In Defense of a College Education

Do entrepreneurs need a college education? Flickr and Hunch co-founder Caterina Fake may have argued that the best way to become an entrepreneur is to drop out of college, but Read Write Web profiles one college entrepreneur who disagrees. Jay Rodrigues is a 21-year-old University of Pennsylvania junior who secured Series A funding for his college-calendaring system start-up, DormNoise. “Don’t drop out of school, because for every Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg, there are hundreds of entrepreneurs who drop out and go nowhere,” he advises. “At least if you stay in school, you’ll have an education.” But it isn’t easy juggling his roles as CEO and college student–Rodrigues says he works about 16 hours a day. “Be 150 million percent sure this is what you want,” he says. For more on successful college entrepreneurs, check out our 2010 list of America’s Coolest College Start-ups . How to stop being a control freak? Name a number two. For business owners who built their company from scratch, letting go can be hard. But the Wall Street Journal cautions that there are worse consequences than the fear of losing control, such as burnout or unexpected emergencies if for some reason you can’t be around to make sure things run smoothly. “Invariably an owner will hit a wall where they feel overworked and like a prisoner to their business,” says Daniel M. Murphy, co-founder of The Growth Coach. Ceding day-to-day operations to a number two can free you up to work on the big picture. Ideally, their skills and work style will be complementary to your own. What better time than now, adds Murphy, “There’s such great talent out there that’s affordable.” The man who fired Steve Jobs. We told you last week about the dangers of saying no when the founder of Apple offers you a job . Now, the Daily Beast tracks down John Sculley, 25 years after he engineered a coup at Apple computer to oust Steve Jobs. Sculley, unsurprisingly, feels bad about the whole thing, telling the Beast that he should never have been the CEO in the first place. Meanwhile, the website digs up testimony given to an oral history project by Arthur Rock, a VC who was on the board when Jobs got fired, that hints at a culture clash. “I believe [Jobs] had a goatee and a mustache and long hair – and he had just come back from six months in India with a guru, learning about life,” Rock said. “I’m not sure, but it may have been a while since he had a bath.” For a glimpse at what Apple’s board was thinking back when they fired jobs, fire up the Inc.com time machine, and check out to this 1987 Q&A with Sculley. How to build foot traffic. For one small business owner, the answer was bananas. Yep. Bananas . (Via the Los Angeles Times.) Oh, AT&T. The sole U.S. provider of wireless service for Apple acknowledged yesterday that the e-mail addresses of more than 114,000 iPad owners had been uncovered by a group of computer experts through a security hole in AT&T’s website. Gawker Media first reported the security breach, calling it an “embarrassment” that exposed “dozens of CEOs, military officials, and top politicians.” Could the slip up further complicate AT&T’s rocky relationship with Apple? Well, Apple is staying mum on the issue, leaving it to AT&T to apologize and clean up the PR mess. Which type of entrepreneur are you? Tech entrepreneur and UC-Berkeley professor Steve Blank has winnowed the spectrum of entrepreneurship down to four major types: small businesses, scalable start-ups, large companies, and social entrepreneurs. Although seemingly very different, Blank demonstrates that the four types of entrepreneurs are all searching for a sustainable business model and all have common characteristics such as resiliency, agility, tenacity, and passion. The differences are most notably seen in each group’s risk tolerance, size and scale of vision, and personal financial goals. Hiring and firing deli-style. A CNNMoney contributor and small business owner herself, Vickie Elmer attended a crash course on SMB hiring and firing given by Zimngerman’s the Ann Arbor, Michigan-based deli with a cult-like following . There she picked up a few tricks she might apply to her own Italian ices business, Mity Nice. One of the hiring tests the deli employs is having most potential hires work a trial shift on a busy Saturday or what they call “Tilt-A-Whirl” in which they simultaneously interview multiple candidates. Other ideas came from the attendees such as asking job seekers to sell you a pen to gauge their sales ability. For more information, read our guide on improving your hiring practices . More from Inc. Magazine: Get this delivered to your inbox. Or get it on the Kindle Follow us on Twitter or Tumblr . Friend us on Facebook. Apply now for the 2010 Inc. 500|5000 . Apple – Steve Job – Facebook – Mark Zuckerberg – Caterina Fake

