Entrepreneurship – Page 3

3 Entrepreneurial Lessons Learned on the Path from Intern to CEO

November 11, 2013 by Janet Choi

Khalil Fuller is the CEO of Learn Fresh, which makes NBA Math Hoops, a basketball board game and mobile app that uses math problems and real-world NBA and WNBA statistics to improve students’ math literacy and engagement. He’s also a college senior, studying education and social entrepreneurship at Brown University.

Khalil Fuller of NBA Math Hoops Growing up L.A., Khalil saw his friends become increasingly disengaged from school, especially math class. “I started tutoring kids and realized there was nothing fun to make math really relevant to them, so they didn’t make the connection between math class and the rest of the world. And they didn’t want to do their homework — they wanted to go outside and play basketball.”

At Brown, Khalil met Bill Daugherty, an entrepreneur and former NBA executive who’d teamed up with Tim Scheidt, veteran math educator and inventor of a prototype math board game. “For the earliest versions, it wasn’t Kobe and LeBron,” Khalil recounts, “it was Johnny SlamDunk and Andrew ThreePointer. Bill and I said, ‘if this is somewhat fun and the kids like it, it could be much more powerful if it had real NBA players.’”

When it was clear that the kids did like it through some early testing and incubation with Big Picture Learning, they brought the game to the NBA to see about those real-life players. “The NBA really liked the fact that we had a purely social mission,” Khalil reports. “They actually gave us a royalty-free license for the first time in their history.”

NBA Math Hoops board game

4 Nourishing Routines for Your Success and Happiness

October 21, 2013 by Janet Choi

Whether it’s a nice cup of tea or coffee or reviewing your diary, regular routines and rituals help forge the discipline, energy, and mental space to consistently make progress.

We reached out to some productivity superstars to ask:

What is one routine or ritual that contributes to your happiness and success?

Everyone’s response focused on nourishment, nurturing health, relationships, and mind.

Routines and rituals are inherently very personal — what works for you won’t necessarily work for somebody else — but the main takeaway here is that they’re also about prioritizing aspects of your life to create balance.

Here are four of those balancing routines:

How Share As Image Got to $1,000 Recurring Revenue

October 12, 2013 by Adam Rotman

When Walter saw how his recent post on how iDoneThis reached $1,000 in recurring revenue struck a chord among readers, he thought it would be illuminating to talk with other entrepreneurs about their journey to $1,000 recurring revenue.

Here’s Walter’s interview with Adam Rotman, creator of Share As Image, a tool that helps people turn quotes into images.

Why I Decided to Move Away From My Team to Live in Downtown Vegas

September 5, 2013 by John Todero

For six years, John Todero worked to build his marketing company Dyverse in Orlando. He decided to relocate over 2,000 miles away with his small team still in Orlando. John tells us about what spurred his decision to move to the hopeful lights of Downtown Vegas.

While the number one benefit of being an entrepreneur is the freedom from others telling you what to do and how to do it, the truth is, running a company also comes with a lot of responsibilities that can tie you down. Always working long hours to make sure everything gets done on time and ensuring that everyone stays productive, I never felt it was the right time to up and move — even though I’d felt the urge for awhile.

After grinding it out for six years in Downtown Orlando running my marketing company, Dyverse, I had a real longing to spread my wings and explore what living in other cities would be like. All the same, I had a small in-house team working with me and I wasn’t sure if our foundation was strong enough yet to be working remotely from different cities.

How Dan Pink Invested in iDoneThis

August 13, 2013 by I Done This Support

This story is inspired by this week’s Startup Edition question: How did you raise money for your startup?

“Email Dan Pink.”

That task sat on my to-do list, undone for weeks. I somehow managed to move everything else around it to my done list while that one task languished. I was too scared to reach out.

If you don’t know who Dan Pink is, he’s a five-time bestselling author and thought leader on the changing world of work. His latest, To Sell is Human: The Surprising Truth About Moving Others, which gives a definitive look at modern sales, is a #1 New York Times business bestseller.

I had to sell to the guy who had literally written the book on selling.

