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Do you have what it takes to become a social entrepreneur? This site will let you find the answer to that question, and without you having to invest a single cent at all. Generally speaking, it revolves around a game in which your entrepreneurial skills will be put to the test. All you have to do is join (or log in via Facebook Connect) and let everybody know what you can do. Read more Learn more about Selfport.com in Dataopedia.com Find out how much Selfport.com is worth with Stimator.com

We’ve talked now and then about college programs that are making strides to provide students with entrepreneurial training , but the Harvard Business School (HBS) has so far not come up in our discussions. This might seem odd that one of the top businesses schools in the nation doesn’t gather much attention from things like The Princeton Review’s ranking of entrepreneurial programs , but one HBS grad may have an answer to that puzzle. Sponsor Stu Wall , co-founder of the startup Postabon with an MBA from Harvard, recently wrote about some of the reasons that he thinks cause MBAs to make mistakes when trying to form a startup. The biggest obstacle in their way is that through their years of education, MBA students are taught to meticulously plan their businesses, but nothing can substitute from actually getting your hands dirty. “With three months and ~$10K, we created a bare-minimum website and iPhone app that allowed us to iterate daily based on consumer feedback. No amount of time in Baker Library would have substituted,” writes Wall. “Building a product will allow you to identify a viable strategy, iterate, and prove your team can win. Research, formatting and nicely worded emails are a prerequisite but by no means a differentiator.” Does this mean that no startup ever got funded without a working demo or beta phase product? Probably not, but the point here is that the amount of discovery and business education you give yourself by actually building a product and testing it trumps anything you can learn from a lecture or a book. I would assume that at some point during his Harvard MBA education Wall had some sort of “lab” experience in which he was tasked with actually creating a business, but I can’t be sure. If he did, it may not be likely that the experiments they ran were in the realm of startups, but they could have been. The point is, Wall seemed to learn a lot more about forming a startup simply by doing than he thinks he did from school. Another pitfall he sees with MBA students is that the culture implanted into the minds of most business school students doesn’t jive well with startup culture. By this he means that MBAs spend tens of thousands of dollars on an education as an investment toward a future with a high paying career, but that startup culture is a different kind of road to success than they may have expected. “By the time we’re thinking about career decisions, many have a ‘what will you do for me’ attitude,” writes Wall. “Entrepreneurship is the truest form of meritocracy where ‘credentialing’ counts for nothing. Be humble and cognizant of your weaknesses, and put your passion for idea show (as opposed to your $$ aspirations).” Discuss

Go to the website where a portable iPhone charger called the 3GPower2 is for sale, and you will find tips on extending an iPhone’s battery life. What you won’t see is any hint that Bill McNeely, the man behind the product and the website, is working from a dorm-style room on a police-training base in one of the world’s most dangerous corners: Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan mired in battle with the Taliban. For now, McNeely earns his living managing the logistical operations at the camp, run by an American company that the U.S. government has hired to help train the fledgling Afghan National Police. (McNeely requested that the name of his employer not be printed.) When night falls, though, McNeely gets busy running his Web business. The inspiration to market an iPhone battery booster came to McNeely last summer. Immersed in his usual routine of nighttime online reading (despite what he calls a 1999-level connection to the Internet), McNeely came across articles citing the iPhone’s short battery life. “I saw a big market,” he says, “and not that many players.” Though he has no technical knowledge, McNeely had a simple idea: Create a sleek-looking external battery that snaps on to the bottom of an iPhone, giving it hours of new life. He went to Alibaba.com, and within a few weeks, he was able to land a Chinese manufacturer. He turned to the freelancer site Elance to find a graphic designer; his packaging was created by a Bulgarian. McNeely also used the Web to find and hire a Harvard Business School — educated consultant to help craft his business plan. And a New York Times article led McNeely to a Web designer, who helped him set up his site. After an investment of about $6,000, McNeely got 3GPower2.com up and running in less than three months, and his site opened for business last September. McNeely’s personal war-zone exit strategy is to build his iPhone battery charging business to the point where he can give up the overseas life and get back home to his family. And the sooner the better. His days are filled with reminders of the war around him: There are the crowds of Afghan men who have come to receive police training — and the crackle of gunfire from the base’s shooting range. Recently, a rocket launched by the Taliban landed a few hundred feet from the base. It’s hardly an ideal environment in which to start an entrepreneurial venture, but McNeely had few options. His stint in Afghanistan began in 2008, after he had been out of work in Texas for three months. A former Army logistics officer who served in Iraq, McNeely found a job with a defense contractor managing a crew of local mechanics responsible for maintaining trucks and tractors used in a poppy-eradication mission in the southern Afghan province of Helmand. The work was dangerous. McNeely survived an attack on his convoy, but several drivers were killed, and his SUV was destroyed. “I’ve been through some pretty rough stuff,” he says, “but I was really scared that day.” McNeely needed the work, though, so when that job ended, he signed up for his current job with the same company. So far, business is slow for 3GPower2. McNeely, who earlier tried and failed to start a defense contracting business, has sold just over 250 chargers, at $29.95 each. He’s spending his evenings and weekends on the business and making Skype calls to his wife, who handles shipping from their house in Temple, Texas. To get sales moving, McNeely is applying search-engine-optimization techniques to his company website. He’s also counting on boosting sales with a discount promotion offered through the coupon site Groupon.com . (See ” Four Tips for Using Groupon Coupons “). If the strategy works, McNeely figures he will be able to head home well before the end of the year with a full-time job waiting for him — running his own business. “He promised that this will be the last year,” says his wife, Suzy. That means a lot more iPhone battery booster sales, but McNeely intends to keep his promise.

