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What They Don't Teach You At Stanford Business School

Austin Secret Society of Entrepreneurs 9

(PALO ALTO CA) Everyone at some point in their lives has had an idea about some type of buisness. This makes nearly everyone partially entrepreneurial. If you do not own 100% of You Inc, you're asinine.

I've met thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs since my first business I started my sophomore year and I've been mentored in a way shape or form by all of them (even if its in what NOT to do). Here's the list

-1- One Hit Wonder. In music terms, they have been riding the wave since their hit song in the 80s. In terms of entrepreneurship, they started Postage.com in the 90s and have been a pop culture icon, the subject of business school case studies and on the speaker tour ever since.

-2- Pee On Your Parade. This non-entreprenuer is a voracious consumer of start-up news. They're more on the reading the news versus making the news. He regurgitates all the critical material into pee for your parade. They need a hug more than anything in the hug-then-escape manuver. If you're related to them, forward this post to five people near them.

-3- Ready, aim, ready, ready, ready. Measuring twice and cutting once works great for carpentry. Unfortunately, measuring for five years and never cutting, a barn doth not get raised.

-4- DDSSer. DDSS stands for 'Dumb it Down, Sandbag for Success'. Is alpha but acts beta, gamma, delta or lower down the food chain. They can kiss ass and swallow their a-for-alpha, a-list status and even kiss a 1st year b-schoolers butt. They definitely don't teach this manuver in business school.

-5- Old school. This retro entrepreneur makes money the old fashioned way, they cut-and-paste it. They take what worked in Korea and moved it to LA and called it Pinkberry. They took what worked in a roll-up of video stores (i.e. buying mom and pop video stores and calling them all 'Blockbuster') and applied it to the garbage industry.

Other old school cut and pasters Dell, Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg and of course Bill Gates. Old school lends credence to the phrase, 'good artists create but great artists steal". I think Picasso, another entrepreneur, said that.

-6- Recent Rockstar. This crop is labelled the next next thing. Has the cache of crunchTech, siliconTech and allThingsE...what?! You haven't heard of these blogs. Well unfortunately recent rockstar's domain is domiciled squarely in the tech bubble kingdom.

-7- Vicarious. See it. Read it. See it some more then do it. The entrepreneur waiting in the wings is going about it the right way. Moonlighting is the next step but there's a catch-22, snafu with VC funding. Get $900k and avoid the VCs you don't wanna meet. http://gigaom.com/2008/01/08/9-vcs-youre-gonna-want-to-avoid/

-8- ex-Entrepreneur. Is trying to stop their hard wiring that keeps them on the start-a-business-train. But you know what they say, "I can't quit you"...

-9- Monetize Entrepreneurs (aka a VC). This risk adverse entrepreneur is very much getting in the game via investing. It feels great to say 'no' but pulling the trigger and getting operations experience is tough. Loading and pulling the trigger on starting a biz is even harder.

As a VC you buy into gaming companies but don't game yourself.
As a VC you buy into bioTech firms but got Cs in organic chem
As a VC you invest millions but don't have your school loans paid off.

The VC sees recurring entrepreneur patterns but can't systemize it enough to discover winners 100, 80, 30% of the time. As a true entrepreneur, we are happy going from success forecast of 55.1% to 55.6% by learning to do ONE thing better.

Found Read, found hacks should be a blog on its own. Or someone should take the theme, "What They Don't Teach You At Stanford Business School".

I'm part of a club that shares underground tips, 'Austin Secret Society of Entrepreneurs (asse9)'... check out the Facebook group for asse9