A fun part of being a professor is talking to entrepreneurs and learning from them. A few weeks ago, I was talking with a European CEO who had just moved his company to California. He has a pretty amazing business model, which is quickly evolving as they learn about the landscape of the industry. But in […]
Entrepreneurs on Hostile Ground: 5 Lessons from Eastern Europe
The fall of the Berlin Wall, which happened exactly 25 years ago, marked the dawn of a very complex transitional period for Eastern European countries. Yet even amid the tough environment, some entrepreneurs were able to overcome all the barriers and start businesses, some of which have since become thriving multinationals. At that time, entrepreneurs […]
If You Are Considering Angel Investing, don’t Miss These 5 Tips
A hundred startup deals – the milestone that IESE’s Business Angel Network will shortly reach – can pan out into almost as many different outcomes: a multiplicity of investor recipes, unforeseen business situations, investment trends, hot sector waves, or be subject to entrepreneurs’ idiosyncrasies. So if you are a novel investor and don’t want […]
Crowdfunding and the Financing of Entrepreneurial Ventures
Lending Club’s IPO preparations mark an important milestone for Peer to Peer (P2P) lending. Since its inception in 2007, Lending Club has facilitated billions of dollars in personal loans with about $2 billion of those loans originating in 2013 alone. In essence, P2P lending websites (Prosper and Zopa are other examples) have disintermediated the banking […]
Entrepreneurship with “obvious” business ideas
Obvious business ideas – of the kind that makes you say, “How come no one ever thought of that before?” – may not sound very exciting, but it’s an area where entrepreneurs can do wonderful things. A good example of an “obvious” business idea is when an entrepreneur spots an interesting product or service in […]
