to the Internet at near-office-like-speeds then they would most likely be comfortable spending longer times away from the office (mobility would increase).
If employees are spending longer times away from the office they will have less access to IT support resources and may have more difficulty solving problems with their laptops (remote support needs would increase).

Our basic value proposition was good for today’s environment but we knew it wouldn’t last forever. We needed to find a way to embrace these likely changes in technology and the market.

We decided to focus on a different world than the one that existed in front of us in 1997. We decided to assume that eventually a majority of users in any given company would be mobile a majority of the time and connecting at high speeds. Very quickly, we decided to round out our product offering with features that would help take advantage of a more mobile work force and assist users in keeping their laptops functioning smoothly even if IT support resources were not sitting down the hall.

Ultimately, these changes proved extremely valuable as our competitors were limited in their approach and not prepared for the disruptive change in mobility that occurred in the early part of 2001-2003.

What we did wasn’t that significant to us at the time. We simply observed where the trends were in the market and what was likely to become a reality. Instead of fearing the future and keeping focused on the pain of today we simply observed logical trends and planned for the unavoidable. We ended up taking a pretty good idea and helped shape it into something really great!

Why we need to unplug for 30 minutes

Posted on November 1, 2011 by dougneal

Last week, the homework assignment for one of my entrepreneurship classes was for each student to think about and write down what the value of the Internet is to them.

The purpose of this assignment was to teach the students the difference between describing how they use something and its true value. As entrepreneurs, we often fail to do this and get caught up in the thing we are doing and forget to step back and recognize what the core value is of our product or service.

Additionally, I wanted the students to focus on trying to channel truly creative thinking by removing anything that might distract them.

To achieve this, I added to the assignment the following parameters:

After you write down your initial thoughts on the value of the Internet you must then unplug completely for 30 minutes and reflect on this further. Walk away from your phone, iPod, computer and TV and sit somewhere and reflect. Then, after 30 minutes are up come back to your original notes and modify them with what you have thought about.

The results were…. surprising.

These students did a great job, as I expected, in identifying the value of the Internet to them and wrote excellent insights to how it has helped shape their thinking, extended their knowledge and connect them to others.

What was surprising, however, was how difficult they felt it was to unplug for 30 minutes!

Many wrote about being hesitant to walk away from their smart phones and in some cases had their room mates take them away physically and hide them. Some could not sit still and started tidying up their rooms and pacing. One student couldn’t do it and decide to give up on the assignment all together.

After about 10-15 minutes many students wrote about a growing sense of themselves falling behind the rest of the world and not knowing what was happening and how stressful this made them feel. (amazing, eh? yes, this was only a 30 minute activity).

During the final 10-15 minutes a lot of the students started getting into deeper thoughts about their assignment and managed to develop some very strong and meaningful insights. Many also started to identify a little sadness or longing for times when life wasn’t so busy and they could read a book for fun, play cards or enjoy simpler things.

I couldn’t agree more.

We all are moving extremely fast in this busy world trying to pack just a few more things into our day and accomplish just one more task (or respond to just one more email). This leaves very little time for truly creative and deep thinking and without that reflective time I believe we will miss some truly amazing and disruptive ideas.

I think we all could benefiting from unplugging for 30 minutes… don’t you?

Chance Favors the Connected Mind

Posted on October 26, 2011 by dougneal

Great progress has been made in developing processes and tools to help entrepreneurs take an idea and search for the right business model and turn it into a new venture.

Not a lot, however, has been done to develop processes around taking an interesting idea and evolving it into something truly amazing and disruptive.

Imposible? No. You first need to look at where good ideas come from… Steven Johnson has done a lot of work on this topic and has a great video about it here.

My favorite quote from Steven comes at the end of his video … “Chance favors the connected mind”.

At the University of Michigan we have a tremendous opportunity to generate really good ideas given the deep research, faculty expertise and amazing student talent. The challenge, as one would expect, is to create opportunities to connect people and ideas in ways that generate truly disruptive and great ideas.

At the Center for Entrepreneurship we are experimenting with ways to develop a process that is efficient at doing just this. Many of our programs at the Center are designed to include opportunities for connections to be made and ideas to ignite.

Ultimately, I see these experiments turning into accepted processes that can help connect, create and generate truly disruptive ideas. I’ve never been a fan of leaving things up to “chance”.

Testing Ideas with Customers

Posted on October 24, 2011 by dougneal

I’ve sat through approximately 50 pitches in the last 2-3 weeks and many times I hear a common example of how the teams have tested their ideas with customers…

“We went out and showed our prototype to a bunch of people and everyone we showed it to said yes, they would buy it!”.

The problem is that is not validation.

First of all, people like to be nice to other people. Its human nature. People will smile and say your idea is great but honestly it doesn’t prove anything.

