Monday, August 16, 2010
Sunday, July 4, 2010
BOBBY GENOVESE
What could Ontario farms, venture capital, reality TV and polo possibly have in common? Only Bobby Genovese. Armed with high-powered marketing savvy and a penchant for picking winners, Bobby is a self-styled entrepreneur who founded his first company at age 25 with a ninth grade education and a hunger to succeed.
Far from his roots in the farmland of northern Ontario and a planned equestrian career, Bobby’s passion for business could not be contained and he rapidly emerged into the world of capitalist matchmaking. He launched the Investor Relations Group (IRG) in Vancouver, B.C., where he effectively positioned privately-held and undervalued companies to compete in the public arena. Foreseeing greater opportunity in the U.S, Bobby sold his IRG interest in 1995 and founded the BG Capital Management Corp., which specializes in turning undervalued companies into profitable ventures. The company’s many successes include Clearly Canadian, The Neptune Society and Neptune Memorial Reef, a first-of-its-kind ecological resting site off the coast of Miami. But that’s not all. Bobby stars in the reality TV series, Bobby G: Adventure Capitalist, which hit the airwaves on MOJO TV in January 2008.
In the midst of all of his business deals, Bobby found a way back to his old love of horses through a new passion – polo. From the time he watched his first Polo match he was smitten with the speed and excitement of the sport. “I hadn’t ridden horses since I was a 17-year-old farm boy living in northern Ontario, but I wondered how hard could it be to ride a horse and hit a ball?” Bobby soon found out, approaching polo not unlike every challenge – with vigor and authority. He invested in a few months of lessons and soon became a top-rated player; then he invested in 30 horses and created the Vancouver International Polo Team. His success on the field rivals that in the business world.
Saturday, July 3, 2010
How to Find a Job at a Startup Company
Today's guest post is from College Mogul co-founder Alex Lindahl.
Some of today's most successful companies were birthed on university grounds or through the vision of young entrepreneurs. Companies such as Apple, Dell, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo, Google, RockBand (Harmonix), and countless others sprung from guys who were either students or (let's face it) drop-outs in their 20s. And now, there's no reason why you can't follow in these footsteps. In light of the downturn of the economy, people are realizing that starting a company is not only less risky than they once thought, but also an extremely valuable experience.
However, this trend is also prevalent in the number of students and graduates who don't necessarily want to start their company, but who want to get involved and be a part of the same learning curve and opportunities. Both are reasons why I founded College Mogul as a resource for first-time entrepreneurs - I saw the need for a media site to chronicle the stories of these young entrepreneurs and emerging technologies from university labs, and to simply cover growing entrepreneur trends. For example, we just covered Local Motors, a startup that is crowdsourcing automotive design, that came from a Harvard Business School business plan competition.
But where do you find an internship or job at a startup? It can be intimidating if you're not connected with the right people, such as company founders and members of the venture capital community. Thankfully, there are niche sites that list these types of opportunities just as other jobs are listing. There's thousands of new companies started each year. There's nearly hundreds that come out of MIT alone. In fact, if you pool all of the revenue from the MIT entrepreneurs, you get the equivalent of what would be the world's 11th largest economy. Startups and entrepreneurs matter - they're huge drivers of economic prosperity and opportunity.
You don't have to go corporate if you don't want to. Find a job at a startup so you can wear multiple hats, learn how to grow and scale a company, connect with extraordinary businessmen, and network with the best. But most importantly, do it because its straight up fun and will lead to more opportunities.
I found my first job at
3. PartnerUp: An online community for small businesses, startups, and entrepreneurs. People use it to find new partners for their business ventures, post job opportunities, and network to find the perfect early stage opportunity to jump on board with.
4. HotStartupJobs.com: Ironically the site doesn't attract too much traffic, but it claims to aggregate over 300,000 startup jobs.
The Danger of Lingo and Jargon Available on the iPad * Home o Blogs o Columnists o Economics o Green Busi
The Danger of Lingo and Jargon
Posted by: Jena McGregor on June 26, 2007
This week’s Newsweek issue, which ambitiously tries to chronicle “What You Need to Know Now,” has a piece on “the most relevant lingo in business today.” While the four words or phrases it mentions are central to business today (BRIC, IPO, Hedge Fund, Private Equity), I gotta say they’re hardly what I think of when someone talks about today’s business lingo.
As a journalist—especially one who covers the often squishy world of leadership thinkers and management trends, I’m consistently amazed at how prevalent certain jargon spreads among executives. A few of the most irritating ones I hear these days: “journeys” (CEOs’ favorite ways of making sure I know they still have a ways to go), “accountability” (the broad but overused notion that nothing is acceptable but success) and “alignment” (a fancy way of saying we’ve got to get everyone on the same page).
I understand the importance of using language to bring together a team, of having a common vocabulary. But when the language becomes robotic to the point where it becomes meaningless—it’s used so often that managers don’t think for themselves—I find it disturbing. (And, I’ll admit, frustrating—especially when trying to write a story about a CEO who sounds like an automaton rather than a leader of people.) In a recent conversation with Andy Grove, the former chairman of Intel, he too expressed his concern about such language, calling them a fad: “[It’s] coming up with ridiculous phrases or obfuscating euphemisms when we don’t want to talk about things that are more unpleasant. In my view the word ‘innovation’ is overused, clichéd, meaningless. It’s one of a family of words. You can add empowerment to it. You can add accountability to it. The word green is about to be added to it.”
What’s the most irritating business jargon you’ve heard lately? What language is obfuscating the real conversations managers need to have?