Why Entrepreneurs Aren’t Risk Lovers

Successful entrepreneurs need to have an outsized appetite for risk. They have to thrill to danger, relish the idea that they might lose it all with one roll of the dice.

Right?

Wrong, obviously, or we wouldn’t have written it that way. (Also, we probably would not have started a business.)

Many people have debunked those ideas, most recently Malcolm Gladwell, writing in the New Yorker. Using as examples Ted Turner and John Paulson, who famously made billions betting against the housing bubble, he argues that successful entrepreneurs are not braver than everyone else. Instead, they are very good at finding opportunities to minimize risk so they don’t have to be brave….

Want to Work at a Startup? Does Your Startup Need Workers?

Talk about upside potential.

In the recession, lots of entrepreneurs have had to bootstrap their startups. They’re dying for talent, but can’t pay salaries. Meawhile, there are lots of smart people willing to work for, um, “alternative” compensation (i.e., equity, low pay, or nothing), because they want to build their resume, take a shot at a startup or just do something with their unemployed selves.

Enter JobNob.

Our smart friends at JobNob bring the two sides together. They have held eight successful mixers in Silicon Valley for job-seekers to connect with startups, and they’re brining the show to New York on Feb. 9…

2009 Was a Big Year for Start-Ups

Isn’t it nice to be validated? For more than a year, we’ve been talking about all the new businesses that would be started as a result of the recession. We knew there were people who felt liberated by being laid off or by quitting miserable jobs, and others who were launching start-ups because they didn’t see any job openings out there.

According to a new survey by Challenger, Gray & Christmas, 8.6 percent of unemployed managers and executives started started businesses last year, a four-year high.

“The start-up rate might have been even higher if banks had loosened their lending standards,” pointed out John Challenger, the company’s CEO…

Recession Briefing: Goodbye, Tavern on the Green

What you need to know today to survive and thrive in the recession.

Despite extensive government intervention in the housing market, some policy makers at the Federal Reserve are worried that even more might need to be done. (New York Times)

The aftershocks from deep recessions reverberate for years, even decades, and take an enduring toll on everything from government finances to countless upended individual lives. What economist John Irons calls “economic scarring” will long serve as a reminder of the 2007-09 recession. (USA Today)

Lacking a license and loaded with debt, Tavern on the Green, the glittery New York City eatery, went dark after a final champagne-drenched fete on New Year’s Eve. On Jan. 13 relics of the shuttered restaurant will be auctioned off over three days. (Wall Street Journal)…

Recession Lexicon: Femterprise

n./ Female-run business. Also, fempreneur.

Much has been made of the fact that women fared somewhat better in the recession than men (resulting in a mancession), particularly when it came to layoffs. But new data shows that the coming decade will also see a steady increase in the number of businesses started by women….

Entrepreneurs, Trust and Money

It might sound obvious, but if you’re running a business, you should aim to bring in revenue that exceeds the costs of running the business. It’s a point that panelists at New York Entrepreneur Week today at Columbia University felt they needed to reiterate, which may indicate that entrepreneurs are losing sight of what’s important in creating a successful business: income that will allow your business to grow.

“It’s a very simple thing to say,” said JP Werlin, Pipeline Deals. “But it runs contrary to what you’re taught in the venture capitalist industry, but – ‘no expenses before revenue,’ it’s a mantra we have internally in our company and it’s helped us get to where we are today.” PipelineDeals, which makes software for salespeople, never raised venture capital, but developed a company structure that allowed it to build slow and scale based on the revenue they brought in – not on spending money raised from investors…

Recession Briefing 8.24: Manorexia on the Rise

What you need to know today to survive and thrive in the recession. If you come across a good article or blog post about the recession pass it on. To receive Recession Briefing in your inbox, subscribe to our daily email.

Financial fears and the recession are contributing to the rise in the number of men suffering from anorexia. (Sky News)

Obama administration officials are looking at 1937′s stalled comeback from the Great Depression for clues as to what this recession’s rebound might be like. (Wall Street Journal)

In the recession, there are a proliferation of scams that target job seekers. In addition to sham job-finding companies, perpetrators prey on the desperate by offering credit rating repairs, foreclosure rescues, and home-based businesses that aren’t legitimate. (Boston Herald)…

Love in the Time of Layoff: Man Behind the Curtain

Note: Deborah Siegel was due to submit her post today, but her growing responsibilities in a rapidly developing venture have precluded her doing so. In other words— the twins are really kicking her ass. Despite being deep into the second trimester, her “morning sickness” hasn’t let up, and she is currently sitting up in bed with a cold compress on her fevered brow. She has thereby ceded the reins of “Love in the Time of Layoff” to me. You, dear reader know me as her house-husband, Her Man Godfrey, her Sancho Panza, her sometimes Bartleby. And now I’m honestly maybe a little too giddy with power. I am Marco.

Yes, I do exist… even as I eliminate the last traces of my existence in our little one-bedroom apartment.

I spent the afternoon yesterday dismantling my desk and bookcase and moving them out of our bedroom: we are staging our apartment yet again. It’s been on the market for months, and with a looming move to bigger digs in Park Slope we’ve redoubled our efforts to get it sold. New broker, new price, new priorities: we needed to let in more light and air, make the place roomier. It became obvious that my office away from work, my study and refuge from a crazy world, my anchor, was doomed. Into the boxes with my design books, my graphic novels and old Tarzan pulps. Reality beckoned…

Raising Money in Recession

It’s no surprise that it’s been tough to start and run a new business in the downturn, but Julie Brown of Inner Rewards shared her blow-by-blow experiences raising money over the last year with Collective-E. The full post is worth a read, but here are some excerpts. At this point in the piece, she has raised $765,000 from an angel who proves, throughout the tale, to be just that.

July 2008—I set out to hire a team and get started with an aggressive goal of building and launching a beta site by the end of the year. Because my investor wanted to build a company ready to be fully backed, and given an aggressive timeline to build a full blown site with content and videos, we ended up with a very high monthly burn rate (monthly expenses). I immediately set out to raise more money.

September 15th, 2008—Lehman collapses and the market is in turmoil, every single investor runs for the hills. I have now built up a full staff with 7 employees and 40 contractors and need to raise cash quickly or we will run out of money before I can even launch.…

Entrepreneurs in Emerging Markets See Gloom Lifting

In a report published last month, Endeavor, the nonprofit group that helps entrepreneurs in developing countries, revealed one group’s outlook on the global economy. The organization surveyed 65 of its entrepreneurs, the bulk of them in South America. Companies had revenue between $500,000 and $20 million. Their answers were surprisingly upbeat, and contrasting even with their December responses to the same questions, which were also not as bad as you’d expect. Entrepreneurs around the world, particularly those working with Endeavor, seem to be in fairly good standing.

Key results:

Has the global crisis had any impact on your business to date?…