In Detroit, a city with rampant unemployment, big crowds in the middle of the day may mean someone is giving out freebies. But on a recent workday, over 450 people packed an auditorium downtown. They weren't looking for a hand out, sympathy or even a job application. They were looking to start their own business.
Would you consider launching or growing a business in the midst of the Great Recession?
Desperate for a job? How does CEO with a six-figure salary and flexible hours sound?
Visitors to the basement auditorium at NYU's Stern School of Business on Wednesday could be forgiven for thinking they were hanging out on Sand Hill Road: Seven financiers and tech journalists congregated on stage to assess the merits of ten tech startup business plans. "You should be able to bake your company into a Tweet," advised Business Insider senior editor Dan Frommer, advising the entrepreneurs to focus their pitches.
An e-mail message with the provocative subject line, "Entrepreneurs: France's Newest Export," arrived at Fortune's offices one March evening at about 6:30 pm Eastern Time. (That's 12:30 am Paris time.) "More and more U.S. technology companies are founded by French entrepreneurs," it read.
When metal worker Ken Kash was laid off in July from his job at a theatre set company, he decided not to look for another full-time position. Instead, he's pursing a longtime dream: launching his own company.
Segway scooter inventor Dean Kamen freely admits it: He often suffers sleepless nights wrestling over whether to quit a project that's not panning out.
You've heard the conventional wisdom: Entrepreneurs drive innovation and job creation in the U.S. Yet two recently published books draw starkly different conclusions about the state of small business in America today.
The percentage of women starting new businesses dropped to a 10-year low in 2007, according to a new study released Thursday by the Kauffman Foundation. Meanwhile, men and immigrants became entrepreneurs at an unprecedented pace.
At first glance, Carol Negiar resembles many other U.S. indie retailers. She graduated from the entrepreneurship program at the University of California at Davis and worked for a few large banks before launching a store devoted to her passion, Japanese tea. Seven years later the store is profitable, and many customers discover it online.
In Detroit, a city with rampant unemployment, big crowds in the middle of the day may mean someone is giving out freebies. But on a recent workday, over 450 people packed an auditorium downtown. They weren't looking for a hand out, sympathy or even a job application. They were looking to start their own business.
Would you consider launching or growing a business in the midst of the Great Recession?
Desperate for a job? How does CEO with a six-figure salary and flexible hours sound?
Visitors to the basement auditorium at NYU's Stern School of Business on Wednesday could be forgiven for thinking they were hanging out on Sand Hill Road: Seven financiers and tech journalists congregated on stage to assess the merits of ten tech startup business plans. "You should be able to bake your company into a Tweet," advised Business Insider senior editor Dan Frommer, advising the entrepreneurs to focus their pitches.
An e-mail message with the provocative subject line, "Entrepreneurs: France's Newest Export," arrived at Fortune's offices one March evening at about 6:30 pm Eastern Time. (That's 12:30 am Paris time.) "More and more U.S. technology companies are founded by French entrepreneurs," it read.
When metal worker Ken Kash was laid off in July from his job at a theatre set company, he decided not to look for another full-time position. Instead, he's pursing a longtime dream: launching his own company.
Segway scooter inventor Dean Kamen freely admits it: He often suffers sleepless nights wrestling over whether to quit a project that's not panning out.
You've heard the conventional wisdom: Entrepreneurs drive innovation and job creation in the U.S. Yet two recently published books draw starkly different conclusions about the state of small business in America today.
The percentage of women starting new businesses dropped to a 10-year low in 2007, according to a new study released Thursday by the Kauffman Foundation. Meanwhile, men and immigrants became entrepreneurs at an unprecedented pace.
At first glance, Carol Negiar resembles many other U.S. indie retailers. She graduated from the entrepreneurship program at the University of California at Davis and worked for a few large banks before launching a store devoted to her passion, Japanese tea. Seven years later the store is profitable, and many customers discover it online.
Easy money: Richard Branson helps fund U.S. entrepeneurs
Dear FSB: Thank you for the amazing job you are doing at FSB. I live near Philadelphia. I am looking for a professional course in starting a business. Can you offer any suggestions?
No matter how groundbreaking your idea for a new business, you won't get past the starting gate without funding. While there are many ways to find money, most are generally more appropriate for more established companies. Still, there are some smart tacks for startups. Here's a look at seven options:
Not so long ago, there was a standard recipe for affluence: Start with four years of college. Add one white-collar job. (For best results, find a big corporation with a pension fund.) Carefully stir in equal measures of obedience and initiative. Wait 40 years. Retire.
