...Eric Ries author of The Lean Startup, says that those working for startups are doing so “under conditions of extreme uncertainty.” In spite of this uncertainty, job satisfaction remains high. This may be because startups “stand for culture and fun, just as much as work,” with 93% feeling valued within their team and by company founders, according to this study. Employee satisfaction is considerably lower in more established businesses. According to a global Gallup survey, unhappy employees outnumber happy employees on a scale of two to one. A staggering 63% of workers are “not engaged,” with a further 24% being “actively disengaged.” Only 13% are “engaged” workers who enjoy their work. This means that a total of 87% of workers are emotionally disconnected from their workplaces and less likely to be...
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...by population, the number of successful startups per capita varies by orders of magnitude. Somehow it's as if most places were sprayed with startupicide. I wondered about this for years. I could see the average town was like a roach motel for startup ambitions: smart, ambitious people went in, but no startups came out. But I was never able to figure out exactly what happened inside the motel—exactly what was killing all the potential startups. [1] A couple weeks ago I finally figured it out. I was framing the question wrong. The problem is not that most towns kill startups. It's that death is the default for startups, and most towns don't save them. Instead of thinking of most places as being sprayed with startupicide, it's more accurate to think of startups as all being poisoned, and a few places being sprayed with the antidote. Startups in other places are just doing what startups naturally do: fail. The real question is, what's saving startups in places like Silicon Valley? [2] Environment I think there are two components to the antidote: being in a place where startups are the cool thing to do, and chance meetings with people who can help you. And what drives them both is the number of startup people around you. The first component is particularly helpful in the first stage of a startup's life, when you go from merely having an interest in starting a company to actually doing it. It's quite a leap to start a startup. It's an unusual thing to do. But in Silicon...
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...Abstract The purpose of this study is to identify most common strategies in managing employee engagement in startup companies in Seattle, Washington, US. Although many research and studies has been conducted to identify strategies to manage the employee engagement, many companies are still unsuccessful to improve their engagement level and their turnover rate. Therefore, this research will narrow the study of employee engagement to a specific type of company, so the result of this study will be most possible to be adopted and referred by other companies in the same category. Engagement level in thirty sample startups will be determined using ISA Engagement Scale and common HR strategies will be evaluated among companies with higher employee engagement score. In the future, the findings of this study can be use as a reference for practitioners at startup companies to develop a better human resource strategy, improving their employee engagement level. Keywords: engagement, startups, human resources, strategy Introduction According to State of the Global Workplace Study by Gallup, there are only 13% of employees are engaged at work in the world. In other word, only one in eight employees that are emotionally committed to their work, contributing to the company’s growth by working effectively and efficiently. Studies have proved that engaged employees contribute to the company’s performance (Arrowsmith & Parker, 2013; Reilly, 2014; Pollitt, 2008) and strategies to improve...
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...challenging a job at a startup can be, especially when you're new to the workforce. Play your cards right and you will learn more in one year than your friends will pick up in five or more working at larger, more traditional organizations. The media likes to sensationalize the perks and fun of working at a startup, but startup life is no day at the beach. You'll find that most operate with a "work hard, play hard" mentality. While you'll enjoy plenty of happy hours and ping pong tournaments, you'll also find the work intensely demanding -- likely, far more than anything you've previously experienced. Here are seven tips I've learned over the years to help you not only survive, but thrive at a startup: 1. Embrace the mission. The most successful entrepreneurs are incredibly passionate about their work. It's the fire in their bellies that drives them to succeed. Similarly, if you're going to commit to working at a startup, you have to believe in its mission. Look for organizations that are doing something you're interested in. You won't make it at a business if you're not genuinely excited about the work. 2. Acknowledge the long hours -- and accept them. If you're going to make it in the startup world, you first need to acknowledge that the hours will be long. The second step is to accept this fact. In the beginning, it wasn't unusual for my team to work more than twelve hours a day or come in over the weekend to meet our goals. In a startup, there's always more work...
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...on that side job. Sound familiar? For a lot of new startups, this is a typical weekday. Welcome to the world of moonlighting. Moonlighting, or working multiple jobs, has become more and more common these days. People moonlight for lots of reasons: to supplement income, to gain skills, or to start a new business. So why’s moonlighting important? These days, many successful companies (like Instagram) owe their existence to moonlighting. But moonlighting is hard work, and it can be risky. Intellectual property (IP)...
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...The way to get startup ideas is not to try to think of startup ideas. It's to look for problems, preferably problems you have yourself. The very best startup ideas tend to have three things in common: they're something the founders themselves want, that they themselves can build, and that few others realize are worth doing. Microsoft, Apple, Yahoo, Google, and Facebook all began this way. Problems Why is it so important to work on a problem you have? Among other things, it ensures the problem really exists. It sounds obvious to say you should only work on problems that exist. And yet by far the most common mistake startups make is to solve problems no one has. I made it myself. In 1995 I started a company to put art galleries online. But galleries didn't want to be online. It's not how the art business works. So why did I spend 6 months working on this stupid idea? Because I didn't pay attention to users. I invented a model of the world that didn't correspond to reality, and worked from that. I didn't notice my model was wrong until I tried to convince users to pay for what we'd built. Even then I took embarrassingly long to catch on. I was attached to my model of the world, and I'd spent a lot of time on the software. They had to want it! Why do so many founders build things no one wants? Because they begin by trying to think of startup ideas. That m.o. is doubly dangerous: it doesn't merely yield few good ideas; it yields bad ideas that sound plausible enough...
