Funding Ob-Seth-sion

I had been working on a post about building companies vs. "getting funded." Entrepreneurs sometimes get confused about which is the goal, and which is a side-benefit. They confuse correlation with causation. When I ask "what do you need?" or "what are you working on?"... I often hear about funding.*

Building a company sometimes requires outside funding.** For these, funding is one of many activities that founders need to pursue. But the focus needs to be on fixing what sucks. That is the purpose of your enterprise, not getting funded. It is finding something that needs fixing, and building an enterprise to do that, that results in funding. Not the other way around.

But I don't need to write that post anymore, because Seth Godin did. Right here.

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* So I just ask a second question- what will you use the money for? Then we can discuss the many options they might use to obtain those resources.

** This depends on your business model design. Many good companies get built without outside funding. I'd encourage you to prototype several bootstrapped business models for your venture so you understand your options.

Happy Fifth Anniversary to my Blog or... JULIA ROBERTS, SEX! AND 8 THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW!

Wow. I just realized on Monday that my blog is now 5 years old (not all blogs have this staying power). To celebrate, I have actually gone back and separated out the posts in the early years (blogger in the early years didn't do this easily), so that it is easier to find old posts (though I should have started this blog on wordpress, which would have been more user friendly*). I also reread a number of my old posts as I did this.

This has led me to the following THINGS EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW about me and this blog:

1) I still mostly agree with myself and find my early naivete and optimism to be amusing and refreshing. I also laugh at my own jokes.

2) The fields of BOP focused business and social entrepreneurship are progressing. In the early days, there wasn't much written and there were few conferences. Now it is hard (e.g., impossible for me) to keep up with the many books, articles and events.

3) I still have little idea of who the thousands of people are who read my blog every month. Commenting on blogs seems to be "so 2007." In any event, thank you. I hope my thoughts are useful to you. And I hope that many of you are "BOPreneurs" (or at least proto-BOPreneurs).

4) If you want to increase your readership, use titles such as "10 steps to...", "Ten Tips on...", "8 Things Everyone Needs to Know about... " or make references to sex and/or celebrities (I never anticipated that Julia Roberts would become the spokesperson for clean cookstoves).**

5) The way people come to my blog has changed. Used to be google and RSS. Now it is twitter and facebook.

6) I don't post as often as I used to. Part of this is that I have said what I have to say on what I view as key topics. And part of this is that I have less time. And part is I am now exploring impact investing more deeply... my guess is that more future posts will be on this topic. But I will leave BOPvestor blog to someone else (Ross? Rob?).

7) I started this blog to share my thoughts and learnings about my core belief that entrepreneurship is a powerful force for positive change in the world. From the beginning, my focus*** has been "to share experiences and opinions about the BOP, entrepreneurship, investing, philanthropy, sustainability, teaching, innovation, design or whatever I feel like." This focused approach seems to be working so far.

8) I still plan to write "longer than average" posts. Sorry, Nathaneal. I also hope to have more guest posts. (Ben Lyon, if you are reading this, you still owe me).

For twitter followers and facebook friends, this week I will be bringing back a few of my posts from the vaults. Looking back, some seem prescient, some misguided... and most unrepentantly optimistic.

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*Except I had no clue what I was doing. As in many things, I just started, and figured it out as I went.

**The title of this post could have worked in a sex theme too, but I just won't stoop that low on the 5th anniversary.

*** Use of intentional irony. Times two.

Light Weight Business Models

As promised in last week's post, here are my slides from the Enterprise Solutions session at the Global Health & Innovation Conference at Yale this afternoon. My hope is that it will help my bleeps design business models that are focused on "ounces of prevention" rather than "pounds of cure." I tried to share some of my thinking on how ideas from "lean start up" folks can be applied to social ventures working on global health challenges.

At the end of my presentation, I offered a free consult to anyone in the audience that was willing to publicly commit, then and there, to design/redesign a business model for a global health venture. I look forward to finding out more about the 16 people who took this first step to jumping in!

I also learned a lot from my co-presenters, and wish that we had more time for discussion following the session. Check out Ted London's new book, "Next Generation Business Strategies for the BOP" as well as the HBR article he referenced. Very helpful resources for thinking about what you want to do, and how you might go about it. It is much easier to travel light if you have friends along the way and rely on local resources, as Ted recommends.

If you enjoyed Michael Fairbanks of SEVEN Fund, I'd encourage you to check out his new blog, the Daedalus Experiment, where you can find out why some social entrepreneurs are like "self licking ice cream cones." Be careful... too much of that type of ice cream will put on the pounds, and you want to design a lean and light weight venture which can fuel itself off ounces of prevention.

Business Models for Prevention: "An ounce of prevention..."

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