The Tough Get Growing: How to Succeed in a Down Economy

Stay calm, stick with your vision and business fundamentals, and you’ll survive and perhaps even thrive in rough economic times, counsel these entrepreneurial aces. In a conversation with the Kauffman Foundation’s Bo Fishback, panelists reflect on their experiences bringing novel tech products to market and new companies to fruition, in good times and bad. Daphne Zohar attributes much of her company’s success to its unusual approach: PureTech Ventures is an institutional entrepreneur that “starts companies from scratch, backwards, looking for an unmet need.” Her team investigates thousands of technologies brewing in academic labs, then, says Zohar, “we brainstorm and come up with ideas ourselves, forming a company in a proactive way.” Zohar’s group seeks out the very best researchers from the start — the first step in building what she calls an “entrepreneurial trinity: people, money, technology.” Zohar has been starting companies since she was a teenager, and is relatively unfazed by the current crisis. PureTech is bullish enough to have started a hair follicle company for such disorders as baldness and acne. It’s “an area where there are no solutions, but it’s clear that if there were something, a lot of people would be happy.” As a veteran of a half dozen startups, Eugene Fitzgerald has developed a healthy respect for macroeconomic cycles. The contraction of funding opportunities in the current climate may not be such a bad thing. “When you’re in a phase with cheap capital around, you could form an idea incomplete on the technological level, and run with it Cheap capital biases people toward selling their vision alone.” With investors hard to come by, entrepreneurs will have to ratchet down their expectations, and “build companies the old fashioned way, over a longer period of time.” A recession focuses people on researching and developing an idea so it “will sell tomorrow.” Fitzgerald also sees “lots of opportunity during a time of gigantic ch...

Channel: MIT World Video Length: 0s Date Found: Tue, Mar 23 2010 4:24 AM Category: Science Date Produced: Wed, Dec 23 2009 12:00 AM View Count: 0