I found 5 different applications downloaded to my Verizon family calling plan (3 cell phones) that we never selected or used. The charges were conspicuous, two applications dated back to 2008, after migrating to an unlimited data and voice plan. I would think potential class actions here.
Pacino said “You wanna learn the first rule you’d know if you ever spent a day in your life?” and this time the rule is don’t spin small business owners.
I was being sarcastic in this Bloomberg BusinessWeek piece last year, “If you bail out some, you pretty much have to bail out everyone, so small business deserves its share.” The following month I made sure to clarify how and why the government should stop handing out cash in this Wall Street Journal piece. While these are just opinions, I would like to suggest a fact that is $30B to community banks is $30B to community banks and nothing to do with small business.
Give it to them as I don’t think there’s even a way to measure this stuff anymore but don’t call it for small business.
Foremski/Zdnet included: “95% of Venture Capital (VC) firms are not making any consistent money for their investors (Limited Partners). Imagine what would happen if only about 35 of 790 VC firms were to survive in ten years from now.”
I have imagined this that is a key reason I wrote this.
Housing starts have never double dipped, unemployment has never doubled peaked and the double dip has never actually happened.
In late 1972, U.S. housing starts peaked and declined more than 30% before the 1973-75 recession began. As the recession ended in 1975, housing starts bottomed consistently rising until 1977. The same housing starts pattern occurred preceding the 1980s recessions that is striking because there were actually two recessions (1980 and 1981-1982) including two sharp housing starts cycles. Housing starts declined by nearly 30% preceding the 1990-91 recession and, hold for it, housing starts peaked at 2.3M units (seasonally adjusted annual rate) in January 2006 declining more than 50% to 1M units by the time the Great Recession began in December, 2007. NEWS FLASH: I estimate hundreds of thousands of people around the world knew a big recession was coming based on this data alone. Finally, housing starts bottomed last year and will continue to recover as in every other recessionary period.
U.S. unemployment peaked in 1975 before falling consistently until 1977. The same pattern occurred in ’82-’84, ’92-’94 and will occur again looking back on the 2009-2011 cycle.
Confidence or at least comfort will be restored in America once we reconcile our history and accept we will repeat it.
SEE MORE AT JON B FISHER’S BLOG
When you collaborate with a customer in order to design a product, you want a solution tailor-made for the customer. You can also sell it to other customers who need similar solutions. That’s why choosing a customer to collaborate with can be so crucial. Collaborate with the wrong customer and you may wind up with a solution that only that particular customer can use. Collaborate with a strategic customer and you can create a solution that others can use and are willing to buy too.
A strategic customer is one that is both representative of your target customer and possesses a reputation as a leader in its field. For example, if your company sells medical billing software, you could customize and sell your product to any hospital in the country, or you could focus on a hospital with a reputation for using cutting-edge technology or that specializes in certain types of research.
Your product’s close association with a well-known and reputable customer validates your product in the market place in the same way that celebrity endorsements validate soft drinks or running shoes in the eyes of the public. Gain a strategic customer as a collaborator and you define the right product to solve a pressing need to generate revenue from day one, and you leverage the reputation of the strategic customer to help sell your product to similar customers.
Ironically, one of Google’s initial customers was Yahoo! Yahoo! contracted with Google to provide the underlying search technology for their web portal. Initially Yahoo! had the reputation of being the most popular search engine on the Internet. By working with Yahoo!, Google gained a strategic customer that provided revenue and gave Google credibility as a search engine.
Perhaps the final, and most important, purpose of a strategic customer is to help your company to get acquired. Once you collaborate with a strategic customer, you develop a relationship with that customer who has helped to shape the design of your product. A fast way for a larger corporation to gain your strategic customer as their own customer is to buy out your company. By buying out your company, a larger corporation essentially buys the assets and customer base that your company has created.
The more important your strategic customers are to others and the closer these strategic customers are linked to your own company (through their involvement in designing your product), the more attractive your company becomes as an acquisition target.
Any corporation that buys out your company will inherit your customers. Sometimes during an acquisition, customers may leave a company that’s being acquired if their business relationship changes. However, if you’ve collaborated with your customers and linked them closely to your startup, customers will be far less likely to switch to a rival product. This helps to guarantee that the majority of your customer base will remain intact for the acquiring company.
I find long runs help to solidify start-up strategy. They also should help me pass the key man life insurance exam as well as the executive physical next month at USCF. This time, I’m leaning on Joe Satriani (Summer Song), Thomas Newman (Cinderella Man), Hans Zimmer (Gladiator), Beethoven, Mozart and last but not least Europe (The Final Countdown) that edged out the Rolling Stones.
It looks like Sequoia has a large portfolio of companies that will mostly exit like Chuck Phillips understands better than almost anyone in the world. I’m not suggesting Phillips understands individual Sequoia companies better than Sequoia partners, rather most of these companies will be acquired by one of just a handful of enterprises that is Phillip’s area. I haven’t seen a top Venture Capitalist create a pure sniper function yet that might pay huge dividends. Phillips also appears to be civic/politically minded and he would be helping strengthen America’s best companies by systematically feeding to them some of America’s best private companies.
Facebook at 500M users is in every news report but I don’t see a single journalist documenting proof of such a claim e.g. “Facebook showed me their records and I can confirm 500M users”. Perhaps there will be an investigation when Facebook announces 8B users.
From SF Examiner: I got an email today from a friend of mine, Jon Fisher, exclaiming, “I’ve finally written a best-seller!” So I immediately jumped onto the iBookstore to grab a copy of his book and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I did a search on his name, then a search on the book title, nothing.
I fired up my laptop and went to Amazon to see if I could find it in the Kindle store and there it was. So I bought a copy and didn’t think much more about it. Until now.
Why wasn’t his book in the iBookstore? I know exactly why: Publishing on the iPad is hard!
Most traditional book publishers are having a tough time getting their books into the iBookstore and onto the iPad because they don’t have the technology in place nor the technical expertise to integrate their catalog with the iBookstore. Many of their titles are old and I’m sure there is a cost-benefit analysis they are doing right now to decide whether it’s even worth their while to spend the money necessary to convert the titles into EPUBS.
If you are a published author, you’re probably fuming right now, too! I had a conversation with a well-known author last week who was outright pissed at his publisher because they were dragging their feet again over eBook publishing his backlist. He was ready to spend the next few years hammering on their door. So I gave him some tips, and I’ll share the same three tips with you here
Predilect, a company working to strengthen online security, today announced it has secured a first round of funding for $750,000 from serial entrepreneur and investor Jon Fisher as well as several other angels.
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