Posts Tagged ‘entrepreneur’

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Josh Weinstein Offers Advice to Potential Entrepreneurs: Do it!

Monday, August 1st, 2011

josh-weinstein.jpgJosh Weinstein is the founder of YouAre.TV. YouAre.TV allows anyone to be on TV and interactive gameshows via webcam. He previously
founded CollegeOnly, GoodCrush, and CollegeGovs. Josh likes people,
technology, and leveraging the latter for the benefit of the former. You can check out some of his early work at Photocracy.org.

Josh was nice enough to sit down with TILE for a few questions.

TILE: What inspired you to become an entrepreneur?
Josh: My passion for creating things is the primary catalyst for me becoming an entrepreneur. GoodCrush was the first entrepreneurial project I worked on post-grad and was something I came up with in college. It was clearly addressing a problem and was used by a lot of my peers, so I was excited to continue to work on it.
TILE: Where do you get your best ideas?
Josh: The best ideas come from actual experiences when you are like “I really wish I had something that could do X” — that’s how I came up with the CrushFinder originally. YouAreTV came about in the same way.

TILE: Which start-up are you most proud of and why?
Josh: Tough to say between GoodCrush and YouAreTV. GoodCrush was cool because we clearly hit a need and people really liked it. YouAreTV, however, is really novel and disruptive.
TILE: How has your experience as an entrepreneur – personally, financially and in business – compared with your expectations?
Josh: Patience is of the essence in entrepreneurship. You hear about a lot of homeruns that seems to be magic right out of the box, but it’s not like that for the majority of the cases. Even some of those instant homeruns weren’t instant — Groupon for example, was a pivot from a failing venture.
TILE: What advice would you give to any young people considering entrepreneurship?
Josh: Do it. Learn to code.
TILE: Help our members learn from your mistakes…What’s the dumbest thing you’ve ever done in your financial life?
Josh: I worked with an outside firm to code some of our site – they were incredibly expensive but ostensibly some of the best in the world. It was a massive waste of money and they didn’t care about our stuff at all, it didn’t even work at the end. I should have used our money to focus on building a team internally instead of a) racing to get the product out b) working with people who weren’t invested in the same way.

Making it Work: Internet Shopping Entrepreneurs Talk Shop

Monday, June 27th, 2011

Carla Holtze and Kimberly Skelton used business school as an excuse to do what they already wanted to do: create a social website that roughly imitates the experience of having your best friend give you the thumbs-up or thumbs-down in the dressing room. Thus was born WingTipIt.com.

But starting a company isn’t easy – especially when it involves learning new technology in a relatively new industry. Watch them talk about what’s worked and what hasn’t:

>> TILE brings you exclusive opinions, explanations, and interviews from experts in every industry. Have a burning question or an expert you’d like to see interviewed? Just Ask TILE!

Dilbert Creator Says “B Students” Should Skip Math Class and Sell Candy in the Cafeteria Instead

Thursday, April 14th, 2011

If you’ve ever felt like certain school subjects just aren’t your thing, read this essay by Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams.

He tells the story of how he learned to run a business by simply going out and doing it. He didn’t need to be an expert in anything in order to be an entrepreneur; he just used little bits of different talents he already had, he failed a lot, and he kept trying.



(He apparently hasn’t heard that Algebra II is the key to success.)

Seems like every piece of advice ever tells us that the only way to accomplish anything is by trying to do something. Keep that in mind when your campus lemonade stand is crushed by a competitor. At least you’ve done something.

And next time, you may be the ruthless competition-crusher!

Check out some real-life class-cutting capitalists.

Don’t Just Buy Local – Buy Personal

Thursday, February 24th, 2011

“Recently I saw a small business shut its doors. I feel terrible because I am partly to blame.

I never stopped by this store. While I can tell myself it was more convenient to shop at a large retailer, the truth is I didn’t stop in because I never saw any cars in the parking lot. I was uncomfortable with how both of us would feel if I browsed and didn’t make a purchase: He disappointed, me guilty.”

What do you think?

Have you ever avoided going into a store or restaurant because you felt awkward about interacting with the owner or salesperson?

Trying To Protect Older Workers, Japan Creates A Youth Crisis

Tuesday, February 1st, 2011

“TOKYO — Kenichi Horie was a promising auto engineer, exactly the sort of youthful talent Japan needs to maintain its edge over hungry Korean and Chinese rivals. As a worker in his early 30s at a major carmaker, Mr. Horie won praise for his design work on advanced biofuel systems.

But like many young Japanese, he was a so-called irregular worker, kept on a temporary staff contract with little of the job security and half the salary of the “regular” employees, most of them workers in their late 40s or older. After more than a decade of trying to gain regular status, Mr. Horie finally quit — not just the temporary jobs, but Japan altogether.

He moved to Taiwan two years ago to study Chinese.”

What do you think?

See any similarities between the situation in Japan and the situation here in the U.S.?

Gourmet ice. You heard it here first.

Monday, January 31st, 2011

ice-cube-blue.jpg
credit: _Fidelio_

(Is this some sort of sign from Zeus that our crazy American economy is chugging back to life?)

Meet Adam Blake, the Young Prince of Real Estate

Wednesday, November 24th, 2010

TILE showed up for part of the Global Student Entrepreneur Awards at the New York Stock Exchange this October, and we met some young folks who made us feel bad about sleeping through college.

Adam is just one of them. He was THE Global Student Entrepreneur of the Year in 2005, because he figured out how to turn a simple off-campus housing need into a multi-million dollar real estate business.

