Founder of coches.com at IE Business School

Entrepreneur session 3:

Arrola 

A young successful entrepreneur who's wife and family as his true passion have given him the strength and drive to grow his passion for cars and achieve a successful enterprise and a balanced life.

I believe, Arrola's comment about appreciating the important people in your life and never putting them second is possibly the most valuable take away from this session.  

Despite my remote class attendance, I was truly touched by his comments.

I was able to follow the class thanks to my fellow class mate Radek, who kindly invited me to the class through his skype. (Picture below is a screen shot from my laptop) as  despite being away, I was in no way gonna miss this class ;-)

 In fact, without losing thread of this blog post completely, I really feel that I need to mention something about the experience of this experimental class... 

It has absolutely been amazing so far. The class is extremely interactive but not only inside the class... but on the net through  participants twits. The picture on the right is a screen shot from my laptop while I was following this session.

As you can see, twits were being posted in real time, as the class was ongoing. You could read what was being said in the class, shared thoughts, opinions and ideas. It was truly interactive.

I have had other MBA students asking questions about the class who have simply come to know about it through our twits. I think this was such a creative idea which was started by our professor Enrique Dans who also suggested the the #ietechstartup  where you can read all our twits related to these classes. 

Beside the great fun of being able to use social media in such a simple but creative way to share your class experience in real time, you meet great entrepreneurs and see them as ordinary people who you can associate to. 

You hear them talk about their success and failure and about their personal life and how entrepreneurship has effected their lives. You hear how they made their dream  become reality... because they dared to dream!

It is such an encouragement to see that these brave individuals have made it against all odds. To hear them talk and actually realize that they are just like you and I.

We often have this illusion of successful entrepreneurs as being ruthless, selfish and money driven individuals. It is possible that there are people like that, but this doesn't have to mean that this is the character of a successful entrepreneur. 

The one thing I have really seen in common among the entrepreneurs who have share their experience is that they have all dared to dream...  

Arrola dared to dream about coches.com and here is his reality:

 

Fundraising expert at IE Business School

Entrepreneur session 2:

 

Jorge Mota

  Most would agree that one of the very important elements in any business is $$$!

Unless you are loaded with cash and can spend it as you are pleased, at one point or another, the thought of raising capital to start or to grow your business may become necessary.

Is it a daunting idea?...not necessarily. But it is an options which should be given some serious thoughts. 

Jorge Mota who were our guest here at IE Business School and a very successful entrepreneur who has continuously managed to raise substantial amount of capital gave the class some valuable insights.

Surprisingly, he made a comment that the dollar is green everywhere, or in other words, make no preference to your investors!! 

Unless I have misunderstood this comment, I am to some extend confused. We have over and over been told that it is utmost important to choose the right investors for your business and it is not simply the cash that adds value to the business but the experience and the network the investor brings. But the person who has been extremely successful in raising capital has a different view?

As I mentioned, I could have misunderstood this comments as my information has been gathered reading the class blogs and the real time twits that were shared during the class. Unfortunately, I was unable to attend the class... as ironic as it was, I was busy with a big European grant application for my own start up which had to be filed by today and after filling out god knows how many forms and preparing 100s of documents, we found some small prints related to UK companies which resulted in delaying this application until September...that is another story however!!

Jorge's other view was that business angles should be treated as part of the family, since their capital is primarily invested in you and not necessarily in your idea! He suggested to ensure great return for the business angels as they deserve this more than anyone in the business.

Another important tip he offered was to never give away more than 35% equity in the early stages of your business.

He also emphasized on the importance of the key management and their commitment in the business as this would be the absolute first thing any investor would consider. 

I would personally add to this... I think choosing your partners right from the very early start is one of the most important things to consider. There are many different views of how to choose the right partner, but I would say it is a combination of everything. 

First you must feel right about your partner and really feel that you can work well together. (sounds obvious but more than often ignored) 

Second, his/her skills should be complimenting yours and you should never just choose a person because of friendship.

Third, regardless of how much you trust one another, business is business and so it should be treated this way (an advice that I often oversee myself btw) 

Fourth, treat your partner as you wish to be treated yourself. Motivation is key in any business and credit should always be given to achievements. Its not about showing off to your partner who did what. Its about keeping each other motivated to accomplish the goal! 

One last advice... As 'wrong' as this may sound, it is a very good idea to examine your partner's personal life. Most people are effected by this to such an extend that it will influence their professional performance... so this part should be considered carefully! 

As important as capital is for the operation of an enterprise, people running the operation still remain the most important!

