“Entrepreneurship is a discipline”
Entrepreneurial thinking can be applied to a lot of situations, especially engineering,
If you understand the bigger picture of why you’re designing features, that’ll take you a long way
As a faculty member, running a lab is like running a business
grant competition
staff management
There are business plan competitions all over and your entrepreneurial skills can be a source of won cash.
The Purpose of Business Plans
About planning (you wouldn’t go build something you haven’t designed first
Establish your budget
Find out if your idea is even feasible
You need to be able to convince yourself the idea is worth it
That’s money and time that you don’t want to waste on something that won’t pan out.
Convince investors your idea is worth their money and time
Most often used as a sales document
Characteristics of a business plan
You get what you put in
If you spend more time building a plan and researching, you get a better finished product
He’s referring to spending more time researching and developing, not editing grammar.
Expect modifications
There should be a natural succession and it should read like a story
Effectively convey information with bullets and diagrams (visuals)
25-30 page max
Needs to answer questions they will have.
No confidential information
Don’t detail your secret recipe and then swear every investor to secrecy
Basic Business Plan outline (plenty of examples on the internet)
Cover sheet
name, contact
revision #/date
Table of contents
Executive summary
2-3 pages
only thing they’ll look at
critical points
Define a problem/need
magnitude of problem
current approaches
how those approaches fall short
Describe solution
talk about what tech does, not how it works
focus on advantages and degree of disruption of how we do things
A good solution
fundamental tech
disruptive tech
intellectual prop protection
clear translation into products or service
cooperation of the inventor/technical expert
Describe company
type of company
founder info
mission statement
History
product description
Market analysis (industry analysis, tarket markets, customer profile, competitive analysis)
research (dialogue with cust)
References
Operations
Where you are to where you wanna go
Time-money
how will you scale-up
how will you get product to customer
post-scale responsibilities
Marketing strategy
revenue model
market entry strategy
Partnerships
expansion strategies
The 4 P’s
Pricing
Positioning
Promotion
Place
Management
investors invest in people(teams), not products
bios on key people
at least have a team of advisors in different areas of expertise
Financing
“Bootstrapping”
“non-dilutive sources”
“dilutive sources”
Exit strategy
how will they make money at the end?
Financial statements
for 5 years
balance sheet
income statement
- cash flow