But… why? Well, we asked him:

Watch the oh-ficial GSEA 2010 recap video here. To see all our GSEA interviews, click here.

Kiva Partners With Accion To Microlend In The U.S.

Monday, October 25th, 2010

Poor entrepreneurs are everywhere, so why limit U.S.-based microfinance operations to overseas customers?

  • Kiva.org, an online nonprofit that helps anyone make microloans to foreign businesses via local institutions, is expanding its scope to include entrepreneurs in the United States.
  • Through a partnership with Accion Texas-Louisiana, Kiva will start to offer microloans to new and existing business owners in those states. Kiva’s model is a kind of “crowdfunding,” which allows lots of small donors to make a big impact.
  • Microfinance helps poor entrepreneurs get access to loans. These individuals are usually seen as too risky for traditional bank loans, so microloans can greatly increase their chances of success.

Facts & Figures

  • Accion is the third U.S. microfinance institution Kiva has partnered with since October 2009.
  • Less than 1% of the borrowers featured on Kiva’s website are based in the U.S.
  • The average U.S. microloan is about $7,000.

Best Quote

“Awareness of microfinance is really low here.” – Premal Shah, President of Kiva

Your Friend Can Now Lend You $20 Using A Credit Card

Friday, October 1st, 2010

Is this the end of the entire credit card business model as we know it??

  • A new company called Square is blowing the minds of credit card company executives everywhere. Square produces a little gadget that plugs into the headphone jacks of a variety of iThings and the Android phone. That’s where things get crazy.
  • The free device allows anybody with a bank account to accept credit card payments in person or over the phone.
  • Usually, only businesses accept credit cards. They have to purchase expensive equipment and then pay fee after fee just for the ability to process credit payments. Square Up changes that, eliminating equipment, setup, and maintenance fees.

Facts & Figures

  • Square’s chief executive is the co-founder of Twitter.
  • Each time you process a payment using Square Up, the company keeps 2.75% of the transaction amount, plus $0.15.
  • At first, transactions are capped at $1,000, but that cap can be raised over time or for established businesses.

Time to enter the real world? Blair Brandt will help you find a place.

Thursday, August 26th, 2010

blair-brandt.jpg Blair Brandt is the founder and CEO of The Next Step Realty. And at just 22, he’s responsible for managing all the different components of the business: he recruits and manages brokers and Next Step staff, develops relationships with clients, oversees PR and marketing, business operations, legal and financial matters, tax, web design and programming, investment and return on that investments for investors… pretty much everything. Blair spends most of his day meeting with people to seek collaboration, advice, cross-marketing opportunities, and so on. But he found the time to answer some of our questions, so check it out:

TILE: How did you come up with the idea for a service like this?
Blair: For the past four years, I worked as an assistant at a real estate firm while in Florida. There I noticed one crucial factor in the marketplace: the power of referrals and the importance of having good leads for a realtor.

Especially in bad times, having personal networks that could deliver you with quality clients was the way to continued success. SO, if we were going to set up a leads service, we needed to find a niche that we could specialize in and that could be ours.

We realized our niche when my friends from college started to call me asking if I knew brokers in the cities they were moving to for new jobs. So, while I was helping a few of my friends get matched up with the right brokers, my friend and future business partner Belton Baker picked up on what I was doing and said – listen, let’s market this to everyone we know, and everyone they know. We immediately saw the demand for an improved, streamlined housing transition from college to the real world.

TILE: What was your first apartment search like?
Blair: Our first apartment search actually went pretty well. We spent months recruiting the best real estate brokers for the job in major cities, and we really did some extensive interviewing and personal networking to make sure we were dealing with the right people. Once we started to get our clients, which happened more in a wave of hundreds than in any one single first search, the brokers were very well prepared to service the clients. Most of their clients were young professionals anyway and this is what they specialized in, but they hadn’t directly marketed their services to colleges – that became our business.

TILE: Why is your logo a giraffe? NextStep-logo-only.jpg
Blair: My philosophy from the time I started this company with Belton is that the transition from college to the real world is one of the most intense psychological and logistical bridges young people must cross. Of course, life offers countless challenges after graduation, but the change in lifestyle from student to adult is a rapid one for recent graduates. Graduates are often embarking on their first job and career, and in the meantime making all the other adjustments required in moving to a new city. We decided if we could help recent graduates by solving one of the problems – housing – we could develop our own niche market in the process. The giraffe  is symbolic and metaphorical because it represents the nature of our clients during this transition. Giraffes take some of the largest steps of any animal and they reach high. Our clients are similarly reaching high in their new beginning and taking a very large step into the real world and their first home.

TILE: What advice would you give your teenage self?
Blair: Dream big.

TILE: Can you tell us a secret about the real estate business?
Blair: It’s about specialized service, having an expertise in a particular process or niche, and building relationships with expanding networks of people. Most of what we do is personal networking. We started this business with a list of 500 students at college campuses to help spread the word, and the domino effect is beyond what we ever expected. First friends, then friends of friends, then friends of friends of friends, and before you know it, you are dealing directly with the public. If you can specialize in a certain real estate niche, associate yourself with that niche, and then use networks to create momentum, you can get something off the ground fast.

To see Blair talking in real life, check out his recent interview on Bloomberg TV: http://bit.ly/dlIxYM

>> TILE brings you exclusive opinions, explanations, and interviews from experts in every industry. To read more, click on Ask the Experts in the TILE Library.

Have a burning question or an expert you’d like to see interviewed? Just Ask TILE!

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