...so before raising the big capital, ask yourself... am I in this for the money...for friendship...for  passion...for ego...for love?

....or perhaps a healthy combination of the above!

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Founder of Weblogs SL at IE Business School

Entrepreneur session 1:

Julio Alonso

A calm, relaxed and an extreme humble personality Julio Alonso....he increased his interest in blogs after completing his MBA in 2004 where he found himself spending more and more time exploring and reading blogs including the blog of our professor Enrique Dans. He explained that blogs were not so wide spread in Spain at the time and the only people who really appreciated blogs were actually those who blogged themselves.  It was also during this time that he started his own blog but most importantly, this was when he recognized a great commercial opportunity in his passion.

On July 20^th2004, Juan Afonso decided to take blogging to a higher level!

Juan decided to find people who were passionate about gadgets and technology to start a blog writing about anything related to this topic. Out of the 20 people who were initially very enthusiastic, 4 remained and this was the beginning of WeblogsSL.

Today Weblogs SL has over 200 bloggers who officially work for Weblogs SL providing enriched content to around 40 different blog topics including xataka, blog de cine,  notasdefutbol, poprosa and many more... 

One thing all writers have in common however is that they are all very passionate about the topics they are blogging about. 

I guess this is the first and most important component of a successful blog!

Real passion! Now making a living from what you enjoy so deeply can only be a bonus!

Today there are 16M unique visitors on a platform that was simply a page containing nothing but information combined with excitement and passion written by Juan in his apartment here in Spain.

Julio Alonso gave up his 10 year old career in consulting to start a blog! His colleagues thought he had gone mad! His passion however kept him determined and immune against any criticism. While others saw his vision as unrealistic, he made it real!

After a successful career in consulting, the first money earned from his new passion was nothing more than 100 euros in the first month of business operation, which was generated through adscene advertising.

Nevertheless, he kept going and he started around 10 new blog topics in the years that followed. He explained his excitement about when they started a new blog about anroid and had 600.000 hits in the first month!

The most important thing he mentioned and really emphasized on was the importance of data gathering and data analysis.

The second most important issue for him was to keep a track of user behaviour in terms of ROI. His operations are worldwide and there is more than one site he needs to track. 

For this he uses a simple yet very sophisticated tool. An online preprogrammed google doc spreadsheet, which uses google analytics and plots all the information on one document in real time.

Here he can determine the ‘quality’ of the visits; Meaning the ratio, the frequency and of course the duration.

Since his business model is based on advertising, he explained some interesting concepts and illustrated some different numbers. 

Julio explained that only 7% of the visitors contribute to 79% of all the clicks.

What does this mean in terms of revenue from advertising?

This clearly illustrates that considering a CPC option must be the last option if there are any others. This view was actually shared by a professor of ours in another class who is also the founder of Busuu (a cool and fun platform to learn a language online)

In the discussion about RSS feeds, the drawback mentioned was the fact that the RSS subscribers are missing to see the advertising. My own technical knowledge with regards to RSS feeds are limited but the questions and comments are: 

1. Why can the advertising not also be fed through with the blog post?!
2. Julio mentioned that the name choice was very important and that people often misspell the xataka blog. My comment would be to obtain domain names with different types of spellings and different possibilities that people might type and simply link these to the actual site. This is what I did from the beginning when I registered my own domain name. 
3. I would be interested in knowing when would be the best time to approach companies to advertise on your site. I mean how many users would you have to illustrate in order to have a chance for a good advertising deal. And what is the best way to approach this? 
4. Would you employ a salesforce experienced in this or would you do this yourself being experienced in your business? 

Managing Tech For Start Ups at IE Business School

As time as passed, me, alongside with the the rest of The International Class of MBA 2011 at IE Business School are now in our 5th and final term. Everyone have different plans of what they will be doing after their MBA, but there are a large group of people who have either started or planning to start their own venture.

One of the electives I have chosen in this term is called Managing Tech for Start ups. It is the first time this elective is being taught at IE but given the experience I had with Enrique Dans's class in my first term, I cannot wait to see what this experimental class would offer us.

I have had two previous start up experience and am now in the process of a new venture, which might be considered a 'Tech Start Up". I have a facebook page which you are welcome to join. 

The class will be about bringing a community of successful entrepreneurs to the class to share with us their experience, challenges they have faced and generally have an interactive open discussion about any related issues.

As you may guess, I am therefore extremely curious to explore what this this class will offer us and how we can use the experience of other successful entrepreneurs in our ventures and also learn from their mistakes to reduce the risk of failure. 

I will share the experience in this blog...