This week we’ve got a book hot off the presses for your weekly dose of entrepreneurial reading as 37signals founders Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson are back with their second book. Released earlier this month, Rework , a no-nonsense rethinking of how to successfully start and run a business, is the second book from Fried and Heinemeier who earlier authored Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application . Sponsor This time Fried and Hansson take a more general approach to business by examining the ways that new companies are disrupting traditional business practices and making a big splash. They cover their entrepreneurial bases by reminding us that “no time is no excuse” and that “a business without a path to profit isn’t a business, it’s a hobby,” but then also elaborate on less traditional practices that have helped them succeed. The main theme of the book is to trim the fat and do fewer things better; simplifying every aspect of your business and doing a smaller number of things at a higher quality is far better than trying to do too much and a mediocre level. There were times when customers of their products wanted more features and they refused to comply because it would slow them down and decrease efficiency. They decry time-stealing meetings, lengthy contracts, childish office politics and bloated inventories because they weigh down companies from reaching their full potential. Rework is a great read for entrepreneurs because it is very focused and doesn’t waste any time with lengthy use cases. The book itself is an example of the principals it teaches; the quality of a written work is not based on it’s length, so why should company be judged by how many features it offers? Fried and Hansson admit that the book, which comes in at a dense but brief 288 pages, was originally drafted to be nearly twice as long, but why say in 600 pages what you can say under 300? Another reason the book is a great read is because of the authors’ open and honest tone. “Ever seen those weapons prisoners make out of soap, or a spoon? They make do with what they’ve got,” one passage humorously points out. “Now we’re not saying you should go out and shank somebody, but get creative, and you’ll amazed with what you can make with just a little.” Other useful and easily digestible analogies for their unique business ideas include comparing your company to a hot dog stand. They advise that the best way to trim down an inflated company is to find the “epicenter” by asking yourself, “If I took this away, would what I’m selling still exist?” The best hot dog stand doesn’t worry about the decorations on the stand, or the condiments – it worries about the hot dogs. There are dozens of other valuable pieces of advice in Rework that are sure to inspire any entrepreneur or small business owner. But as LeVar Burton famously said at the end of each episode of Reading Rainbow, you don’t have to take my word for it. Seth Godin, who has authored several books on business and entrepreneurship including The Dip which we profiled earlier this year, had nothing but high praise for Rework . “Jason and David have broken all the rules and won. Again and again they’ve demonstrated that the regular way isn’t necessarily the right way,” says Godin. “They just don’t say it, they do it. And they do it better than just about anyone has any right to expect.” This book is an obvious buy not only because the of the expert advice dispensed by the successful founders of 37signals, but also because the book is an easy, quick and inexpensive read. Personally, in a few short hours I was able to breeze through the audio version, which can be found online for less than $10. But if you prefer reading words on a page, the Kindle version is also $10, or a hardback copy is just $3 more at some online retailers . Discuss

TechStars is an early stage venture fund based in Boulder, Colorado. ReadWriteWeb was given an early peek at historical results data on TechStars companies, which the organization is about to release . The data shows acquisition and failure rates, as well as how many of the TechStar companies have gone on to receive angel or venture funding. TechStars reports that nearly 6 of 10 of their companies have historically gone on to receive outside angel or venture funding (not including friends or family). Five other companies reported that they are now profitable without outside funding, so overall 27 of 39 (69.23%) TechStars companies have either raised outside funding after the program or bootstrapped to profitability. Sponsor Of the 39 TechStars companies analyzed, 29 are still active (74.36%), 4 were acquired for > $2M (10.26%), 1 was acquired for < $2M (2.56%), and 4 failed (10.26%). One of the companies is listed as “other” (2.56%), but there is no explanation of what that means. The data that TechStars reports is similar to a recent study by the blog Awesome Zombie , which did an analysis in December of similar early stage venture fund Y-Combinator . Awesome Zombie found data on 145 Y-Combinator companies from a variety of non-official sources, such as CrunchBase, news articles and discussions on Hacker News. It found that 82 Y-Combinator companies are active (24 having received further public investment rounds), 33 failed, 14 were acquired. The rest were stealth, unknown or “other” (e.g. merger or private investment). The TechStars numbers are very encouraging for early stage companies. Nearly 70% of TechStars companies have raised outside funding or have become profitable on their own, which is comparatively better than the more high-profile Y-Combinator (with the proviso that the Y-Combinator data was unofficial and gathered by a third party). TechStars attributes this success rate to its “mentorship driven approach.” The program also only funds 10 companies per batch, which TechStars says is due to its focus on quality over quantity. TechStars CEO David Cohen told ReadWriteWeb, “I think that the programs that will ultimately prove to be most powerful for their local entrepreneurial communities are those which follow the mentorship+community formula that we pioneered. It’s powerful in so many ways when you get dozens of mentors involved in very hands on, meaningful ways with each company from day one of the program.” I happened to be in Boulder on Wednesday, where Elyssa Pallai and I met with a group of TechStars companies for lunch. The knowledge and passion for web technology exhibited by each person at the lunch impressed me a lot. If this group of young entrepreneurs were representative of the Boulder startup scene, then it’s a city with plenty of vitality and smarts. If you’re a U.S. company interested in applying to TechStars, applications for their Boulder program are open for a few more weeks. TechStars also has a new Seattle program starting soon. Discuss