In 1993 and 1996, I was too young to care or know the difference between a booming economy and a recession. In late 2000, I was too close. Come 2008, this is my third down cycle. Things are hard. At one level they are much harder than what was eight years ago – the outlook is bleak all the way …Read the Rest
Startup Mode: Finding the voice of the customer
April 2, 2010
Startup Insights – Finding the voice of the customer I have been teaching entrepreneurship as a practitioner for 8 years and the format that I follow is very simple. Start with a group of students willing to express their ideas in less than one hundred words. Mix in between 18 to 36 hours of instruction. Finish and close with a …Read the Rest
Startup Guide: Kill your ego…
April 2, 2010
When I first met Don Sexton, Mark Broadie, Ralph Biggadike and John Whitney at Columbia, a few things stood out at once. All four were very successful, well established and well respected professionals. They had touched professional peaks I couldn’t even dream about and had nothing left to prove. All four changed my life. 8 years later when I look …Read the Rest
Startup Guide: Just ship it
April 7, 2010
This week I kept on going back and forth at a client convincing them to ship a product that was already four weeks late. Every day someone would find that one little extra thing that would make the product a winner or fix a crucial defect. While the product was ready and possibly superior to any other prior releases done …Read the Rest
Startup Guide: Lessons from a failed startup
April 7, 2010
Looking through the wreckage of an old folder, found this post for the really early days of Reboot – the original list of lessons from a failed startup that became the book. Here is the list, with one new addition, five years later. Technology is not a competitive advantage. Focus on the business problem not technological elegance or cool factor. …Read the Rest
Startup Guide: The startup crash course in 7 posts or less
April 16, 2010
For the last four weeks I had been thinking about putting together a basic reading guide for mentees that would help them move forward and remove me as a bottleneck. A collection of short to the point posts that introduce them to a basic framework that many of us take for granted and most of us have never seen or …Read the Rest
Startup Mentor: The road to startup failure interview
May 15, 2010
Once upon a time in a galaxy far far away, when it was cool and unique to talk about new venture failure, I did an interview as part of Society of Actuaries coverage of the Blue Screen of Death and Reboot. I was looking for something else when I found it and I thought it was worth sharing on the startup …Read the Rest
Startup Founders: Borrowed time, non-core distractions, or why diversification is a four letter word?
May 25, 2010
You are living on borrowed time. Each day that you don’t generate cash is a day closer to the end. The new-venture lifestyle burns you out personally and financially faster than any professional route known to mankind. The hours are longer, the stress higher, the baggage heavier, the money rarely enough. Then the sacrifices start calling. Initially the suffering is …Read the Rest
Startup Deals – The paradox of large customers
May 25, 2010
Is there any correlation between targeting large customers, executing large orders, and new venture failure? I believe so. New ventures, with rare exception, lack the depth to handle large assignments and contracts. Without sufficient depth, new ventures make bad short-term calls on pricing, delivery terms, hiring, concessions, and service-level agreements that put them on track for eventual failure. It’s about …Read the Rest
Startup Mentor: Baby Steps
July 24, 2010
The first step is always the most difficult And then You get used to it… Or If at first you don’t succeed, blame your knees
Corporate Finance Blog make over immediately generates Google Adsense revenues.
September 6, 2010
Not sure if it was luck, hard work, persistence or all three combined but the immediate impact of the Corporate Finance Blog Make Over yesterday was an immediate jump in Page views and the breaking of the Sunday taboo. Over the last six months, we had never booked a cent of Google Adsense revenues on a Sunday. Last night we …Read the Rest
Corporate Finance Blog gets a make over
September 5, 2010
Learning Corporate Finance, our Corporate Finance course portal started with the simplest of word press themes in February 2010. I had managed to get a crash course in word press management when Awab pointed out that my primary blog had been infested by spam injections that pointed the source on the page to everywhere but where I wanted to go. …Read the Rest
Google Adsense Adventure: Adsense revenue, impressions and clicks analysis for an online education business
September 4, 2010
Here is some additional detail on the review of traffic on the Learning Corporate Finance Portal that I ran a little earlier. I exported a simple dump out of Google Analytics to take a look at earnings and clicks in a given month. The graph below shows Adsense earnings and Adsense clicks on the vertical axis and the number of …Read the Rest
Google Adsense adventure: The search for traffic and adsense revenues continues
September 4, 2010
Figure 1 Corporate Finance Traffic Stats The search for incremental traffic and revenues continues on Learning Corporate Finance, the finance E-education portal I have now been running since early March 2010. First the good news. Apparantely all the directory submission work done in May 2010 has finally started to payoff. Either that or Google has loosened the traffic spigot. Where …Read the Rest
Crude Oil price outlook: Crude oil price watch for next week: sub 70 dollar oil at NYMEX?
August 21, 2010
Earlier this week, I asked if the time was right for Crude Oil to break 74 dollars per barrel on NYMEX and by Friday it was apparent that the time had come to forecast a new low for crude oil prices for next week. Crude broke through 74 US dollars a barrel to trade at 73.46 on Friday at NYMEX. …Read the Rest
Founders at work: Startup founders and entrepreneurs recommended reading list
August 15, 2010
Being a founder is difficult work. It is frustrating at time hopeless and only for a lucky few worthwhile. Sometimes in your darkest moment you need a balance between cheerleading and reality. Other founders who have walked that path and shared that door with you; Other stories with different endings to help you keep you sanity. Jessica Livingston at Y-Combinator …Read the Rest
Online Finance courses – Top finance courses at the Finance e-education portal
August 14, 2010
Based on Google analytics tracking, here are the top courses on the Corporate Finance e-education portal this month. Structured Products: Basic Products, sample term sheet and pricing | Learning Corporate Finance - 171 Views Calculating Forward Prices, Forward Rates and Forward Rate Agreements (FRA) – Calculation reference | Learning Corporate Finance - 146 Views Asset Liability Management – Rate Sensitive Gaps, …Read the Rest
Learning Corporate Finance – Now a Technorati Top 100 Finance blog
August 13, 2010
It took five months to break through the Technorati Rating system but earlier this month Learning Corporate Finance finally became a Technorati Top 100 Finance blog. Couldn’t have done this without our content team (Agnes, Nabil and Adnan) and our super editor (Uzma) or our designer (Nida Faizi) or without the marvelous technological platform of WordPress.
Online Finance Education – Experimenting with Quizes on wordpress –
August 13, 2010
Here is what I really like about wordpress. Almost everything I ever wanted to needed to build an online education portal at the Corporate Finance courses is available as a widget or a plug in that works from the word go. Last night it took about 2 minutes to find the right plug in on google, another minute to install …Read the Rest