Maybe the U.S. isn't falling as far behind other nations in math and science education as business leaders fear. A new study suggests that American universities are luring more entrepreneurial talent from overseas than many think, fueling a boom in tech startups here.
When Rodrigo Veleso launched ONE World Enterprises in Los Angeles last year, he quickly grasped why entrepreneurship was surging in the U.S.
For the first six years of the century, the dream of building a technology company and taking it public was out of reach for all but a few lucky entrepreneurs.
Today entrepreneurs are America's role models. Almost everyone wants to own a business - from teens and college students, who are signing up for entrepreneurial courses in record numbers; to those over age 65, who are forming more companies every year; to recent immigrants, who in 2005 started 25% more companies per capita than native-born citizens did.
For the first six years of the century, the dream of building a technology company and taking it public was out of reach for all but a few lucky entrepreneurs.
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Which states are the most entrepreneurial? Which have the most women-owned businesses? Here are snapshots of a few noteworthy locales.
These days just about everyone wants to be an entrepreneur. Here are eight people - women, immigrants, corporate refugees, minorities, even kids - who got in on the action. Here's what they have to say about it.
ONCE UPON A TIME, SMALL BUSINESS WAS seen solely as the domain of idiosyncratic, iconoclastic outsiders, willing to forgo the security of corporate life to venture out on their own. But ...
Once upon a time, small business was seen solely as the domain of idiosyncratic, iconoclastic outsiders, willing to forgo the security of corporate life to venture out on their own. But today entrepreneurs are America's role models.
Entrepreneurship is the fastest-growing course of study on campuses nationwide, but never before have would-be moguls been able to get a degree in the field.
Ask today's youth what they'd like to be when they grow up, and the resounding answer is: an entrepreneur. Nearly 71 percent of teens want to start a business, according to a 2006 poll of more than...
Cody Chang and Jonathan Mohan didn't even know what an entrepreneur was when they signed up for a class on business and entrepreneurship at their local YMCA.
If you cash out of a flourishing small business, what's next? Another startup is likely to be all-consuming, yet retirement would probably bore you. For an increasing number of entrepreneurs, the m...
At 21, Diana Reed has already reached the pinnacle of one career. A senior at the University of Iowa, she is the Hawkeye Golden Girl, one of the top twirlers in the Big Ten. Every Saturday during f...
Seven out of 10 Americans fantasize about starting their own business (often after a bad day with the boss), and many act on that dream: More than 550,000 small businesses are launched each year. U...
(FORTUNE Small Business) - If you cash out of a flourishing small business, what's next? Another startup is likely to be all-consuming, yet retirement would probably bore you. For an increasing number of entrepreneurs, the middle ground is angel investing, in which wealthy individuals give financial backing to budding companies.
It's the spring of 2006, and the sweet scent of entrepreneurship is in the air. Growing numbers of Americans are pursuing their startup dreams. According to the National Venture Capital Association...
SAN FRANCISCO (Business 2.0 Magazine) - It's the spring of 2006, and the sweet scent of entrepreneurship is in the air. Growing numbers of Americans are pursuing their startup dreams.
If you're reading this, there's a good chance that you've always wanted to launch your own startup. According to our research, roughly half of all Business 2.0 readers dream of founding their own c...
At 21, Diana Reed has already reached the pinnacle of one career. A senior at the University of Iowa, she is the Hawkeye Golden Girl, one of the top twirlers in the Big Ten. Every Saturday during f...
Business schools such as Babson (see cover story) and Stanford have long offered many excellent entrepreneurship programs. Here's a sampling of 10 cutting-edge programs for budding entrepreneurs.
Launching a Web startup is easy these days, thanks to a heady mix of new software, cheap hardware, and ever-more-ubiquitous broadband. But getting a startup to take off as a business is as challenging as ever.
You've come up with a world-changing idea, or at least an industry-changing idea. You have a business plan. Maybe you've even written some code or built a prototype. Now all you need is those few thousand bucks--or a few tens or hundreds of thousands of bucks--to get your new venture up and running. All that stands between you and your startup, in other words, is an angel.
You've come up with a world-changing idea, or at least an industry-changing idea. You have a business plan. Maybe you've even written some code or built a prototype. Now all you need is those few t...
Two rubbery-looking potted plants adorn the lobby of 285 Hamilton Ave. in downtown Palo Alto. The five-story building sits across the street from City Hall and is a short bike ride from Stanford Un...
Dropping out of school to start a business became as much a dot-com-era cliché as trying to become the next Bill Gates. Now, thanks to economic uncertainty, dropping back into school to launch a co...
If awards were handed out for "best save," small-business owners in the U.S. would probably qualify. Even during the worst of the recent recession, entrepreneurs launched about six million new busi...
