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A Venture Capitalist View of the Top 5 Entrepreneurial Energy Opportunities
Tweet Share on Facebook August 18, 2009 Comment (2)Accel Partners is one of Silicon Valley's premier venture capital firms. Over the 25 years that it has been in business, Accel has funded way too many successful start-up companies to list here.
Accel is aggressively investing in energy-related start-ups and recently released Entrepreneurial Energy, a white paper covering its analysis of this market. The conclusion: Changes in the energy industry are creating a wide range of opportunities for small, entrepreneurial companies.
I caught up with Accel VCs Rich Wong and Craig Lawrence to discuss the energy sector and the white paper. They see five key energy areas as having the best small-business opportunities in the coming years:
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Will the Recovery Be Jobless?
Tweet Share on Facebook August 5, 2009 Comment (4)The U.S. economy shrank only 1 percent in the second quarter, which is better than most economists expected. This has led to a number of economists bucking the consensus view that the recovery will be slow and feeble. Instead, they are predicting a V-shaped recovery with robust economic growth starting this fall.
But even if the optimists are right and the recovery is strong, we expect that traditional job growth will be weak.
In this highly uncertain, competitive, and volatile economy, companies are hesitant to add full-time staff. Instead they are looking to contractors, outsourcing arrangements, and business partners to provide flexible workforces that quickly and easily scale up and down in response to business change.
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7 New Rules for Small-Business Growth
Tweet Share on Facebook July 30, 2009 Comment (3)The hardest growth in small business is the second bump, like a second wind—what we call emerging companies. It comes when you conquer the first long uphill climb, and then you pause. And, if you're not careful, you have trouble coming out of pause. Maybe we can call it malaise.
I had a good talk about this the other day with Lisa Nirell, founder of EnergizeGrowth ® and author of Energize Growth NOW, whom I've known since she and her husband moved up to Oregon from California three years ago. I'm sympathetic to that path, because I took it about 17 years ago, when I moved up to Oregon from Palo Alto.
In Lisa's case, her consulting firm focuses on finding that second wind for companies that made it to the top of the first hill and want to get the energy back. When we talked, she said her favorite readers are
"Leaders running growth companies who want to maintain a certain level of growth while also making a difference in the world. A holistic way of growing their business instead of growing at any cost."
When Lisa says "holistic," she's not talking about so-called touchy-feely business counseling. Her book is totally grounded in the real world. It's not a matter of magic formulas or complex frameworks.
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How Many Small-Business Employees Are Out There?
Tweet Share on Facebook July 17, 2009 Comment (10)With the debate around healthcare legislation heating up, a lot of attention is focused on the role small businesses play in the U.S. economy. I often read and hear that most Americans work for small businesses.
But it is interesting to note that not everyone agrees on what a small business is, how many there are, or how many people work for them.
According to the Census Bureau and the Small Business Administration, about 60 million Americans worked for small businesses in 2006. This is about 51 percent of the private, nonfarm U.S. workforce. They define small businesses as private firms having fewer than 500 employees.
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No 'Anti-Obama Small-Business Bailout,' Please
Tweet Share on Facebook July 9, 2009 Comment (25)I've been getting surprisingly obnoxious unsolicited E-mails from somebody calling himself "America's business coach." He's calling an annoying offer of a free E-book his anti-Obama small-business bailout.
By the way, he's not who you might think. He's not Brian Tracy, or Barry Elms, or Thomas Winninger, or Lisa Bilal, or Maria Masala. His name doesn't turn up in the first few pages of any major Web search. I checked.
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Small Businesses Not Seeing Impact of Stimulus Package
Tweet Share on Facebook July 1, 2009 Comment (7)According to a recent survey by Intuit Corp., the vast majority of small businesses have not benefited from the stimulus plan—nor do they expect to.
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Make It Easier on Your Customers
Tweet Share on Facebook June 24, 2009 Comment (73)Everyone is in customer service. All of us have the responsibility to help customers. In large companies, though, it can become a struggle to find a real live person to help with a problem.
Jeffrey Hayzlett, chief marketing officer at Kodak, talked at the 140 Conference in New York about how large companies are using Twitter to put customers in touch with a real live person to get them help with their products. Corporate management may ask, what's the return on investment on Twitter? Hayzlett replies, well, what's the ROI on ignoring customers?
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Is There Too Much Venture Capital?
Tweet Share on Facebook June 16, 2009 CommentThe National Venture Capital Association recently released its first-quarter 2009 analysis of venture investing. Not surprisingly, the number of venture investments was substantially lower than in recent years.
In Q1, there were only 549 venture deals adding up to a bit over $3 billion in funding. This was the lowest number of Q1 deals since 1995.
Many see reduced venture funding as a huge problem. But others believe that the industry investment rate of $25 billion to $30 billion per year over the past decade is way too high and that the venture capital industry needs to be restructured and to shrink.
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Start-Ups Should Think About Charging for Content
Tweet Share on Facebook June 3, 2009 Comment (83)The Newspaper Association of America recently hosted a meeting of the nation's top newspaper executives to discuss charging for online content. Several San Francisco Bay area newspapers, including my local paper, have already announced plans to charge for news. They are joining a number of online content providers attempting to charge end-users for content.
The reason for this shift is straightforward: Advertising-supported content providers are having a hard time making money. This is especially true for traditional media companies, which tend to have higher cost structures because of their legacy offline businesses.
Many start-ups and small content companies have already recognized the need to move to fee-based business models. Open Table, for example, charges restaurants a fee for each reservation made through its service. Its recent IPO success has resulted in even more interest in fee-based services.
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What the Stimulus Package Means for Small Business
Tweet Share on Facebook May 19, 2009 Comment (9)The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, better known as the stimulus package, was signed into law by President Obama in February. It amounts to $787 billion in government spending, incentives, and tax cuts designed to kick-start the economy and create or save 3 million to 4 million jobs over the next two years.
There has been much debate about the merits of the stimulus package, especially as it relates to small business. But regardless of how you feel about the stimulus package, it is starting to create opportunities for small businesses.
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