The only thing better than losing money is . . . losing other people’s money!
During the dot com days, I misspent my middle age at a marketing communications firm that kept the lights on servicing a passel of dot com dreamers, drudges, and outright phonies. They were, I admit, all well-funded startup phonies, but two [...]
“It may look like a movie, but I see dollars, dollars, dollars.”
Let’s start with a bit of word association. When I say the word “Miramax,” what immediately comes to mind? You might say, “great movies,” or “Cinema Paradiso,” “Shakespeare in Love,” or “Harvey Weinstein.” All of these are fine, but for someone on the business [...]
Malcom Gladwell explains the puzzling failure of Bill Gates and his promising startup company.
Malcom Gladwell has in the last few years become one of the favorite “elevator” intellectuals in the world of business and entrepreneurship. If you’ve ever been involved in a start-up, you’re intimately familiar with the “elevator speech,” the 30 second “kernel idea” [...]
New, new new! No, no, no!
Probably the most convenient aspect of blogging is that topics come knocking at your door, instead of the often-agonizing search for relevant topics when you’re on the hook for magazine or newspaper articles. And this week’s topic came a rapping at my door a week ago when my brand new [...]
At the Church of Scientology, every disciplinary write-up is proceeded by a knock-down.
. . . you do not talk about fight club.
The Shoestring Venture first anniversary retrospective of Top Ten Bizarre Business Stories of 2009 begins, appropriately enough, with a manager that makes your boss look wonderful. Really. Tell me about the worst boss you’ve [...]
. . . have you ever wondered what a marathon is like?
Come on, you know you’ve heard the expression a thousand times. “Running a business” or “starting a business” “is a marathon, not a sprint.” And you nod your head in agreement as if somebody has actually said something sensible. But outside of the fact [...]
The “In” part is now open.
LinkedIn has joined the rising tide — or should I call it incipient tsunami — of social networking sites with an API open for developers (an API, if you’re sick and tired of computer industry acronyms, is an “application programming interface” that allows other software to interact with that application [...]
Considering how buggy and incomplete Microsoft final software releases are (think Vista), I wouldn’t want to find out what Microsoft actually considers a beta version to be.
Microsoft today released a public beta of Outlook 2010 that includes heavy integration with social network sites with its new Outlook Social Connector. The feature will allow you to [...]
It’s been a great recession for Wall Street and a truly sucky one for Main Street.
It sounds, I swear, like an Onion headline — in fact, when I read it, I scanned upwards to make sure the date didn’t read April 1.
Goldman Sachs’ president, Lloyd Blankenfein, announced today that it’s sorry for all the [...]
Buy this album and they’ll include a song written just for you.
Ezra Furman, leader of the band Harpoons, is offering to “personalize” each and every copy they sell of their third album, Moon Face: Bootlegs and Road Recordings 2006-2009. And I don’t mean that Ezra and his folk-rock meistersingers will sign each CD with some [...]
We still make trash better than anyone else on the planet.
Trash.
Clusterstock reports that California is the number one exporter to China with, natch, computers and tech leading the charge at $3.3 billion, but with good old plain American garbage as a close second at a whopping $2.3 billion. California, as we all know, is America’s [...]
Don LaFontaine
1940-2008
One of the best business journalists on the scene today is Megan McArdle, in large part because she truly gets business in a way that most of her colleagues don’t. In recently published, intriguing article on how Wall Street always lands on its feet in a pile of money, McArdle compared investment banking to [...]
In the SBA’s new 0-2(b) loan program, eligible small business owners are given a Big Gulp cup, a sheet of cardboard, and a magic marker.
Now that CIT has filed for bankruptcy, who’s filling the void that they leave in small business and supply chain financing, since they were the top dogs in both until very [...]
Amazon, WalMart, and Target are in a book price war, further commodifying and cheapening the value of published books. WalMart started the war by offering ten upcoming bestsellers — including highly-anticipated tomes by Sarah Palin and Michael Crichton — at the incredibly low price of $10 each for pre-orders. Amazon responded by dropping the price [...]
MySpace, which has been steadily losing ground to Facebook over the last year like a cartoon character that’s run off a cliff, has just announced today that it’s strategy against its fierce and formidable competitor is . . . to give up. As reported in today’s Financial Times, CEO Owen Van Natta has decided that [...]
The Heene’s have aptly lived up to their name as one of the heinous parents in the TV amusement park 15-minute celebrity ride. But as prosecutors begin to mull over possible criminal charges, what can the Heenes expect by looking at others who have also taken a whirligig spin on the same 15-minute celebrity ride? [...]
It is a well-established fact among statisticians, pollers, and market researchers that somewhere around 5% of all survey responders are, in fact, stupid. I kid you not. I learned that statistic in my first marketing research class, my second marketing research class, four more statistics classes, and a consumer behavior class. That’s seven different professors [...]
The Series
Introduction
1.) Internal Rate of Return
1a.) Modified Internal Rate of Return
2.) Net present value
3.) Payback
4.) Average
5.) Standard deviation
Bonus!) Excel Solver
Many moons ago, I started a series of blog posts on the five spreadsheet formulas every entrepreneur should know and, well, the follow-up never really followed up. Over the next ten days, however, we’re going to [...]
Everything about Yahoo!’s new Y!ou advertising initiative (to which they’re devoting $100 million dollars) always seems to be just shy of the bulleseye — and by just shy, I mean several feet away, starting with the tagline of the whole kaboodle, “Y!ou,” with the exclamation point after the “Y” (taglines don’t work if you really [...]
A home equity loan could’ve snagged you Business Week.
It’s official. Michael Bloomberg has bought the venerable, eight decade old Business Week for the pocket-change amount of $5 million (less than the price of a good condo in New York). Of course, as perhaps the best business weekly in America — in fact, one of the [...]