Krishna "Kittu" Kolluri calls it "a gift from God."
If you think it's not a great time to start a business, you're right. Three years after the tech market crash left the Pets.com sock puppet in the Goodwill bin, investors aren't exactly clamoring f...
When Anthony DeHart got married seven years ago--in the midst of building his precision-cutting-tool company, DeHart Tooling Components--he made three mistakes. First, after a romantic wedding in G...
It would be hard to make the case that Jared Polis is typical of the entrepreneurs who populate this year's Big Ideas list. For while others stand poised on the verge, he has already crossed over t...
One of my editors asked me why Silicon Valley wasn't producing major startups anymore--companies like Hewlett-Packard, Intel Corp., and Apple Computer.
The venture capital business has a size problem. A monstrous, staggering, stupefying one. Brobdingnagian even.
One day you're scrubbing in the shower or driving in your car--whatever you do to kill time between episodes of The Anna Nicole Show--and suddenly a notion takes shape in your brain. Before you kno...
On the face of it, Patrick Sweeney II is the kind of chest-thumping, money-hungry entrepreneur that America has always known and loved. Now 35 years old, he plans to be worth $40 million by the tim...
Some of my best friends are venture capitalists! Sure, venture capitalists are now seen as villains. My colleagues and I are charged with being inept, corrupt moneychangers who are only interested ...
For most of last summer ramesh Harjani and Jae Moon scoured Silicon Valley looking for signs of life. Their new company, Bergana Communications, which makes chips for wireless handheld devices and ...
Shelley Coldiron, a Ph.D. scientist-turned-entrepreneur, learned of an exciting scientific breakthrough at Iowa State University in Ames. Researchers had come up with a device that could test chemi...
Recession, terrorist attacks, fear. In times like these, the business decisions you have to make become all the more difficult and bewildering. That's why FSB searched the business, academic, and c...
A couple of years ago Paul Entin and his wife, Shannon, each started separate companies--his an advertising firm, hers a health and fitness Website--out of an office in their home in Washington, N....
This time last year it seemed that everyone was becoming an entrepreneur, going to work for one, or apologizing for not being one. Not since Ronald Reagan's dewy-eyed tributes to entrepreneurship h...
A Private Backer
Bill Gross is one of the uniquely creative people I've ever met in my life. --Compaq co-founder Ben Rosen
It was during that effervescent time in late 1998 and early 1999, when dot-com IPOs defied gravity and the market value of new-economy darlings like AOL soared past old-economy stalwarts like Coca-...
As dawn breaks in Las Vegas, an unlikely crew of venture capitalists spills onto the people mover at Bally's Casino, stogies in hand, bleary-eyed from a night at the blackjack tables. Thrown in amo...
After Steve Crummey got off the phone in 1996 with his old Lotus crony Bill Gross, he turned to his wife and said, "That guy's crazy! Have you ever heard of a crazier idea?" Gross, who had become v...
Randy Korba is an advisor whose time has come: a post-bubble, I'm-more-than-my-IPO counselor to Internet entrepreneurs trying to make it in a rocky market for startups.
A few short months ago, Dean Summers was on a roll. His business plan for Ineedapart.com, which proposed to sell electronic parts over the Web, was hot: Chase Capital Partners wanted to invest $2 m...
On a humid, drizzly evening in June, a line of new-economy hipsters snakes out the door of Ohm, a dimly lit Manhattan nightclub, and onto the street. The queue at the coat check inside is almost as...
Right before Jim McManus retired from UUNet last year, he bought a yacht. A big honcho in the telecommunications industry, McManus had always wanted a boat, and now he would finally have the time t...
Let's say you've been nursing a secret wish to launch your own high-tech startup. If the Nasdaq's recent gymnastics haven't made you doubt that your nerves (or your finances) can take the strain, H...
Look up, look down Keep your ear to the ground Keep your ear to the ground --Heather Nova
Kanwal Rekhi's got these big eyes that flicker when he talks. His shoulders are rounded and his large, thick frame shows marks of age. But when he speaks, his face, large and jowly, emits youthful ...
KOREA has caught Web fever. Ten million people already use the Web, 3,500 new high-tech startups were launched last year, and broadband is booming. This may be just what the country needs to keep i...
Back in 1997, computer evangelist Guy Kawasaki and an associate figured they could capitalize on the dot-com frenzy by building a string of Websites about the world's best technology cities. So the...
Back in 1997, computer evangelist Guy Kawasaki and an associate figured they could capitalize on the dot-com frenzy by building a string of Websites about the world's top technology cities. So they...