Where to Start Your Start-up

Is Boulder really the best place to start a business? According to business location website ZoomProspector, it is. In BusinessWeek , ZoomProspector pinpoints the ten best places to launch, weighing 11 factors like quality of workforce and access to venture capital. Number one is Boulder, Colorado, and ten is Rockville, Maryland. peHUB’s Dan Primack calls the list absurd. “Well, unless you’d really prefer to launch your generic start-up in Franklin, Tennessee instead of San Francisco. Or in Boca Raton, instead of Cambridge, Mass. Or in any of the top “Top 10″ instead of New York City.” Other companies’ trash is Terracycle’s treasure. Back in 2006, we dubbed Terracycle the ” coolest little start-up in America .” At the time, Terracycle was focused almost exclusively on their core product, a garden fertilizer made from composted worm poop, packaged in re-purposed soda bottles. Today the company is still turning trash into new products, only on a much larger scale. As the Wall Street Journal reports, Terracycle has greatly expanded their product line to include everything from backpacks made from reused drink pouches to kites made from old candy wrappers. That expansion, however, hasn’t come without some difficulties. To house the mounds and mounds of garbage they collect for their products, the company has had to lease five new storage warehouses. Terracyle’s execs have even begun sharing offices and moving their desks into the hallways to make room for trash piles. Terracyle is now banking on increased orders from big-box stores like Wal-Mart and Target to jumpstart their business and keep their warehouses full of trash out of landfills. “The pressure is as high as I can think of,” says the company’s founder, Tom Szaky. How a divorce could endanger your business. Not so long ago we were crowing about the bright future ahead of Elon Musk and his luxury electric car company, Tesla. After filing for an IPO earlier this year and completing a successful test of the rocket engines at his space start-up SpaceX, Musk’s fortunes reversed and he is now in the midst of a messy divorce that could doom his company (via Venturebeat ). If Musk’s wife receives a large enough portion of the company, among other problems, it could lead to a default on a loan of nearly half a billion dollars from the Department of Energy, which specifies that Musk must control 65 percent of capital stock. Here’s how to protect your business if you (or your kids) get divorced . A start-up incubator grows in Manhattan . The Web analytics service Chartbeat and the link shortener Bit.ly got their starts there. And as The New York Times explains, Betaworks, a New York City tech incubator, is confident there will be many more successes to come. Can Betaworks do for New York what Y Combinator has done for the Valley? Breaking down what makes Groupon tick. In a guest post at Tech Crunch , Steve Carpenter, the founder of Cake Financial, analyzes Groupon’s financials to find out how the $1.2 billion valued startup is doing with its rapid expansion in the face of a growing number of competitor sites. The key finding: Groupon has seen pretty impressive revenue growth numbers through increases in customers, higher deal prices, and its success in quickly expanding to new markets. “The question remains whether fast followers like LivingSocial and BuyWithMe will be able to grow into mini-Groupons with Groupon already firmly entrenched in a city,” he writes. Another intriguing result of his research: Boston residents love laser hair removal (655 purchases), riding on Segways (4,311) and learning how to fly a helicopter (2,575). The future of online dating. It involves finding a mate whose DNA is compatible with your own. That’s the premise of Littlehint, a Swiss start-up, that purports to match people based on a “psychoanalytic assessment and optional DNA matching,” according to TechCrunch. Mike Butcher notes that there’s something slightly pie-in-the-sky about this business plan–and also something a little creepy. “The site says they will ‘inform our singles when a match is found in traveling distance,’” he writes. “As in, perhaps, ‘Dear Sir, your Alpha Theta match is 2.5 miles away.’ Arousing stuff.” The oracle of Silicon Valley . This month’s Inc. cover story just went live. It’s about Tim O’Reilly the founder of O’Reilly Media, a little book publisher that has somehow been in front of pretty much every important technology trend of the past 30 years. He’s got a few ideas about the next 30 too. More from Inc. Magazine: Get this delivered to your inbox. Follow us on Twitter. Follow us on Tumblr. Friend us on Facebook. Apply now for the 2010 Inc. 500|5000 .