I finally worked up the courage to send Dan an email, and we set up a call. Then, I gave him a horrible pitch — I fumbled my words and my nerves paved the way to tangents that made no sense. When we were done, I hung up, dejected and I felt sure that I’d blown it.

8 Myths Startup Founders Hate

August 8, 2013 by Janet Choi

The entrepreneur’s journey can be a bumpy one, with thrilling peaks and stressful valleys. It doesn’t help that the startup world is aswarm with hype and misconceptions, which can worm their way into rookies’ heads and lead them down a wrong road or two. Take, for example, the misperception that scaling is imperative in the early stages, which leads 70% of startups to fail.

We decided it was high time to do some startup mythbusting, so we asked founders and leaders this one question:

What startup myths do you hate the most and why?

With a wide range of wise words from hard-earned experience, on aspects from accountability to how you grow to what really matters, here are their responses:

If Money Were No Object: The Best of the Internet

February 8, 2013 by I Done This Support

Happy Friday! Catch up with the best of what we’ve shared on the interwebs this week!

Chart your own path but slow down along the way.

What would you like to do if money were no object? What do you desire?

Turns out there’s something between extroverts and introverts. Dan Pink on the benefits of being an ambivert.

Communicating through the inverted pyramid.

5 things to be more effective at work.

The Entrepreneur’s Journey: Slowing Down and Why Grandma’s Always Right.

February 4, 2013 by Daniel DiPiazza

Are entrepreneurs always dissatisfied?

It’s hard to stop and bask in your own achievements. It’s why we strive to build a tool that shows you how far you’ve come to motivate and inspire. Daniel DiPiazza, who works with plenty of young go-getters brimming with restless, entrepreneurial spirit, reminds us about the importance of learning to relax and appreciate your own hard work.

Grandmas have an uncanny way of presenting elegant solutions to life’s most vexing conundrums — wisdom without tripping the alarm system. Every day, mine would take me on a short walk from our suburban duplex to the small office where she practiced law at her own firm. I always thought the walks were social outings, but looking back, I know now they were opportunities for her to teach me her life philosophies.

At seven, I just wasn’t ready for the sophisticated dose of grandmotherly psychological judo I received, but her words stayed with me.

“Do not be beholden.”

We talked a lot about entrepreneurship, self-direction, motivation, and self-image on our walks. These may seem like heavy topics for a first-grader, but I am certain I would not be the person I am today had we not had these talks. One thing she said to me still rings crystal clear:

“There is no greater pleasure than working for yourself. You do not want to be beholden to anyone else. Chart your own path.”

Photo: Cornelia Kopp

As I got older and started working, something didn’t feel right. I never really felt like I fit in anywhere that I worked. At first I thought it was the job. Or the boss. Or the co-workers. Or the uniform. Until I ran out of “or’s”.

That’s when I realized — it was me.

How Roeder Studios’s Virtual Team Built a Social Media Empire

April 3, 2012 by I Done This Support

Building a business from scratch is a huge challenge and doing it with a virtual team is even tougher. The interaction and information exchange that happens when people work in the same room often get taken for granted. It’s something that’s tricky to replicate when the team is straddled across different locations and timezones.

So why bother with a remote team? For founder Laura Roeder, having a virtual team is a competitive advantage. It gives her greater flexibility in hiring to make that she’s focusing 100% on quality and fit. It also suits her hands-off management style. Everyone in the company has the autonomy to do their own thing, so long as they’re openly and actively communicating with the team.

Write Your Own Story

January 10, 2012 by I Done This Support

Every milestone is an opportunity to attract attention to your startup because you have a piece of “news” — a new piece of noteworthy information that no one else but you has.

When you have something to announce, conventional wisdom says to go to the press and blogs with your story because they (1) have distribution and (2) are expert in crafting a story. In the past, we’ve offered nuggets of news to journalists as exclusives, and we’ve gotten written up by Betabeat and The Next Web this way.

However, we’ve recently experimented with writing our own story on our own blog, telling a narrative that’s personal and shows how we work behind the scenes, harnessing the power of social news for distribution — and that has resulted in our all-time one-day high for traffic and 1,000+ signups, more than double the signups resulting from our press coverage. Through that experience, we’ve learned the importance of writing your own story and turning transparency and narrative into a competitive advantage.