In the midst of the garage offices and warehouse cubicles of Silicon Valley startups, just up Highway 101 from the venture capitalists of Sand Hill Road and hard by Stanford's illustrious business ...
So you have an idea for an Internet startup. It's a big idea. Well, not earth-shatteringly big, but of sufficient mass to justify, say, a blowout billion-dollar IPO. You put up a Website to prove y...
In early July, before the heat wave enveloped my hometown of New York City, I set out for San Francisco to spend the summer exploring how big money has changed life for Internet people there and in...
Getting the entrepreneurial bug, are you? Tired of reading about all these pubescent little CEOs who did nothing more clever than sell books or airline tickets over the Internet and made a billion?...
When Roman Koidl set out in 1993 to found a consulting company to help German retailers focus on convenience--a new concept in a country where service often comes with a snarl--he couldn't get a ba...
It should come as no surprise that seven of our ten boomtowns are located in the West. After all, this part of the country has always attracted pioneers--in this case, entrepreneurs such as compute...
The Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory is only 18 miles north of Wall Street, but it runs on an entirely different clock. At the abbey-like research center overlooking the Hudson River, events that u...
If the headline above grabbed your attention, you're probably one of the untold legions of good corporate citizens with a recurring daydream wherein you take hold of your own destiny and run your o...
America is the land of the un-free agent, home of the financial fraidy-cat and the paycheck-loving, perk-addicted cubicle potato. That's not what you'd read in any of the 545 books or 400 magazines...
So you've been saying for ages that no one in your industry really understands technology. What you ought to do, you keep repeating, is start a company with a high-tech edge and make a killing. Or ...
David Weekly is in the process of forming two technology companies. His headquarters is cramped and messy, with tools on the floor and computer hardware crammed onto a small desk. Junk food and soc...
Among the T-shirted techies who cram the dingy offices of NetGravity, a San Mateo, Calif., software startup, Stephen Recht stands out. He wears a tie. He is 45. He has a wife and a son and a house ...
On a stretch of lakefront ten miles southeast of downtown Seattle sits the Barbee lumber mill. Family-owned for three generations, the Barbee is the only working sawmill left in the greater Seattle...
If you think starting a successful home business requires $100,000 in start-up capital, an M.B.A. from Harvard and a room buzzing with high-tech equipment, consider 26-year-old Brent Winters of Jop...
For a glorious three decades, American venture capitalists did a lot of good for the economy while also doing very well for themselves. Arthur Rock and Tom Perkins, among others, got famous and ric...
-- The animal spirits of entrepreneurship are stirring: New businesses are popping up at the fastest pace since the early 1980s. The government's latest reading of the business-formation index says...
WANT TO RAISE $10 million for your new business? Listen to the saga of Douglas Pihl and Duane Carlson. They were among six co-founders of Lee Data, which manufactured peripherals for IBM computers,...
If it's a nice place to visit, why not start a business there? According to economic consultant David Birch, entrepreneurs are doing just that. A common denominator of the fast-growing firms he cal...
They're baaack! The keepers of the supply-side flame at Polyconomics, the New Jersey research firm headed by Jude Wanniski, aim to resuscitate the cause with an ambitious new look at the economics ...
LEN BOSACK and Sandy Lerner started Cisco Systems ''without a particular business vision,'' says Lerner. ''We had a technical vision.'' Working together to link up Stanford University's computers, ...
THE GIANTS of American industry may be making waking noises as the recession ends, but ever more managers and professionals are no longer listening. They are tuned instead to the homey clatter of a...
NOT MANY YEARS ago, on the way to school, Michael Dell would drive by big office buildings around Houston and imagine himself running a company from one of them. It would have a flagpole in front, ...
Henry Kloss was wiped out. A lifetime of creativity and risk taking had left him strapped for cash. He had put $2 million and ten years into promoting his own invention, a large-screen projection t...
Simon Ramo -- the Ramo in Bunker-Ramo, a computer venture, and the ''R'' in TRW, the giant defense electronics company -- has advised Presidents and served on the boards of corporations and univers...
THE BEEFY REDHEAD was down on his knees examining a mechanical filing system in a big Wall Street investment house. He had grease on one sleeve -- transporting and installing files is rough work. A...
A WAVE of entrepreneurial activity unprecedented in the postwar period is sweeping across Western Europe. Venture capital funds and over-the-counter markets, where the stock of young companies is t...
On the one hand are the tales of successful entrepreneurs that focus on the exhilarating freedom of being your own boss and the plentiful profits to be made by running your own business. On the oth...
FOR A GROUP that a few years ago seemed endowed with wondrous wealth-creating alchemy, times have grown austere. Venture capital firms, some of which in good years had doubled investors' money in t...
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