With Major Clients, a Site’s Sales Take Off

The Problem In the June 2009 issue, we wrote about Millennium Music , a popular independent record shop in Charleston, South Carolina, that was struggling to come to grips with the age of digital music. The shop had built its reputation on its welcoming ambiance and its knowledgeable and helpful staff. But it had been losing money for years. So founder Kent Wagner decided to turn his company into an online reseller of used CDs, DVDs, and books called AbundaTrade.com . The idea was to solicit customers’ old media in exchange for cash or electronics, such as iPods and flat-screen TVs. AbundaTrade would then resell the CDs and DVDs online at prices slightly below those of competitors. Soon after launching, AbundaTrade was taking in around 15,000 items a week, but the former record store employees missed serving as cultural tastemakers. What the Experts Said Jason Crawford, founder of SwitchGames, wondered if the move wasn’t just prolonging death, noting that eventually CDs will be useless. Marty Anderson, a lecturer at Babson College, wasn’t sure how AbundaTrade could grow. Jeremy Hanks, founder of Doba, admired the company’s e-commerce model but urged the company to simplify it. What’s Happened Since Wagner and AbundaTrade co-founder Clayton Woodson have concentrated on increasing supplies of used merchandise. The effort has paid off — both supplies and sales increased more than 60 percent in 2009. One reason for the success: AbundaTrade lined up some big-volume suppliers of used and overstocked CDs and DVDs, including Blockbuster and Best Buy. The company began hiring and now employs 26. It also refined its business model; it now focuses almost entirely on exchanging old CDs and DVDs for cash, rather than for electronics. That has freed up staff to focus on reselling and shipping. What’s Next The founders are honing the company’s search-engine-optimization strategy, which they say will give another boost to sales. “We want AbundaTrade.com to be known as the No. 1 place for customers to sell their media collections,” says Woodson. IPod – Compact Disc – SwitchGames – DVD – Babson College

Product Placements in Telenovels

MediaBuyerPlannet: Telemundo is increasingly incorporating products into the plot line of its telenovelas, and its newest deals are being made with manufacturers to develop brand new products for viewers to buy – products which didn’t exist before integration with the show. The first products will be jewelry from the Richline Group. The jewelry will be worn by characters in at least 16 episodes of telenovela El Clon, the first of which will air on Telemundo on April 22. The jewelry is already available on the Telemundo website, reports The New York Times. Another line of licensed merchandise, home decor products from Arrow Home Fashions, has been created and will begin airing in telenovelas as well as in the Telemundo morning show beginning in September. Telemundo Creates Products to be Sold during Telenovels [MediaBuyerPlanner]

SugarSync: 2 Petabytes and Counting – Welcome to the Personal Cloud

SugarSync is one of several companies competing these days to benefit from the disruptions in the market created by the new ways that people organize and share information from the any number of devices they use in their day. That’s a fundamental shift that is happening as people move beyond the desktop as a place to keep their documents, their media and their productivity applications. Sponsor Services like SugarSync serve in many ways as personal clouds that people use for their own work. They seem like plain vanilla services but that as well is the benefit the services provide. They are very simple to use. Data is automatically backed up to the cloud. SugarSync’s latest hosting numbers are revealing as they demonstrate how much data people are storing online. SugarSync reports that in the past year, the amount of data added to the SugarSync data centers went from an average of 1 terabyte of data to 5 terabytes of information. In total, the company now hosts two petaybtes of information. What’s fueling this growth? The customers may provide some clue. About 33 percent of customers are from outside the United States. Mobile devices are far more predominant outside the U.S. It makes sense tht people would need an alternative place to store infromation besides their smart phone or netbook. In light of the booming mobile device market, SugarSync, Dropbox and a host of other services are companies that seem like it would make most sense to develop mobile apps. That appears to be true. In the past 18 months, Sugar Sync has released apps for the Android, BlackBerry and iPad. Services like SugarSync show how the data we create will become part of a personal cloud network. These services lay the grounwork for a new generation of personal and business offerings that work with users to create data as a service opportunities. That’s down the road a bit but people do want so share. And they want to share outside the borders of a social network. Personal clouds could be a means to do that. Discuss

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