In today’s International Herald Tribune, Thomas Crampton has an engaging story, German Brothers Break the Mold, about the three brothers in Germany who became successful student turned entrepreneurs. They setup an auction website, Alando.de, in 1999 that was soon bought by Ebay. Their next venture was a mobile content company, Jamba, which Verisign bought recently for $237m. Key take-aways from the story are that they:
- Developed “aggressive curiosity” to understand how Silicon Valley entrepreneurs found ideas, raised money, hired and expanded companies.
- Researched what they wanted to do. They believe that consumer focused Web services are great opportunities right now.
- Ran a lean, indeed frugal, organization.
- Out-hustled their bigger competitors to develop new segments.
- Resolved conflicts among founders in a mature fashion.
- Tried derivates of the original idea when things didn’t work.
- Quickly embraced new insights that came from relentless experimentation.
Clearly Silicon Valley type entrepreneurship is going global. In fact one of the Samwer brothers says that: “American companies are not smarter or better managed. The main difference is that they have more capital and thus can be more aggressive”
Last month I wrote an article in Silicon India (also carried in Smart Techie) where I tell the story of Alexandar Amosu (the “Lord of Ringtones”). In 2000, when he was 24, Amosu was tinkering with his phone one day, when he decided to try to compose a ring tone by simply punching different buttons on the keypad until he got the tune right. Soon R ‘n’ B Ringtones was born. It took in nearly $2 million in the first year itself, and that marked the end of Amosu’s university career.
Typically, student-turned-entrepreneurs do better with consumers as they are able to smell out trends among early adopters, usually their peers, and cash in on them. This is how Jerry Yang (of Yahoo), Larry Page and Sergey Brin (of Google), Alexandar Amosu, or Samwer brothers have become successful. Alternatively, one can become an executive-turned-entrepreneur after accumulating years of working experience. These entrepreneurs can then leverage their professional relationships to build and sell complex enterprise offerings. Both these routes of entrepreneurship have their heroes. Pick your inspiration and take a plunge!
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