Entrepreneurship [Post-]Discussion

Entrepreneurs feast off ideas, and Berkeley has a thriving community of student entrepreneurs. A simple discussion type of venue is perfect for the exchange off these ideas, perspectives, and experiences. While this often happens informally, oddly we’re not aware of any such organized discussions about entrepreneurship in Berkeley (Startup2Startup organized by Dave McClure is something similar with meetups every month in the South Bay). 

So, last Thursday, April 2nd, along with Berkeley’s IEEE we got a group of 17 people with varied entrepreneurial experiences (some who had successfully started and sold several startups and others who are considering starting one, with many in between), closed the door, and had them just talk for two hours about ‘Entrepreneurship in Consumer Web Technology’. Some brief descriptions of what we talked about – you’ll have to check out the full video to get the complete scoop (Note: if you do watch the video, please skip the first 20 minutes as we’re just chatting and munching on delicious West Coast Pizza):

• Ad models – Are they substainable? Finding the right demographic and hypertargeting. Gaining critical mass.
• Other Business models on the web – Other Business/Revenue models on the web. Building “products not business models”.
• Picking a team - Choosing team-members you can trust and respect. What’s the right combination of engineers and business people? When should you hire the MBAs; are they even necessary?
• Financing – When do you bootstrap? When do you go to VC’s? 
• Launching web apps- When should you launch – earlier or later?
• Competitive Advantage – How do you take on a large player in the market (the Google’s and Microsoft’s of the world)? How do you reach a global audience?

It was a lot of fun seeing people’s views on these topics, and we thought it went well enough to do it again! We’re planning similar discussion events on renewable energy, biotechnology, cloud computing, and other fields. Tell us if you interested in a particular one, or would like to see another discussion event. We’re going to have more people involved next time, and we also want to get more grad students and people from academia.