Secondly, people may say “they like something” but it doesn’t mean that they are necessarily willing to pay cash for something.

Lastly, this is the wrong question to ask.

When you are testing your ideas with potential customers the first thing you need to do is ask them what their challenges are and why. There is a whole discussion that needs to take place to get inside their heads.

If you are working on a new venture and interested in gathering some customer data start by just having a simple conversation with them about what they are doing and why. You’ll be surprised at what you will learn!

Celebrate Invention at A2 Draws Big Crowd

Posted on October 20, 2011 by dougneal

Last night the University of Michigan’s Tech Transfer Office held their annual Celebrate Invention event. This event is held each fall to celebrate and honor inventors that are working on exciting new commercial opportunities using U-M IP.

It was a cold and rainy evening so I didn’t hold much hope for a large crowd but was excited to see a large percentage of our A2 Entrepreneurial Ecosystem out networking.

Great event, lot’s of entrepreneurs connecting and lot’s of side bar conversations about this or that next big thing that people are working on… it was infectious and hard to leave.

Go Blue!

Why Neo is an Entrepreneur

Posted on October 19, 2011 by dougneal

As an entrepreneur, you look at life through a different lens. Instead of seeing the world as it is, you tend to start seeing the world as it “should be” or “could be”.

Instead of taking things on face value you tend to stop and question how they came into being and why and who did all the work and what might have gone wrong before getting to this point.

This aspect of entrepreneurship reminds me of the scene from the movie the Matrix and when Morpheus presented Neo with two choices.

The “blue pill” is what most people might choose if they are comfortable in being part of an existing organization and not interested in changing the world or starting new ventures.

The “red pill” enables you to see behind the scenes and enter the mode of always searching for business models and understanding and always questioning how things are and what else they can be.

After taking the red pill Neo experiences an awakening about how the world truly is and what is wrong with it. His passion, tenacity and creativity in solving the problems and pursuing his vision reminds me of entrepreneurs struggling to find solutions to their own problems in their startups.

As an entrepreneur, give up all hope… you have just taken the “red pill”… let’s see how deep the rabbit hole goes!

Chicago’s Entrepreneurial Spirit is Burning Bright

Posted on October 18, 2011 by dougneal

Today ends a 3-day fast paced visit to Chicago for myself and many UM entrepreneurial students who came here to engage the Chicago entrepreneurial network.

On Sunday, I was thrilled to see so many wolverines participating in Chicago’s Startup Weekend event. This 50+ hour event is a great way to build energy in a community and teams. Ideas that come out of these events are usually only half-baked but that is expected. Its impressive to see how polished the idea (and even the product development) can be after such a short time. Great job Chicago!

Yesterday our 5 student startup venture teams arrived via Amtrak along with several UM faculty and staff and participated in a pitch competition in front of UM alumni and Chicago luminaries. We choose “pitching” as a great way to kick off a trip like this as it allows for multiple opportunities to build the network. I particularly enjoyed watching how much excitement the teams had in seeing what their peers were working on and the flurry of ideas that exchanged at the networking session afterwards.

Today, our final day we will tour multiple entrepreneurial success story locations (The Elysian hotel, LightBank and Groupon) before returning to the hotel for a final networking opportunity with 50 Michigan Alumni!

Back on the train and back to A2 after that. Great time, great experience for the teams and thanks again Chicago for keeping the midwest entepreneurial spirit burning bright!

Disruptive Ideas Require Identifying Core Value

Posted on October 14, 2011 by dougneal

Consider this question: ”Describe the value of a gas station”.

I like to ask entrepreneurs this question as a thought experiment of how hard it is sometimes to isolate value from something we are used to experiencing every day.

A typical response is “a place where I gas my car”. That is incorrect, that is a definition of what you do when you visit a gas station.

Another is “a location that provides fuel to automobiles”. Again, incorrect, that is what a gas station does. That is not its value.

This is an important exercise that entrepreneurs should practice and then apply to their own startup they are working on. Isolating the core value of an idea or product allows disruptive ideas to flow more easily since we have now removed existing constraints.

Alternatively, if we focus on what a product does or how people use a product we miss identifying what is possible or, even more excitingly, identifying what is impossible to many but uniquely possible to a few.

The correct answer to the gas station question ”Describe the value of a gas station” is “gas stations provide range extension to vehicles”.

They are at their simplest, vehicle range extenders.

If entrepreneurial gas station owners recognize they are actually in the vehicle range extension business and not the gas pumping business then embracing alternative methods for “extending range” become suddenly a natural extension to what they already do.

Perhaps one day in the near future you will pull into your local gas station and get to choose from Regular, Leaded, Unleaded or 240V!

CFE Director's Blog

Director Doug Neal's Blog