Trends for Entrepreneurs

Running a business is never easy, especially if it’s your first time going it on your own. There are a million things to remember, clients to find, employees to be managed and of course, money to be accounted for. If you don’t have much experience managing the finances of a small business, these free courses from big name colleges like MIT can be just what you need to learn about everything from the basics of accounting to more complex economic theory—and everything in between.

1. Business Analysis Using Financial Statements: Take this course to learn more about how to read and utilize the information contained within financial statements, advantageous both for a general understanding of business and within your own organization.

2. Financial and Managerial Accounting: This introductory course will aid business owners in understanding and presenting financial information to investors and for decision-making processes within the management of your business.

3. Applied Economics for Managers: Take this course to learn more about how economists model consumer choices and market coordination. While it mostly focuses on microeconomics, you’ll learn a little bit about global markets as well.

4. Entrepreneurial Finance: While this course focuses on technology-based startups, it offers great financial advice and education to entrepreneurs in just about every field.

5. Early Stage Capital: Take this course to get a better idea of how to raise initial funds to get your business off the ground and offers some guidance in how to get outside advice and find funding sources.

6. Financial Management: This course will teach you about corporate finance and capital markets with respect to managerial decisions. You’ll learn about risk assessment, asset valuation, corporate financing and more.

7. Taxes and Business Strategy: Paying your taxes correctly and on time can be a big deal for businesses both small and large. This course will teach you how to plan for taxes and situate your business in the most advantageous spot within tax laws.

8. Management Accounting and Control: Need some help getting your finances under control and learning how to best regulate the spending of your business? This course may be able to help.

This post was contributed by Amber Hensley, who writes about online classes. She welcomes your feedback at AmberHensley1980@ yahoo.com

I've recently been in contact with a wide range of entrepreneurs in Boston who are setting up programs and resources to help college entrepreneurs. Its great to see this trend continue in the right direction as I'm a stronger believer that the economic future of the US will largely be determined by entrepreneurs. Previously, I wrote about a growing need for more entrepreneursin order to capitalize on research and technology under development. Technology is advancing so fast that Singularity University was even formed to study its impact and how we can ensure that technological advances will be used for the greater good. Promoting entrepreneurship in universities is a good start to grow a stronger economic base by increasing the number of entrepreneurs who'll eventually build tomorrow's companies.

I've been speaking to the following people/organizations and will be working with them on our common goals. If you're interested in getting involved in any of these initiatives, shoot me an email.

10 Resources for first time entrepreneurs in Boston:  Continue Reading...

I'm in the process of launching a side project called "Clean Economies" and need your help selecting the final logo. We've crowdsourced the design on 99designs.com and its been a fun and interesting experience to see how the model works. Over 3 days, we received nearly 300 logo submissions from 33 different designers! All we did was launch a competition on the site and provided a prize of $295 to the winning designer.

I'll be writing several posts on best practices and lessons learned in the process later. But, in the meantime, we need your help choosing the winning design. We haven't fully conceptualized and solidified the pitch, but here is the start of it to keep in mind before voting below.

Clean Economies will predominantly be an online forum, blog, and monthly event that discusses how we can re-engineer and build more sustainable economies. It's not only about reducing our carbon footprint, its about making sure the entire world has sufficient access to clean water(over 1 billion people currently don't), utilizing resources more effectively by matching supply and demand through crowdsourcing, producing better software and products through open source methodologies, enhancing collaboration and bringing different layers of socioeconomic classes together, building sustainable architecture that's self sufficient and designed to work with the environment, fostering entrepreneurship, creating better healthcare systems, commercializing technology, and ultimately focusing on new models that not only aid businesses, but aid the general well being of society and environment.

Each event will focus on a panel discussion with industry experts, investors, entrepreneurs, and related leaders in emerging fields. We're considering doing our first event on water purification and the need for ecosystems to bring clean water to a billion people who don't have sufficient access.

Anyway, please vote on your favorite design below. We'd appreciate your vote and any feedback you may have in the comments.

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The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) at Georgia Tech, is one of the better known university technology accelerators and has helped launch more than 120 startups. Combined, these companies have raised over a billion dollars in outside funding and produced millions in revenues. However, it's not the only incubator that's seen success at Georgia Tech. The Georgia Tech VentureLab also helps companies spinout of the university and commercialize cutting-edge research. They've launched over 150 more Georgia-based startups that utilize university IP.

There is clearly a trend here. Incubators that are built on campuses produce an ideal breeding ground for companies because it's surrounding ecosystem contains many of the resources required to start a company; technology, industry experts, scientists, researchers, business minds, young energetic entrepreneurs, research grants, and legal advice from tech transfer offices.

Are these university incubators becoming micro Silicon Valleys? Continue Reading...

What if you had the ability to designate where a small portion of your tax dollars were spent instead of giving 100 percent of your income tax to incompetent politicians?  What if government agencies could compete directly for a small piece of your federal income tax returns for special initiatives? The crowdfunding model that is being tested in journalism could also help spur innovation and transparency in government by making agencies compete for money using social media and a good, old-fashioned charm offensive. Let's call this new tax regime 'Flex Filing.'

Part of the democratic process is electing leaders who are responsible for spending public money, but in many ways, it's like throwing your money into a black box.  In 2008 the U.S. Government spent over $3.16 trillion on the military, forests, education, health care, roads, bridges, tunnels and a million other things. Some of the government's priorities I agree with, such as investing money in scientific research, while others I oppose, such as two wars and domestic spying. 'Flex Filing' would enable you track your tax dollars and follow the results from start to finish.Continue Reading...

At the beginning of the decade, 1 billion people didn't have sufficient clean access to clean water. - World Health Organization

Did you know that it cumulatively takes 10 liters of water to produce one sheet of paper? Or, 91 liters of water to produce 1 pound of plastic? Generally speaking it requires 80 liters of water per dollar to produce any industrial product. You would also think that it would take 1 glass of water to produce 1 glass of wine. But, that thought process doesn't include the incremental amounts of water that go into producing the grapes, everything in between production, and the the incremental amounts of water in other processes required to store or ship the wine.

It's a problem I never thought of until I met Warren Anderson at the latest Ultra Light Startups event. He's a Harvard graduate student working on a startup called Hydrolosophy. They're building software that crunches algorithms to compute the total amount of water it takes to manufacture different kinds of products. By tracking, analyzing, and measuring water consumption through production, companies may be able to save big bucks. Their goal is to "reveal the truth about water consumption in America and around the world, by creating disruptively innovative applications aimed at providing cost savings solutions to businesses that rely upon water as an interal part of their product life-cycle."

A growing need for accessible clean water.  Continue Reading...

If you're just getting started in computer science or looking to specialize in a web technology, then you should definitely look into Drupal. Jobs in the marketplace are in high demand, especially compared to some of the other CMS platforms. The number of Drupal job opportunities continues to increase. Just take a look at the chart from Indeed:

We've partnered with many Drupal develoment firms at Acquia. (Have you read about Acquia's Series B and plans for Drupal?) lIf you're looking for a job programming in Drupal, I may be able to make an introduction either to one of them or a company that is building an in house Drupal developement team.

College Mogul is built in Drupal and in the process of searching for a free lancer for this site and another site that I'm in the process of designing. It is for a meetup group that I run in Boston and will need help building the template. Shoot me an email if you're interested.

Here are 5 Drupal Job Boards: Continue Reading...

It should be hardly surprising that you find me criticizing about the lack of support for the growing trend of college entrepreneurship if you've read my previous post, The Grey Entrepreneur. There are going to be seismic social changes which will be great opportunity with the increasing supply of student entrepreneurs in the market.

Education is far too archaic and bureaucratic to make the paradigm changes necessary. And this is coming from a student attending Babson College, the number one ‘ranked’ school for entrepreneurship. As good as they are, the Y-Combinator’s ,TechStars  and DreamIt Ventures  aren’t big enough to cover or assist the growing number of young, first-time entrepreneurs. [Here's a directory of other start-up incubators.]Continue Reading...

Great cities attract ambitious people. You can sense it when you walk around one. In a hundred subtle ways, the city sends you a message: you could do more; you should try harder.

- Paul Graham

Paul Graham writes brilliant essays on technology, startups, and innovation, which I recommend as must reads for any entrepreneur. In one title "Cities and Ambition", he discusses the different types of personalities and characteristics that a city has. Each city sends a particular message, which in turn, can have a huge effect on the type of people that it attracts and the type of community that it builds.

How much does it matter what message a city sends? Empirically, the answer seems to be: a lot. You might think that if you had enough strength of mind to do great things, you'd be able to transcend your environment. Where you live should make at most a couple percent difference. But if you look at the historical evidence, it seems to matter more than that. Most people who did great things were clumped together in a few places where that sort of thing was done at the time.

I live in Cambridge, MA, where Graham describes the message as "You should be smarter. You really should get around to reading all those books you've been meaning to." I completely agree with him.

New York is all about being rich. And...

Silicon Valley is all about being powerful.

But, what about being entrepreneurial and supportive of start-ups.Continue Reading...

I've been working at Acquia (a start-up commercializing open source Drupal) for almost a year now. It's been a valuable experience working with open source because it follows in the same founding principles of the internet: facilitating collaboration and free, open flow and sharing of information through connectivity. Witnessing the growth of the Drupal community, and open source in general, has really opened my eyes to the power of crowdsourcing innovation and technology.

The results of these open models are very disruptive. They create brilliant technology such as Linux, MySQL, PHP, and Drupal while reducing the adoption costs of these technologies by licensing under a General Public License.

But, I sometimes wonder what percentage of the population truly understands the importance and significance of open source and crowdsourcing. Or, if lawyers and traditional corporate executives understand the underlying principles and why these models are successful. Users of Drupal clearly do, but there's a larger population that still needs to be educated and convinced.  Continue Reading...