Business Plan Should Answer

 

From HBR, By William A. Sahlman 

When I receive a business plan, I always read the résumé section first. Not because the people part of the new venture is the most important, but because without the right team, none of the other parts really matters. 

 Fourteen “Personal” Questions Every Business Plan Should Answer 

• Where are the founders from? Where have they been educated? 
• Where have they worked—and for whom? 
• What have they accomplished—professionally and personally—in the past? 
• What is their reputation within the business community? 
• What experience do they have that is directly relevant to the opportunity they are pursuing? 
• What skills, abilities, and knowledge do they have? 
• How realistic are they about the venture’s chances for success and the tribulations it will face? 
• Who else needs to be on the team? 
• Are they prepared to recruit high-quality people? 
• How will they respond to adversity? 
• Do they have the mettle to make the inevitable hard choices that have to be made? 
• How committed are they to this venture? 
• What are their motivations? 

Source: HBR

Weekend Reading

 

• Sales is broken?
• How to get feedback from your team
• Why Buyers are disrupting the sales process
• Who is your customer
• CMO and CIO partnership in Digital Transformation
• Tips for scaling product
• Apples decade of Success

“No CEO in history has created as much total shareholder value as Mr Cook. When he took over the company had a market value of $349bn. Today it is worth $2.5trn, more than any other listed firm ever. Under his aegis annual sales surged from $108bn in 2011 to $274bn last year. Net profit more than doubled to $57bn, overtaking Saudi Aramco’s oil-fuelled earnings and turning Apple into the world’s most profitable company. Less widely noticed, during his tenure the “Apple economy”—its annual revenue plus everything other companies make on one of its platforms—has grown sevenfold to more than $1trn.

Weekend Reading

• 4 D's of Investing
• The growing use of Robotics
• Master the Leadership
• Why Warren Buffet never bought Google stock 
• The One Metric that Identifies Qualified Buyers
• The B2B Lead Gen Stumbling Block
• The India Opportunity

Weekend Reading

• This synthetic bio startup raised $52 million to make tumours reveal themselves
• The best books on The Age of Revolution
• Is your differentiation based on outcome or features
• New eCommerce paradigm - look at boxes trucks and bikes
• Why NPS doesn't mean Retention
• Five golden rules for coaching 

Weekend Reading

 

• Innovations inspired by Nature
• Why smart and hardworking people don't succeed
• Inspiring books to read
• Accelerate your professional services business
• Framework to grow your business

Weekend Reading

 

• Aussie Startup acquired in the US for $2bn  
• How to write a B2B sales proposition
• Humanity is stuck in short term thinking?
• How to retain your customers
• Build things that can last 1000 years
• What do prospects think when salespeople fail
• AIs Competitive Advantage

Interview with Brad Howarth - Australian Innovation and Startups Landscape

As part of our ongoing interviews with CEO's, Media Personalities, Philanthropists, and VC’s, to gauge the innovation and startups landscape in Australia, today we showcase our interview with Freelance Journalist, Public Speaker Mr Brad Howarth, who writes on Australia’s startup industry, digital marketing, dangers of climate change and other relevant topics in this domain.

This is what Brad has to say in a detailed interview with me. Read it here

Top Web 2.0 Apps in Australia

Every day we read/hear about the new web 2.0 applications that start up with interesting concepts used. The recent acquisition of YouTube by Google has raised hope for new startups to realize their dream of making it big time. Aussies are not behind in this trend. There are quite a few interesting applications that have come out of hibernation.


To-do list - Remember the Milk

It allows users to manage tasks online as any to-do list will do. It is integrated with Google Maps, and Skype (IM) and is available on Mobiles as well. This is a very popular application around the globe with more than 100,000 users from 155 countries. It was launched in October 2005.


Digg clone for funniest email - FWDitOn

This is inspired by digg. It allows users to read hilarious emails, do a rating and share it with others. It is an interesting concept and has caught the attention of a few Venture Capitalists from overseas. This site was covered recently on TechCrunch.


Community for parents - Minti

Minti provides an online platform for dads & moms to share and rank their advice about parenthood in a simple way and with lots of fun. It was launched in March this year after raising USD$1.2M.


Connecting students in Australia - Student face

It is a social networking service inspired by Facebook, Orkut, which allows students to share information, swap pictures, videos and more. It helps in uniting students with similar interests from all over the country. Membership in StudentFace is exclusive to students who are enrolled in an Australian university and have a valid university (.au or .edu) email address. The site was launched this year.


Marketing for bloggers using emails - Zookda

Zookoda is a blog broadcasting service provider. It allows bloggers to spread the word about their blogs by sending blog summaries via email. Zookoda provides blog owners with the tools to manage their mailing lists, design their emails, broadcast blog summaries and track recipient usage. It was launched this year in March and is now up for sale.

The Universal Web Storage Platform - Omnidrive

This is a full-scale web storage platform that can be accessed from a web browser, Windows or Mac desktop and even a mobile device. It allows users and developers to easily access and share content and files on the web. This was started by Nik Cubrilovic and launched at the beginning of this year. It was covered by TechCrunch and recently got coverage in nine msn's The Bulletin magazine.


Blog search engine - Gnoos

It is a blog search engine that is inspired by Technorati. Its main focus is on local bloggers. It was launched in May 2006.


Social networking service - Babbello

It is a social networking service inspired by Myspace. It allows people (popular with teens) to write blogs, chat, download ringtones for mobile, swap photos and more.


Connecting buyers and sellers - findit.com.au

It's a portal inspired by Craiglist. It provides a free forum for all community advertisements and listings.


Property Search - Spyk

This allows you to search all residential properties for sale or rent across Australia. It is a project designed and developed by Tim Kremer.

Other notable ones in dealing with real estate are :

• Domain.com.au
• Realestate.com.au
• Suburb View

Update: I have found two more notable sites.

News rating- Sukk

It's a Digg clone for a rating of news from Australia and New Zealand. The site was launched on September 5th, 2006.



News rating- PerthNorg

It's a Digg clone for a rating of news from Australia. It is more comprehensive and allows news to be published and rated separately in different categories like technology, sports, lifestyle, business and others. Interestingly in addition to voting, it increases the rating if someone posts a comment on a news/story/article.

Note: I can't think of covering all the Web 2.0 applications in Australia if I have missed any applications. I would like all of you to share information on other Web 2.0 applications in Australia. Please do leave a comment.
Disclaimer: Views expressed here are my personal. I am not a paid employee of any business/organisation covered in this article. I work for a software development and integration company, in Melbourne, Australia.