Digital Entrepreneurship at the Imperial College Festival
The other day I went to an event at Imperial College which featured a Q&A session on the subject of ‘Digital Entrepreneurship’ organised by the Business School. The panel consisted of three web company founders, two were experienced hands while the third was a recent MBA graduate still in the earlier stages of building his business. Here’s what they had to say:
That changes in technology have made it much cheaper and easier to start a web business than it once was. Amazon cloud services were cited as a key example.
That it is possible to bootstrap finance a business from your own resources but if that process takes too long the market opportunity might get missed, and that investors can bring a lot of extra know-how to the table.
Asked what advice he’d give to a budding entrepreneur, one panellist suggested ‘find a co-founder’ - as an investor he is wary of one-man-bands.
That one of the virtues of a digital business is that it can be cheap to fail. It is important to research your idea and see if it is already being done outside your familiar market, perhaps in Asia. But it isn’t essential to be completely original, and that sometimes the fast-follower who sees how to better commercialise an existing product is the one who really makes money.
That getting the right people is crucial, and that sometimes you must be prepared to invest in hiring younger staff and developing them. All three panelists agreed that the benefits of co-location were overwhelming, none were fans of offshoring work.
That you need to be careful about whose investment you take, and that one of the biggest areas of friction between founders and investors is the nature and timing of the exit strategy. The most experienced panelist said that he only invested in businesses which he thought were mature enough to understand this.