Want To Start A Business?

I’ll be doing some yoga and then teeing it up today. Nice weather in Nevada.  My golf game sucks but after taking around 17 years off I am relearning.  You might be stuck in a cooler part of the country.  I see they have around a foot of snow at my place in Minnesota already.

I ran across this tremendous series of videos by Professor Waverly Deutsch.

If you want to start a business, watch them.  You will learn something.  This is like getting a free mini-MBA in startups.  Chicago Booth has one of the top entrepreneurial programs in the US, so it’s worth your time.

Professor Deutsch runs the Polsky Center at the University of Chicago.  You probably haven’t had the privilege of being in a class with her but I have.  She’s straight, and to the point. She also has seen a lot and has a lot of data to back up what she talks about.

That is one great thing about Chicago Booth, they back up their theories with rigorous data.  Yesterday I was watching a Chicago Executives webinar and Professor Steve Kaplan showed the returns to venture have beaten the S+P in recent years.  As you know, the S+P hasn’t exactly been a laggard when it comes to returns.

Chicago Booth Professor David Altig once told me it takes 30 years for a truly disruptive innovation to make its way through the economy.  Sometimes people have to be educated like when the printing press was invented.  Sometimes, you have to build infrastructure, like laying railroad tracks.  When it comes to the internet, software and hardware, we are slightly more than thirty years in and our economy is benefitting.

So are people that have ideas and want to turn those ideas into businesses.

There is so much opportunity today to build something great.  I am seeing it in our own portfolio and in general.  Software really just works today.  Implementation times are drastically reduced.  AI, Machine Learning and things like that are table stakes.

You can do it, but you won’t do it unless you really want it.  There has to be a driving desire inside you to execute and get stuff done.

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