Here’s our weekly link roundup of small business buzz, musings and muchness. A curation of the best small business talk around the web.
Are Startups the Solution to Work-Life Balance?
“It was from that privileged perch that Ostrow made a bold proclamation at a Monday afternoon South By Southwest panel in Austin… “We’ve seen it play out,” he says. “If you have employees who can’t leave to take care of emergencies at home–whether it’s a kid emergency or a dishwasher one–you’re going to have a resentful workforce.” Resentment, of course, is antithetical to the sort of hyper-productivity startups rely on in their early stages and as they begin to scale.” (Forbes)
Entrepreneurs Downplay the Role of Luck in Their Success
“Business owners are not buying the old saying that being lucky is better than being good. In fact, business owners say that luck is among the smallest factors in the success of their business. Business owners instead list persistence and hard work as the top factor in their business success. However, they also credit business connections, networking, good hiring decisions and timing before luck in accounting for their successes in business.” (Fox Small Business Center)
The AirBnB Advantage: How to Avoid Competition and Become a Multi-Billion Dollar Startup
“Technology startups are disruptive because they are driven by a desire to solve an unsolved problem in a unique way and create new value. Most large and established companies, in contrast, are driven by a desire to defeat competition and protect their market turf. Consider the problem of traveler accommodation… AirBnB applied Platform Thinking to solve the problem of traveler accommodation. It didn’t compete on features. Instead, it created a platform that allowed anyone with a spare room, apartment or island to start running a B&B with access to a global market of travelers.” (The Next Web)
How Great Entrepreneurs Create Sustainable Success
“Very few entrepreneurs intend to sacrifice their family, health and happiness. Yet most do. Divorce, heart attacks, anxiety, burnout — there are dozens of issues that just seem to come with the territory. In contrast, truly great entrepreneurs also have great lives. Not because they’ve magically created more success with less responsibility, but because they’ve managed to overcome the addiction that’s at the root of their problems.” (The Huffington Post)
Understanding Employee Equity: Every Startup’s Secret Weapon
“At an afternoon session of South By Southwest Interactive Friday, [Bill] Harris–the current founder and CEO of Personal Capital–schooled a conference room of would-be millionaires and billionaires, young founders hoping to become the next Zuckerberg. Stock options aren’t just a pathway to wealth, he says, but the most powerful tool at their disposal in building a successful business. ‘The people you want to attract to your business are the people who want equity,’ he says. ‘You need people who are willing to take risks. And then you need to reward them.’’” (Forbes)
Do Troubled Teenagers Make Successful Entrepreneurs?
“Is ‘entrepreneur’ just a euphemism for erstwhile troublemaker? A new study exploring the personality traits of successful entrepreneurs suggests that people like Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg might share checkered pasts as well as hefty salaries. The University of California, Berkeley study, which focused on debunking the myth that entrepreneurship doesn’t pay off for most, found that entrepreneurs actually earn about 50 percent more than their salaried counterparts working in the same industry with the same level of education.” (Yahoo! News)
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