Serious Simplicity

Top 10 tips for demoing/selling a start-up ever from Jason Calacanis. Strongly recommended reading in order to avoid boring your audience to death thus ensuring you never get funding and sales… many are guilty.

This blog is intended to be a coming-together-place of snippets, thoughts and ideas about entrepreneurship, creativity, and simplicity.

The main driving topic will be early-stage entrepreneurship, or in more conventional words, “start-ups”. The terminology is important however because I take ‘early-stage entrepreneurship’ to mean something slightly different from ’start-up’. Or rather, slightly more focused.

Typically, a start-up is a business venture that is in the process of commencing operations based on a specific business idea/model. In other words, the entrepreneur and her team have come up with a business idea and are executing. ‘Early-stage’ however refers to the subset of start-ups within which there has not yet been made a significant commitment of resources to a specific idea/model. Both the idea and the organisation are still fairly ‘embryonic’ at this point and can still be changed, moulded and refined much more easily that would be the case at a later stage.

Secondly, I use early-stage entrepreneurship and not early-stage start-ups to emphasise the innovation element. Every new venture is a start-up yet arguably not every one is necessarily entrepreneurial. I like to differentiate between ‘entrepreneur’ and ‘businessperson’, lightly defining the distinction as being that the former is being somewhat innovative while the latter is simply trading using tried-and-tested ways.

So early-stage entrepreneurship is all about the subset of new ventures that are in an innovative idea development phase.