Angelic investors March 28, 2007
Posted by jefft in Case studies, Micro-enterprise, Startups.add a comment
John Waller is Billboard’s top Christian recording artist to watch for 2007, and in this interview he describes how his church has invested in his start-up missionary venture:
SouthLink isn’t a large church, so how did it come to raise $50,000 to help you record your independent project?
Waller: For the first year-and-a-half, I had a lot of According to John CDs. One of them was an album that never got released. When we moved to Colorado, we had all these CDs on hand, so we decided that every family that came to the church would get one, allowing the music to minister to them and hoping they would pass that on to someone else to draw them to the church. After about a year-and-a-half, I began writing songs just for the people at SouthLink, inspired by them and what God was doing in the church. Each week I’d teach my worship team a new song, and after a while the people began asking, “When are we going to get this music?”
We cast a vision to raise money for this project and raised a little over $50,000 in four weeks. I also cast the vision to some of my friends back in Georgia. Dan Cathy, the president of Chick-Fil-A, is a friend of mine that I’ve known for a long time—his dad (and company founder) Truett Cathy was my Sunday school teacher—so he contributed a lot to the project. The church owns 75 percent of the recording, so there is a business advantage for SouthLink, too. Beach Street ended up purchasing a lot of those master recordings from the church. About four or five of the songs carried over from the indie project [to The Blessing], and I’ve also signed for a large portion of my royalties to go back to SouthLink.
“There was totally completely not a plan” March 28, 2007
Posted by jefft in Uncategorized.add a comment
Startup Studio is a new series of podcasts featuring interviews with successful entrepreneurs. Here’s a popular one with the founder of fashion biz Espirit. Go to the main site for more.
Class on Thursday March 28, 2007
Posted by jefft in Assignments.add a comment
Was spring break last week? I don’t remember. Not because I was partying hard, but because I ended up with some unexpected work to do.
Ah well. Whatever happened over the past ten days, tomorrow we’ll discuss Chapter 6. We’ll also review what we did last class and talk about hybrid social enterprise.
Next week: intellectual property, then we’ll jump ahead to business plans.
A personal meeting mistake March 28, 2007
Posted by jefft in Advice, Case studies, Venture capital.add a comment
Here’s an instructive reflection on a VC meeting gone wrong.
Mistakes and start-ups linkarama March 19, 2007
Posted by jefft in Advice.add a comment
The Business Growth Network has a roundup of links on bad (& good?) mistakes commonly made by start-ups.
Gen Y rewrites family business March 19, 2007
Posted by jefft in Trends.add a comment
Here’s an informative set of articles in BusinessWeek on how entrepreneurial youth (that’s you, folks) might end up hiring their own parents for family start-ups.
Private and public March 17, 2007
Posted by jefft in Case studies, News, Startups, Stock, Trends.add a comment
In our next class we’ll start looking at stock & start-ups. We already talked briefly about the prospect of a liquidity event, such as acquistion or an IPO.
As we’ll discuss in more detail, IPOs have some advantages but they also have distinct disadvantages, particularly in regard to the legal rules that govern public companies. Still, even the most vocal critics of going public have been known to alter their opinion. For example, check out the latest news regarding the Blackstone Group: Blackstone IPO would represent a flip-flop.
Blumberg Legal Forms March 16, 2007
Posted by jefft in Advice, Law and policy.add a comment
This is the link, yes? I’ve never checked out these forms, much less paid for them, so I can’t really comment on their quality.
However, I will let you in on a little secret: law libraries (including public court law libraries) typically have collections of sample legal forms that I imagine aren’t too different from these. Which you can copy for free!
Now, I would be the first to tell you the standard advice for a legal form found in a form book, CD or online: never rely on a prefab form. Read it, make sure it’s written well, tailor it to your particular situation, all in consultation with an attorney.
Still, forms are not a bad place to start, and it’s always good to be able to be able to understand as much as possible about what your attorney may be giving you.
Choice of entity Powerpoint March 16, 2007
Posted by jefft in Choice of entity, Class notes.add a comment
