Mark Cuban

Hello class, I am Pablo Rangel and I will be talking about Mark Cuban.
As many of you know Mark Cuban is famous for being owner of the Dallas Mavericks and is a star on the TV show "Shark Tank".

Mark was born in Pittsburgh on July 31st, 1958. He graduated from Indiana University in 1981.During his undergrad he bought a bar named Motley's for 50,000 dls and quickly became the most famous bar during his stay in college. Mark quickly moved to Dallas after college and landed a job selling software. After a few years of working for someone else, Mark decided he had enough experience to start his entrepreneurial career.

By 1990 he sold his first company for 6 million dollars. Mark was 32 years old and a Millionaire. But he was far from over. In 1995 he and Todd Wagner, his college buddy from Indiana University, started a company named Audio Net, which started by his desire to listen to college basketball games online. The company revolutionized the media by being the first one to start streaming live events on the internet. It started getting partnerships with fashion shows, NBA, NFL, NHL you name it. And the best part was that he was the first one in the industry, so he was always ahead of his competitors.By 1998 the company had changed its name to Broadcast.com and was going public at 200$ a share. It was later sold to Yahoo for nearly 6 billion.
Mark is not your typical guy who sells out 1 or 2 times and decides to retire. He is an ENTREPRENEUR, he loves what he does. For Mark, being an Entrepreneur is a lifestyle, he has fun with it.

In 2000, Mark saw an opportunity in a basketball team that had been damaged by poor management. Mark being a lifelong basketball fan and millionaire decided to buy the Dallas Mavericks for 285 million. Cuban took his entrepreneurial mindset to the basketball court. The Mavericks were a team that was coming off a more than a decade of non playoff appearance. He quickly turned everything around. Unlike many owners, Mark attended practice almost everyday and made sure his employees (players) were performing the way they should. He also had fun along the way, often challenging players to HORSE game and developing strong relationships with players and coaches. He also started giving all star treatment to his players. He raised the budget for hotel accommodations, bought a 757 jet for the team and made sure every player had special treatment. Mark also brought some innovation to the NBA by becoming the first owner with an open blog to chat with their fans about the team.

All that showed in the team's performance during the following years. Since Cuban came to the Mavs, they have won at least 50 games each season (2nd best in the NBA) , and won a championship.
It is obvious that success follows Mark everywhere he goes, he has that vision and mindset that all entrepreneurs dream of having.

Mark is also a great example of how entrepreneurs often face criticism for their challenging attitude. Mark has changed the status quo in the worlds of media technology and sports. And along the way he had to face some adversity as well. He has been fined more than 2 million dollars in the NBA for making comments and trying to change things in the organization. He was investigated for insider trading by the SEC in 2004, the case got dismissed in 2009 and Cuban plead not guilty.
So Mark has a mindset of changing the way things are done around him and he is not gonna let anything get in his way. A trait that a lot of entrepreneurs need. That fire that Mark has is why he is so successful, he likes it when people don't believe in him. He believes that if everyone thinks you are crazy, you gave a chance of doing good "The more people think im crazy and out of my  mind... typically the better I do".

He like to treat business as sports, "In basketball its 48 minutes, in business its 24/7 and the whole world is trying to kick your a**. Mark has disrupted every business he has touched and plans to keep fighting.


Question
1.- Do you think its good to have that much passion when it comes to business?
2.- When is it too much?
3.- Mark is successful because he found his passion in sports, what is your passion?

Links
http://sports.espn.go.com/dallas/columns/story?id=4793301
http://www.imdb.com/name/nm1171860/bio
http://www.biography.com/people/mark-cuban-562656#controversy

Malcolm Gladwell: What Makes People Disruptive

Hello class,

My name is Jeran Smith and for my blog entry I will be talking about Malcolm Gladwell. As many of you know, Gladwell is the author of a number of best-selling books including "Outliers" and most recently "David & Goliath".

Last week, Gladwell gave a speech at the World Business Forum in New York. His topic was on innovation,what really makes people disruptive, and battling giants.

He believes it comes down to three personality traits, which many successful entrepreneurs possess.
According to Gladwell, they are open to experience, conscientiousness, and disagreeable. These three traits are also part of the Big 5 personality traits.

Open to experience means how you relate to new information. This can be a huge indicator of creativity. I agree that very creative and imaginable people tend to get excited about new experiences.

Conscientiousness describes how closely you pay attention to details. Conscientious people are very organized. They set goals, plan ahead, and are extremely responsible. I agree with Gladwell that this can be a huge indicator of success.

Being disagreeable means that you do not care what others think. Gladwell also argues this point in his book "David and Goliath" saying it is a major predictor of making innovation happen.