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...or both of the principles we began with is false. Or we have a new idea. I suspect it's the latter, because as soon as this thought occurred to me, a whole bunch of other things fell into place. Examples For example, Craigslist. It's not a charity, but they run it like one. And they're astoundingly successful. When you scan down the list of most popular web sites, the number of employees at Craigslist looks like a misprint. Their revenues aren't as high as they could be, but most startups would be happy to trade places with them. In Patrick O'Brian's novels, his captains always try to get upwind of their opponents. If you're upwind, you decide when and if to engage the other ship. Craigslist is effectively upwind of enormous revenues. They'd face some challenges if they wanted to make more, but not the sort you face when you're tacking upwind, trying to force a crappy product on ambivalent users by spending ten times as much on sales as on development. [1] I'm not saying startups should aim to end up like Craigslist. They're a...
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...If you wanted to get rich, how would you do it? I think your best bet would be to start or join a startup. That's been a reliable way to get rich for hundreds of years. The word "startup" dates from the 1960s, but what happens in one is very similar to the venture-backed trading voyages of the Middle Ages. Startups usually involve technology, so much so that the phrase "high-tech startup" is almost redundant. A startup is a small company that takes on a hard technical problem. Lots of people get rich knowing nothing more than that. You don't have to know physics to be a good pitcher. But I think it could give you an edge to understand the underlying principles. Why do startups have to be small? Will a startup inevitably stop being a startup as it grows larger? And why do they so often work on developing new technology? Why are there so many startups selling new drugs or computer software, and none selling corn oil or laundry detergent? The Proposition Economically, you can think of a startup as a way to compress your whole working life into a few years. Instead of working at a low intensity for forty years, you work as hard as you possibly can for four. This pays especially well in technology, where you earn a premium for working fast. Here is a brief sketch of the economic proposition. If you're a good hacker in your mid twenties, you can get a job paying about $80,000 per year. So on average such a hacker must be able to do at least $80,000 worth of work per year...
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...to wrest control from me. In other words, at this stage, I prefer control over wealth. From the founder’s viewpoint, all of them have a promising future following HBS and working for MSG as their fulltime employee would mean that they would be settling for much less as compared to what they would get otherwise. Also, accepting MSG offer would mean that Smartix will lose the opportunity to shape the culture of their startup, establish their version of fairness and reward philosophy in the company. If they had to work for an organization, why would they settle for MSG, wouldn’t they aim for something more financially rewarding? The MSG offer itself lends to what Smartix can expect in the future from MSG. MSG potentially could hijack the idea, make it a proprietary preventing Smartix from implementing elsewhere, seriously limiting the ability to Smartix team to reap rich dividends later. Moreover, MSG didn’t like the idea of VC, as MSG considered VC couldn’t bring any value other than money on the table. MSG only cared about minimizing the risks instead of thinking about the upside of the business. This shows discrepancy between the founder’s expectation and MSG’s. Clearly, MSG didn’t see as much potential in the system as I did. This gap in the views could be problematic if we were going to continue working closely together for next several years. On the other hand, if Vivek came to realization that he cares about potential wealth and do not mind giving up...
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...University Department of Industrial & Manufacturing Engineering IE466: Concurrent Engineering Questions Hand-in at start of next class Name: __Jun Lin_ Answer the following questions while watching the 44-minute video, “Why Accountants Don’t Run Startups,” available online via Justin.tv: http://justin.tv/startuplessonslearned/b/262670582 Who is Steve Blank? How does he establish his credentials? Is it effective? He spent 21 years at high technology companies. He taught student in Stanford for 10 years and also has some programs. He wrote a book named “The Four Steps to the Epiphany”. He studies from failure to success. It is effective. What do the words entrepreneur and start-up mean in Silicon Valley? How does that compare to how the words are traditionally used elsewhere in the U.S.? A startup is a temporary organization used to search for a repeatable and scalable business model. Startup is to serve known customer with known product and feed a family. Solve pressing social problems, social enterprise: profitable, and social innovation: new strategies. Scalable startup means to solve for unknown customers and unknown features. Buyable startup means to solve for internet and mobile apps. What is the difference between a business plan and a business model? What is a “pivot”? Business model ascertains how your business makes money. It identifies the services that your customers value and shows the reciprocation of...
