Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Donna Fenn is the author of Alpha Dogs:How Your Small Business Can Become a Leaderof the Pack and a contributing writer at Inc.magazine. An expert on small businesstrends and entrepreneurship for more than20 years, she is also a community leader onWork.com, a featured expert on SBTV.com,and a blogger on Inc.com. She lives inPelham, NY, with her husband, Guian Heintzen,and is the proud mom of two GenYers. For more information, go to Upstarts.com.

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8 CRITICALBUSINESS LESSONSFROM THENEW ENTREPRENEURS

“One of the richest veins in startup gold is GenYentrepreneurs. Fenn deconstructs the DNA ofthis collaborative, tech-savvy generation toilluminate the future of entrepreneurship.”
Guy Kawasaki, cofounder, Alltop,and author of Reality Check

“If your business is stuck in old-schoolways of thinking, this book will bring newperspective and insight on how a whole newclass of upstarts are thinking!”
Tony Hsieh, CEO, Zappos

“In this smart, timely book, Donna Fenn showsus how Generation Y—probably the mostentrepreneurial generation ever—is radicallyremaking the business world in its own image,one innovative startup company at a time.”
Jane Berentson, editor, Inc. magazine

“This book will make you feel confident.Confident in the fact that Generation Y has thetools, creativity, desire, passion, energy andsmarts to keep this great nation in a position ofleadership economically for decades to come.”
Harry Paul, coauthor of FISH! andInstant Turnaround!

“This book will change your perception ofmillennials and by the time you’re finishedreading it, you’ll either want to work for one,partner with one, or be that age again.”
Dan Schawbel, author of Me 2.0

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

UP STARTS

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

Building Cooperative Tribes to Compete

Welcome to the collaborative economy. Today, an increasingly complex, competitive, and global business environment makes it virtually impossible, not to mention foolish, for any entrepreneur to cultivate a lone-wolf mentality. Even simple business models ultimately require a scope of knowledge rarely contained within the confines of a single cerebral cortex. Great minds still conceive innovative ideas, but those ideas are incubated more successfully by the collective intelligence of a team. Perhaps that's always been the case. Thomas Edison, for instance, may have a posthumous reputation as a brilliant inventor, but most of his 1,000-plus patents were for ideas generated at his "invention factory" in West Orange, NJ, where he employed teams of chemists, engineers, and machinists who all worked together to get the lights turned on. Today, we'd call it "team-based innovation."

Working in teams is second nature to members of GenY, and they are changing and refining the very definition of collaborative teamwork. They have, after all, been at it virtually since birth. All those baby play dates, peewee soccer tournaments, and team- base science projects nurtured the notion that working and playing in groups is fun, productive, and, well, expected. Not that they don't value individual achievement; they just expect their success to come as a result of team effort. "My students don't respond well to the whole notion of 'the brand called me,'" says George Gendron, referring to the slogan made popular by management guru Tom Peters. Gendron is director of the Innovation and Entrepreneurship Program at Clark University in Worcester, MA. "They're very team- oriented. I never worked on a team in college; everything I did was solo. Now, half of what is done in liberal arts education is team-based. The mentality is you have to have partners."

But what exactly is a team? A subset of people within the same organization assigned to solve a thorny problem or achieve a lofty goal? In Edison's day, that was an accurate definition of team. Today, it's far too narrow, and no one knows that better than Upstarts. For them, a team is virtual and flexible, and consists not only of people within their own companies but also of friends, family, professors, experts they find on the Web, and even people halfway around the globe whom they've never met. They are relentless and fearless and, yes, shameless about asking for help and advice. From the time the idea is hatched, the entrepreneurial conversation is not a founder's monologue but a constant dialogue among a diverse and often dispersed group of people assembled for the sole purpose of achieving a specific goal. Upstarts are not just starting companies, they are building tribes.

* The Campus as Incubator

What better place is there to build a tribe than a college campus? There was a time, not so long ago, when starting a business meant that you put just about everything else on hold. Remember the old version of the Game of Life, the popular board game published by Milton Bradley? At the beginning of Life's winding road, players steered their pink and blue plastic cars down one of two paths: "college" or "business." The choice pretty much mirrored the options at that time. Now, business and college, even at the undergraduate level, are a powerful combination. The resources available on campus for budding entrepreneurs are almost irresistible: Friends become partners and employees, professors become advisors, and school business plan competitions provide the startup capital. The risks are minimal, there are no families to support and no mortgages to pay, and the dorm room and the meal plan provide the ultimate safety net. College is the new incubator.

Andrew Zacharakis, the John H. Muller, Jr. Chair in Entrepreneurship at Babson College in Wellesley, MA, notes that "out of an incoming freshman class of 400 kids, there are always 20 to 30 who have already done something amazing in the entrepreneurial area before they even enter college, and that wasn't the case 10 years ago." Back then, students came to Babson to learn how to be entrepreneurs; today, they're increasingly likely to be looking for ways to refine their skills and to grow existing companies. "They're much more worldly than I remember being at age 18," says Zacharakis. "They know the language of business, and they're not afraid to approach people for advice."

Business plan competitions, now ubiquitous on college campus, have become an extraordinarily popular way for young entrepreneurs to test their ideas. Siamak Taghaddos, age 27, won Babson's competition in 2003 when he and classmate David Hauser, age 26, came up with an idea for a company that would provide virtual phone systems for entrepreneurs and small businesses. Both Taghaddos and Hauser knew from experience how difficult it was for startups to purchase professional-sounding, affordable telecommunications systems. So they developed a software-based tool that, for as little as $10 a month, gives entrepreneurs the ability to set up (via the Web) voice-mail and mailbox systems, to receive voice mail as an MP3 file within an e-mail, and to integrate different phone lines into one voice-mail system and one inbound number. For startups and virtual companies that often employ staff in different geographic locations, it was a communications tool that allowed small companies to look big and professional without spending $10,000 on a phone system. "Both David and I wanted to start a service like this," recalls Taghaddos. "And when we met at Babson, we decided that given our strengths, we'd be better off as partners than as competitors."

Both young men had startup experience. Taghaddos had founded an online pager distribution company and worked at an educational consulting startup, and Hauser had cofounded ReturnPath, an e-mail management company, as well as WebAds 360, an ad-serving technology provider. But they hit pay dirt with the company they started together, GotVMail. With help from classmates, Taghaddos wrote a business plan for the company, entered it in Babson's 2003 Business Plan Competition, and walked away a winner, with $5,000 in cash. But the bigger benefit, says Taghaddos, was "the confirmation from many business leaders that the plan was solid, a great motivation for me to pursue it after class." So Taghaddos and Hauser officially launched Needham, MA–based GotVMail in 2003, with the former focusing on business development and the latter building out the technology infrastructure.

But winning the competition was just the beginning of the support they got from Babson. Professor Heidi Neck helped the founders understand the business development side of their marketing plan and stressed the importance of segmentation. "A Realtor using GotVMail is different than a consultant is different from a dot-com," says Taghaddos. That advice helped him to develop a marketing strategy so effective that GotVMail grew to $8.8 million in revenue by 2006, landing it the number 66 spot on the 2007 Inc. 500 list of fastest-growing privately held companies.

Also a key factor in the company's financial health: involvement from Babson's Dr. Joel Shulman, who advised the founders on financial modeling. "We...