Startups are risky, especially for investors, so how do you compel an investor to part with their money?
By capturing their imagination with a great story — then supporting your big idea with a business strategy that stands up to scrutiny.
Ever wanted to read the latest articles on how to build a successful startup? Want to access planning documents and workbooks for how to build a solid stategic plan for your company or how to build a financing strategy for your business? Wouldn’t it be great if you could access HR and financial model templates? Well, now you can.
Check out the new website that MaRS has launched!
http://www.marsdd.com/entrepreneurs-toolkit.html
This is the next step in the evolution of the MaRS BMEP program, an MRI funded initiative to help build a strong, robust ecosystem for ontario entrepreneurs. There are many programs and services that can be accessed, including market research reports from the leading market research providers, and various grant programs to help startups with specific, targetted issues.
All of these programs and tools are accessed through the Venture Services Group, a single face to Waterloo Region entrepreneurs. The Venture Services group is a joint initiative of Communitech (including the newly launched Digital Media Centre) and the Accelerator Centre. We’re a group of entrepreneurs-in-residence, and are available to provide coaching and mentoring, help with connecting to provincial programs/services and doing everything we can to help entrepreneurs build a strong business. We can help in many ways, including helping you get the most out of working through the materials in the MaRS Entrepreneur’s Toolkit.
It’s easy to get engaged. Karen Brown is the one to contact. Karen can be reached at 519-888-9944 x43 or karen.brown@communitech.ca.
For those who were fortunate enough to make his talk (which was honestly one of the best I’ve heard ever, anywhere), here’s the link to the slides.
http://www.tbray.org/talks/EW.pdf
For those who did not make the session, try and catch Tim next time he’s in your area — he’s a brilliant technology guy and brings a focus to business rarely seen from someone so technically deep.
–Dan
One the the burning issues in Cloud Computing … Data PRS. Terry is the CEO of one of our local startups, a leader in this space.
The idea isn’t new. Gifford and Elizabeth Pinchot created the term in 1976. It refers to an intra-corporate entrepreneur within a large corporation who drives the creation of a business from the seed of an idea. For those of you who’ve worked in a large corporation, you know that this can sometimes (usually) involve significant risk taking and a lot of innovative thinking. Intrapreneurs tend to have entrepreneurial skills blended with managerial skills, but of course generally operate within the boundaries of an organization.
We’re hearing a lot more about intrapreneurship recently. It’s never really gone out of fashion, but tends to resurface whenever economic conditions worsen, and company’s operating results suffer. It’s a way to shift the company culture back to it’s roots, when the company was small and daily survival depended on the speed and agility of each and every employee, of which by definition there weren’t many.
I think we’ll be hearing a lot more about intrapreneurship in the coming weeks and months. It works.
Here’s a recent article in the Financial Post which talks about Intrapreneurship, along with a panel session which will tackle the topic next week at Wilfrid Laurier University.
http://www.financialpost.com/executive/story.html?id=1247229
http://www.wlu.ca/events_detail.php?grp_id=370&ev_id=5585
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