Power Pal

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an

I just finished a great book on product design called The Inmates are Running the Asylum by Alan Cooper . Computers have really reached into every aspect of our daily lives. Whether in the bedroom, kitchen, automobile, office, or on the go in our cell phones, a computer is present behind the scenes. The problem, Cooper argues, is how horrible the interactions are with the vast majority of those devices and software programs. Not just the interfaces, but the entire interaction. And it's these horrible interactions that are generating a digital divide across the world between those that put the time in to accommodate and learn the poor design ( apologists ) and those that just suffer silently ( survivors ). I'm certainly not a stranger to some of the concepts around design. I studied human computer interaction while I was at Berkeley, tasking several classes in user-centered design, UI design, and usability and even did a research project on an alternative handwriting reco

When I visited FlightCaster over spring break as part of the Duke Week-in-Cities trip, Jason Freedman (founder and CEO) suggested that we all read The Four Steps to the Epiphany by Steve Blank . FlightCaster went through the YCombinator program in 2009 and from what I gathered the book was required reading. I had never even heard of it and it was required reading! I just finished it and I certainly understand why that's the case now. I have to admit the book wasn't necessarily what I expected. It certainly wasn't product management 101. It turned out to be much more about navigating the start-up process rather than specifics about how to design great products. But I can't believe I almost missed out on this one. The book outlines the Customer Development model, a parallel technique to product development that is meant to guide you in the process of iterating and testing each part of your business model until you find one that is repeatable and scalable. The m

In my continued efforts to learn about the advertising industry, I read a great textbook called Advertising and Promotion, An Integrated Marketing Communications Perspective . There are far too many topics to summarize here, so I'll cover my main take-aways. The book covered the integrated marketing planning process and aspects of the promotional mix, including: advertising, direct marketing, interactive and internet marketing, sales promotion, publicity and public relations, and personal selling. The book was well-written, interesting, and included up-to-date anecdotes and stories. It definitely reinforced much of what I learned in brand management and other marketing classes, particularly the marketing planning process. It was a great overview text. A couple of the things I found most interesting (major take-aways): Companies spend an unbelievable amount on advertising and promotion . If you add it all up, companies spend in excess of $1 trillion. U.S. media expenditures al

I've been wanting to get up-to-speed on online advertising and how it works. But I figure before I do that I should learn a thing or two about advertising. Based on the suggestion of my friend and classmate Nate Jaffee (a marketing genius), I'm starting with one of the basics - David Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather. He wrote a book, published in 1985, called Ogilvy on Advertising . The following are my notes from reading the book - apologies if they seem terse ... it's how the book is written and saves me time in writing up this post. "Consumers still buy products whose advertising promises them value for money, beauty, nutrition, relief from suffering, social status and so on. All over the world." How to Produce Advertising that Sells Do your homework - learn about the product, what kind of advertising your competitors are doing and how successful they are with it, learn about your consumers (how they think about your product, what language they use, what att

I listened to The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell on CD on a flight close to a year ago and took some notes on it. I wrapped up my classes and have a little time, so thought I'd finally summarize some of those notes here. In the interest of saving myself time, I'm going to leverage the Wikipedia article liberally (via quoting) and then add my notes on top of that. What is a Tipping Point? From Wikipedia: Tipping points are "the levels at which the momentum for change becomes unstoppable." [ 1 ] Gladwell defines a tipping point as a sociological term: "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point." [ 2 ] The book seeks to explain and describe the "mysterious" sociological changes that mark everyday life. As Gladwell states, "Ideas and products and messages and behaviors spread like viruses do." [ 3 ] The examples of such changes in his book include the rise in popularity and sales of Hush Puppies shoes in the mi

I just read a great article in McKinsey Quarterly called " Four ways to get more value from digital marketing " by David Edelman, a partner in their Marketing and Sales Practice in Boston. Here is a summary of the four lessons with a couple comments of my own thrown in: 1. Orchestrate an integrated consumer experience. Coordinate activities to engage the consumer throughout an increasingly digital purchase journey. Some examples: TV commercials should offer keywords that can be used later for online searches, links should go to specific places to learn about and buy products, retailers should use the same images and rich descriptions as the manufacturer, shifting of budgets from mass media spending to areas that influence a consumer's evaluation process (presence in stores and online, search engine positioning, content for retailer's web sites, and cultivating recommendations online influencers like bloggers). 2. Inspire customers to help you stretch your market

Read an interesting blog post titled " The Future of Music Business Models (and Those Who Are Already There) " by Mike Masnick. I don't know much about the music industry, so thought it was interesting. The main take-away of the new way to approach music business models is: Connect with Fans (CwF) + Reason to Buy (RtB) = The Business Model The business models he used as examples ranged from giving away music for free online (but charging for "packages"), to getting your fan-base to fund your next record, to Here were the examples: Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails - They give away their music for free online, but ask that you sign-up for their email list. You then get emails about their upcoming tour dates, can find ways to connect with other fans (like forums, mobile apps, and user submitted videos), to purchasing higher-end packages. He's made a lot of money this way ... despite giving the music away for free. Drummer Josh Freese - He priced his album s

I've been trying to get up-to-speed on the mobile industry these days and had a thought on search and implications for marketers. All this may be obvious, but I figure I'd jot it down while I'm thinking about it. I was looking into all the new location based gaming companies starting up these days. In looking over what companies like Foursquare , Gowalla , and Booyah are doing, it seems like it introduces new opportunities for how search and targeted advertising will work. Each of these games is producing a rich amount of content regarding where, when, and how consumers behave in the real world. This is incredibly valuable if you're a retailer or service provider. Apply some analytics to this data set and you could form completely new segmentation strategies based on behaviors rather than demographics. For example, make offers to those people that may actually respond to them based on their previous behaviors (e.g. they don't always frequent the same locat

Read a good article in Business Week titled " Apple vs. Google " about how the two companies are on a collision course for each other. The recent acquisitions of AdMob (by Google for $750M) and Quattro Wireless (by Apple for $275M) and the uncanny similarities between the iPhone and the Nexus One highlight how similar the two firms strategies may be. They both want to dominate the mobile industry. According to the analysts, mobile is the next key battleground for digital riches: The key battleground in the near term is mobile computing. Analysts who once tingled when talking about the Internet are getting that same old feeling over mobile's potential. Morgan Stanley's ( MS ) Mary Meeker predicts that within five years more users will tap into the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs. Desktop Internet use led to the rise of Google, eBay ( EBAY ), and Yahoo, but the mobile winners are still emerging. "Now is the time to get going," says Doug Clinton