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...Inthe startup ofnewprocess plants or inthe introductionofnewprocess technology, even minor installation work can cause plant downtime. On the other hand, the increased income from compressing time schedules for the introduction of new process technology or launching of associated newproducts on themarket surely offers an incentive for securing efficient startups,which is the purpose of this study. A review of publications in the area of startup of process plants shows that organizational issues are scarcely discussed. A new conceptual framework has therefore been developed for organizing startups and themodelling of alternative startup organization structures. Four types of organizational models have been depicted,derived frominformation fromthe literature survey and the author’s own first-hand experience of startups. They include a “fully integrated” type of organizational model for startups together with a profiling of startup contexts. How to organize a startup is, however, only one aspect that will determine the outcome of a project, and other influencing factors ought to be further explored. The frameworkmust be tested and validated in real-life startup situations and in further empirical research.The informationfromthe literature survey, the alternative types of startup organizationalmodels and determinants can already be deployed by firms in the Process Industries, triggering discussion and providing guidelines in their selection of preferred startup organization...
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...Acclaim for THE LEAN STARTUP Acclaim for THE LEAN STARTUP “The Lean Startup isn’t just about how to create a more successful entrepreneurial business; it’s about what we can learn from those businesses to improve virtually everything we do. I imagine Lean Startup principles applied to government programs, to health care, and to solving the world’s great problems. It’s ultimately an answer to the question How can we learn more quickly what works and discard what doesn’t?” —Tim O’Reilly, CEO, O’Reilly Media “Eric Ries unravels the mysteries of entrepreneurship and reveals that magic and genius are not the necessary ingredients for success but instead proposes a scienti c process that can be learned and replicated. Whether you are a startup entrepreneur or corporate entrepreneur, there are important lessons here for you on your quest toward the new and unknown.” —Tim Brown, CEO, IDEO “The road map for innovation for the twenty-first century. The ideas in The Lean Startup will help create the next industrial revolution.” —Steve Blank, lecturer, Stanford University, UC Berkeley Hass Business School “Every founding team should stop for forty-eight hours and read The Lean Startup. Seriously, stop and read this book now.” —Scott Case, CEO, Startup America Partnership “The key lesson of this book is that startups happen in the present —that messy place between the past and the future where nothing happens according to PowerPoint. Ries’s ‘read and react’ approach to this sport, his...
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...I created a private Facebook group for community members and a WordPress site to connect even us further. Within one year of working with this organization, it grew nearly ten-fold, from 40 or so members to nearly 500 members due to the online community engagement I nurtured. I have also implemented strategies to capture 6,357 subscribers for the email list through the website. These subscribers get access to webinars and various articles that support their career growth. Currently, I am working with the founder to help her “franchise” it in similar metropolitan...
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...hood 4 2.2 Risk Taker 5 2.3 Open source 5 2.4 Education 5 2.5 Work freedom 6 2.6 Work in diversity 6 2.7 Weather and environment 6 3.0 Comparison Between Silicon Valley and Hong Kong IT Industry 6 3.1 Business nature 7 3.2 Financial Capital 7 3.3 Infrastructure 7 3.4 Cultural factors 8 4.0 Hong Kong Limitations 9 4.1 Lack of Young IT Expertise 9 4.2 High Rental Cost for Companies 10 4.3 Lack of Local Venture Capital 10 4.4 Copyright and Patent Issue 11 5.0 Conclusion 11 References 12 1.0 Introduction Silicon Valley is in the southern portion of the San Francisco Bay Area in the United States. It is home to many of the world's largest technology corporations and small startup companies (Ref 1). In summer 2014, we took a technology field study trip to Silicon Valley with an aim to analyze the characteristics of IT industry in Silicon Valley and compare with Hong Kong. Through our study and information gathered from the site visits, we compare the synonym and antonym of the two places from different aspects. During the week of 18 Aug, we visited several technology companies like Google and CISCO, visited and attended lectures at 3 famous universities, and also spent the evenings experiencing local cultures. These are the highlights of these places: Technology companies: Google Inc. | Internet related services and products, online advertising, search engine, Android | Presentation by Julian ChuGoogle...
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...“Just Do It” attitude and don’t want management, that is where entrepenuers fails They need mananagement discipline of some sort Lean Startup comes from lean manufacturing at Toyota Want cross-Functional teams to work across all functions Henry ford = one of the great entrepreneurs ever and Automobile = Startup • Startups have an engine of growth: need to make adjustments to make your products better. • Feedback Loop: want immediate and automatic feedback that you don’t really think about. Steering is what must it different from other ways to get places. • Many startups are like rocket launches but they are no good. First you have to have vision, then strategy and then a product. Setbacks are a good thing and a learning experience. Who’s an entrepreneur? Internal innovators = entrepreneur • People working corporate America jobs can still be an entrepenur at their company, called intrapreneurs What’s a startup? “Startup is a humn insitiuition designed to create a new product or service under conditions of extreme uncertainty” Starts and entrepreneurs come in different sizes and forms Startups and innovation go hand & hand. Learning Validated learning: showing a team found valuuble truths about the present and the future Find a combination of your vision and what the customer wants Startup is an experiment to get validated learning IMVU was an experiment • Had its up and down. They had to learn that the product the market...
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