Business Ideas

Q&A revisited: Really, How Do I Sell My Idea to a Big Company. Part 2.

April 29, 2013

Irony: This post from about a year ago explains why you can’t sell an idea to a large company, and recommends not even trying. And dozens of reader comments ask how to do exactly what the post itself says they shouldn’t even try. And I get more comments all the time, plus emails on my [...]

Read the full article →

Free the Numbers for Simple Lists and Tables

February 26, 2013

This is me giving back, making it up to all the spreadsheet haters. It’s a non spreadsheet: lists, tables, yes; but no formulas, functions, or programming. It just adds the rows and columns automatically. I call it Free the Numbers.  I’ve been a spreadsheet guy since 1979. I wrote three books on how to use spreadsheets [...]

Read the full article →

Paradigm Shift: Sramana Mitra 1M/1M

January 18, 2013

I liked this one from Sramana Mitra’s !M/!M Youtube channel: Actually I liked several of them. Sramana has 10 cartoons like this one available as a Youtube playlist. Nice work. And if you don’t see the video here, I apologize. You can use this link to go to the source in Youtube.

Read the full article →

Guess What Percent of Ideas are Really Opportunities

September 26, 2012

This monday I posted ideas vs. opportunities in this space. The point was filtering all those ideas for the subset that are actually opportunities.  Overnight I got an email from Rick Holdren, chief evangelist for Medi-code, with this delightful additional story: As a angel investor in over 25 startups I tell a different story: A [...]

Read the full article →

What Business to Start? Look in the Mirror

September 6, 2012

So you want to start a business, but don’t know what kind? Sure, you can get a list of franchises or ask the experts what are good businesses to start. That works for some people. Lists of businesses to start are easy to find. My advice, however, is don’t look for a list of good [...]

Read the full article →

Really Great Ideas Seem Obvious

July 5, 2012

Amazing fact (to me at least): the first wheels on suitcases appeared in the 1970s. My wife and I, both baby boomers, have asked ourselves: how is it possible that we all dealt with suitcases without wheels all the way through the 50s and 60s? What was wrong with all of us? And sliced bread first appeared [...]

Read the full article →

Q&A: How Do I Sell My Idea to A Big Company?

January 11, 2012

This is another email question I received via my ask-me-a-question form on my timberry.com site. I’ve edited it slightly: I recently read your article protect your ideas and I have an idea that I want to protect and want to pitch to a company. I don’t know if I can turn my idea into a [...]

Read the full article →

The Critical Mass Problems

October 13, 2011

Sometimes I’m intrigued by what I call critical mass problems, meaning businesses based on ideas that work only if masses of users adopt them. These make intriguing startups sometimes, because if they go big, they go really big. The best example in my lifetime was the fax machine. I dealt with the precursor in the [...]

Read the full article →

Ideas: Evolutionary Computing and Internet As Brain

August 22, 2011

Call it coincidence, serendipity, synchronicity, or just random, but last week I was accidentally exposed to two seemingly unrelated ideas that ended up seeming very related to me. And they gave me a fascinating whack on the side of the head. I thought artificial intelligence had run its course, but computers that learn could be [...]

Read the full article →

Build Your New Business By Doing Your Old Job Better

June 16, 2011

I know a bright, ambitious guy who didn’t have the patience to stay in school and ended up stocking retail store shelves for a major consumer products company. He stuck with that company, moved up from shelf stocking to sales, and the up again from there to sales management, and eventually, up to country manager [...]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries