Written with help from Marc Habbema (SOWISO) and Menno Kolkert (Plot). Most startup founders plan to hire new employees in their first years. They are looking for the most talented people but do not have the cash to pay the highest salary. Therefore payment ‘in shares’ is often suggested. The best way to do this for a Dutch startup is to create a ‘STAK’: in this article we explain why and how.
The blog entrepreNL will no longer be updated in 2013, because all new articles will be published at the successor blog StartupJuncture.
Innovations in healthcare are very much needed by society to keep healthcare affordable, but many entrepreneurs are reluctant to start a health startup due to the extra complications in this domain. But is it really more difficult to start a business in the medical domain? In this interview we ask this question to Marieke Schoutsen, who has made the jump into the medical domain and is now CEO of the health startup…
Most universities have a large shelf of good ideas that are never implemented in the real world because the people and partners needed to implement the idea are not available. Canterbury Road Partners is a company in Baltimore that specializes in finding hidden gems on these shelves and build companies around them. We talked to Canterbury CEO Matt Van Itallie…
On Thursday 15th of November the Dutch business plan competition NewVenture kicked off with a well attended and lively award ceremony. One of the highlights of the program, besides the 12 awards, the story about the New York marathon and the presentation by Dirk Loots, was the story of Taco Carlier, founder of the trending Dutch bicycle brand VANMOOF.
Perfect Storm Europe is a conference dedicated to the confluence of important technology trends. The organisers, led by chairman Ajit Jaokar, believe that the combinations of five trends (big data, cloud, mobile, smart systems and social media) creates an important event for companies that they need to respond to and startups can benefit from.
(This article is also published on startup juncture, my new blog on startups together with three other authors. Please check www.startupjuncture.com for this and other stories.)
‘Due diligence’ is an M&A term for any investigation that the buyer does to know what he/she is buying (like wine tasting, but for companies). Startup founders typically encounter ‘due diligence’ as a time-consuming activity when they want to sell (part of) their business. Typically a due diligence is done at least on company legal structure, tax liabilities, financial numbers, the business plan, market assumptions, and for large older companies also on pension obligations that are not accounted for. More recently, many buyers insist on a software due diligence: a review of the software of the company to be bought. In this article we help you as a founder manage the software due diligence phase.
Last Friday, Jan Willem Klerkx from EUvision and I organized a masterclass at the YesDelft incubator where we discussed selling complex products in business to business sales meetings. Both Jan Willem and I have worked in companies where we had to sell intangible services, such as software, projects or advice. You cannot offer free trials for many of those services or explain the benefits with a technical demo, so many startups and established companies struggle with sales or have high sales effort and costs. In the masterclass we explained techniques that helped us doing sales in the past (and learned from the participants about their experience). Sales is a large topic and we could have made this into a full week course. Unfortunately no-one had so much times so we covered the essentials. Here are five of the messages from the masterclass.
Do you think you are having a hard time doing sales with your startup? If so, it might help you to watch the classic ‘motivational’ sales speech of Alec Baldwin in the play and movie “Glengarry Glen Ross”. Alec plays a hardball successful salesmen trying to motivate a real estate sales team. It is one of my favorite videos to use in a sales masterclass, and here is why.
The Herman Wijffels award is a prize for innovative inventions that encourage sustainability, sponsored by the Dutch co-operative bank Rabobank. On October 4th the top 10 companies or ideas were announced. Read here a short overview of all ten companies here. As of October 22nd you can vote for your favorite. Not nominated yourself? You can join next year’s competition as of February 1st 2013.
