Category: Venturing, Entrepreneurship, Innovating
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Mid-Life Purpose
The past two quarters have whizzed by! As a social entrepreneur in residence, I had hoped to learn a lot, and was not disappointed. Our first month comprised a wide array of speakers and meetings ranging from dementia, arthritis, polypharmacy, hearing loss, loneliness, care, to inclusive design, career ageism and longer working lives. Sadly within…
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Do we really want banking ‘Uberized’? Part 2
Banking and corporate leaders and middle management seem to have been passively observing but not proactively responding to the VC and angel funded onslaught of web and mobile-driven ‘apps’ and marketplaces. Part 1 of this post sought to define what we mean by Uberization and touched on the elements of disruption of the Taxi and…
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Do we really want banking ‘Uberized’? Part 1
Do we want to ‘Uberize’ banking to improve it, in the same way as taxis and hotels? Even for those working within the tech ecosystem, it’s hard to keep pace with the impact digitization and software continues to have on processes and competitive balance across industries. Venture capital seems to love talk about disrupting fragmented…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 3
In part 2 of this post, I was faced with a difficult choice in 2013: change direction and focus of the current startup, or start fresh. Starting fresh meant admitting failure, and in some ways, giving up. And I don’t like giving up! In my mind, by keeping it going I was fanning the embers…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 2
In part 1 of this post, I talked about pivoting, using my own fintech startup as an example. Setting out to boil the ocean of small business lending, we’d built a working capital platform that combined a borrower/lender marketplace; invoicing; and basic collections CRM. Market timing, borrower behaviour, public policy all shaped the months that…
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Are startup versatility and pivoting a good thing? – Part 1
Product (or business) life extension is a boon when you learn marketing and strategy in business school. But for an undercapitalized startup without a full time marketing brain, it can just prolong the pain. You can’t fail fast if you are continually creating new use cases and finding new doors to knock on! Waiting seems…
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Team Is Hard!
Business model, product, market, timing: all key success factors for any startup (and pretty much any organization! But team, is an ever-evolving puzzle that changes shape over time. Pitching to investors or accelerators? What’s on paper grabs their attention: technical cofounder, tick. Digital marketing, tick. Worked in a startup before, tick. Domain knowledge, tick. With…