According to Gladwell, the combination of these traits is as scarce as it is powerful. Anyone can be creative or just organized. However, it is rare to find someone with the imagination to dream up something big and also have the focus to see it through.

However, the crucial trait, is being disagreeable. Innovators must be people willing to take social risks and do stuff that others may not approve of. As humans, we are hardwired to seek the approval of others, but a radical and innovative thought goes nowhere without the desire to challenge norms.

Gladwell says that, when you have these three traits, you get Steve Jobs and Ingvar Kamprad. Steve Jobs had no problem stealing the graphic user interface from Xerox PARC. We don't use Apple computers today because Steve Jobs was smarter than the people working at Xerox PARC. Jobs had a sense of urgency. He was interested in doing things "at that very moment".

Ingvar Kamprad founded IKEA in 1943 when he was just 17 years old. It is now worth $11 Billion and one of the most recognized brands in the world. Gladwell attributes his success to disagreeableness. When Kamprad first came up with the innovative process of "flatpacking"the furniture so the customer can assemble it themselves, people boycotted because of how much it cut costs. He wasn't allowed to make furniture in Sweden so he decided to move his operation to Poland. This was in 1961 during the Cold War. Hostilities and tension were high. This was a very disagreeable decision. Many people back home were very upset and called him a traitor. However, he did not care. He is not the type of person to care about what others think. Being disagreeable made all the difference as he is now worth $3.8 billion dollars.

Gladwell also uses shipping magnate Malcolm McLean as an example.
Link: What Makes People Disruptive: Malcolm McLean

Additionally, here are some links to other videos/interviews Gladwell has given:
TED talk on David & Goliath
David & Goliath talk at Google

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you agree with Gladwell's three traits that makes people disruptive?

2. Do you believe with Gladwell that being disagreeable or "not being concerned if everyone around you thinks you're crazy" is necessary to do innovative work?

3. Considering his examples of Steve Jobs, Ingvar Kamprad, and Malcolm McLean, can you think of any other successful entrepreneurs that also possess these 3 traits: open to experience, conscientiousness, and disagreeableness?

Links:
http://superheroyou.com/3-traits-to-change-world-malcolm-gladwell/
http://www.wobi.com/event/world-business-forum-new-york-2014/?email=WBF14LevDub
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_k7XRr-se4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r8JAi_zaboU

Student Startups

    You hear a lot about students who, once they stumble upon the idea of a lifetime, drop out of their ivy league school to focus on growing their business. Rarely, however, do you hear about those who drop out of school with the same type of idea, but fail to make the millions of dollars they had one day seen as an obvious outcome and end up without an education and  without a business.
     This week I decided to focus on an article I found on Entrepreneurial Magazine's website -- if you don't follow them on facebook or check their site regularly, you should, because they post great, informative articles.
     The article profiles three different student entrepreneurs who are taking their student project to the next level without dropping out of school. They either came across their idea in an experience outside of school or they found it in the classroom. Both are valid ways to generate an idea. Since creating their businesses, they have been able to continue taking classes as well as use the university to their advantage.
      The first entrepreneur profiled is Spencer Quinn from BYU. A summer job dealing with athletic tape led him to think about its other potential uses. With a bit of tweaking and help from professors at BYU he was able to adjust athletic tape to a form that would work to fix leaky pipes. Fibrefix, the resulting product, has been featured on Shark Tank, QVC and is in Home Depots and Lowe's having sold over a million units.
     The next entrepreneur is Lindsey Stewart, who was a news network producer in LA. She decided to enroll in graduate school at Wharton's SF campus. There she was able to pitch an idea she had in her head for quite a while. She noticed that videographers had trouble connecting with potential interested news networks when they had footage of something newsworthy. At the same time networks would do anything for footage including showing fuzzy youtube clips if that was all they had. Stringr would be the way to upload footage and get paid.
    Now, having graduated, Lindsey is taking her project into beta testing in SF based media accelerator Matter. An interesting caveat to this story is how her business partners feel about joining such a new company in their later years. This part of the article highlights the benefits of starting a businesses while in or just out of school. When you are 40 or 50, like the other members of the Stringr team, you have a lot more to lose.
     And a final profile, shows us the story of Carolyn Yarina who, after a visit to Africa, had the idea of a centrifuge that does not require electricity. With this idea in mind she took more businesses classes at Michigan and realized how she wanted to approach her new idea. She ended up creating a team of other Michigan graduates and together they started a health products company that creates medical devices with the health and economic situations of developing countries in mind.


Here is the article:
http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/237411

Discussion questions:
What factors would you rely on to decide if your start up was worth postponing your education to focus on?

What are some experiences in college that you can say have inspired you the most when it comes to potential business ideas?

With the stories profiled in this article would you say that, depending on the idea, education is important no matter what? or that you still think it is acceptable to quit school and be an entrepreneur if your idea is that good?

Do you think that being in one's early 20's offers significant advantages to the entrepreneurial pursuit? Or that having more to lose and more experience are actually better for being the founder of a start up?

Shyp

I was trying to look for a good article for my social media blog post and one of the things I did to get on the right direction was to go over again all the earlier posts of this blog. We have discussed several times in class and in this blog about angel investors, entrepreneurs following the Lean Start-Up method, how accurate the ideas have worked, and many other things. We have mentioned AngelList a couple times and how helpful this have been for many new ideas. I was reading again the post about Tim Ferris and how he was also an angel investor himself and made me do a little more research and finally got to learn about Shyp.

Shyp is a San Francisco-based company that utilizes a mobile app to provide an easy on-demand shipping experience. The app aims to replace the need for consumers to visit the post office. The company picks up, packages, and ships items through USPS and other major carriers. The company was founded in 2013 by Kevin Gibbon, Joshua Scott and Jack Smith. Shyp's service is currently running in the San Francisco area; with "Shyp Heroes" aiming to arrive on demand within 10-15 minutes of being requested. On September 23, 2013; Tim Ferris posted a blog post encouraging his readers to invest in ship alongside him, which resulted in the company raising $250,000 in only 53 minutes.

The product? The product is an iPhone app in which users enter pick up and destination addresses, upload a photo of the item that will be shipped, and their contact and credit card information. The process was described in a Techcrunch article as: "You open the Shyp app and snap a picture of the item you'd like to be sent away. This picture is sent out to Shyp's network of contracted employees (which they call 'Shyp Heroes'), any of whom can then elect to pick up the package. They show up at your location, grab the item, put it in a padded bag, and take it back to be packed and shipped."

Here is the link to a short video explaining how Shyp works: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DheulkmtR7Y

So, after doing some more research I found that the company was going to expand to different locations around the U.S. and found a great article in entrepreneur.com about how Kevin Gibbon, who is the CEO and co-founder provided 5 lessons in expanding to a new city.

1. Make sure your current customers love you.

Gibbon said customers’ repeat usage helped him realize that Shyp had found the right product-market fit.“It was about people continuing to use it over and over again … and over time, people started shipping more items as well from their eBay stores or their Etsy stores. They started selling more since using the platform, so it was a key indicator we were on to something,” Gibbon said.

2. Know what characteristics you need in a city.

New York City may seem like a no-brainer for startups looking to break into the major leagues, but Gibbon said the Big Apple also had the right factors in place for Shyp to succeed. “Just the overall population in the areas we’re starting in, in Brooklyn and Manhattan … our service works in denser areas, so we’re able to do more pickups per hour with the same drivers,” Gibbon said. He added that the high concentration of artists, makers and small businesses made NYC a prime target.

3. Dip your toe in first.

Before announcing the expansion, Gibbon and his team launched a private beta program in New York City for four weeks. “We looked at the pickup times, and then started expanding to more zip codes,” Gibbon said. (Shyp promises to pick up packages 20 minutes after orders are placed.) Gibbon said that here, they realized that they could use more people on bicycles to cover areas more quickly and efficiently.

4. Stagger your expansion plans.

Gibbon said Shyp will expand to Miami in November, giving the company time to get used to the New York City market. As with New York, the decision to open up shop in Miami was strategic: According to Gibbon, Miami has the greatest number of e-commerce sellers per capita in the U.S. Additionally, the launch will occur right before Miami’s Art Basel festival – just in time to ship those paintings and sculptures to buyers’ homes.

5. Find the right people.

When you’re launching in a new city, it’s important to make sure you’ve assembled the right team, Gibbon explained. “We look for a lot of experience and for people willing to take on a lot of risk,” Gibbon said. “We are mildly successful in at least one city … but we want people who are going to make it their mission to grow this company.”

So, these steps may look pretty obvious for many people, but is always good to hear what real entrepreneurs think about what a company need to succeed in a different environment in this case, and what details should people look before making a move with their businesses.

Questions:

1. What do you think should be the factors defining the decision of expansion of your business

2. What do you think about the concept of Shyp and how would you approach to potential customers to get their attention?

3. What do you think about the future of the company against bigger shipping competitors around the U.S.?

4. If the company is already starting to expand through the U.S. do you think that it could become really successful expanding to different countries? Why?

-David Arismendy-