Planning for Success(ion)

My wife and I had our first child late last year. As any new parent quickly discovers, having a baby comes with an impressive list of things to worry about. Some are immediate and often. Is he eating enough and when did he last eat? Why won’t he sleep? Why is he crying? Does he like me? Is having the TV on really that bad for him? 

Others are considerably less immediate, but much more uncomfortable. What happens to him if something happens to me?

The California Non-Compete Myth: What Startup Founders Should Focus on Instead

California's Longstanding Skepticism of Non-Competes

California has long taken a different approach to employee mobility than many other states. As a general rule, agreements that prevent employees from engaging in a lawful profession, trade, or business after leaving employment are unenforceable. For startup founders, this often comes as a surprise.

What Every Startup Should Know Before Signing Its First Office Lease

For many early stage companies, signing that first office lease feels like a milestone—tangible proof that the idea is becoming a real business. But commercial leases are not like apartment leases. They’re dense, heavily negotiated contracts drafted to favor the landlord, and mistakes made at this stage can follow your company for years. It is important to consider a few key lease provisions before making a decision that can influence the success of your business. 

You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know

My parents are in the middle of winding down their farm operation in Northern Iowa. The idea was simple: sell the land; retire and walk off into the sunset. But as they began the process, so too came layers of complication. The deal involved land that had been in the family for decades, the estate of my grandmother, multiple siblings (nine total, to be exact), and complex tax treatment. It was to say the least – complicated.  

At some point in the process, they realized they needed help—not because they lacked capability, but because there’s no clear-cut blueprint for navigating situations like this. You can only go so far on your own before the complexity outpaces what you can manage without professional help.

The Tragic Fall of the Tupperware Brand

Most children of my generation are quite familiar with searching through a cabinet filled with plastic Tupperware containers and lids to find the right match for packing up leftovers. The ubiquity of the Tupperware container defined the experiences of generations of families from the post-World War II era through the Seventies and Eighties and up through the turn of the Century. Spurred to tremendous popularity by a revolutionary marketing strategy that introduced easy-to-use and often unusually colorful products aimed to keep foods and drinks fashionably fresh, Tupperware containers seemed to be in every household in America. Unfortunately, the Tupperware Brand, once it lost its market leader status, was unable to keep up in the modern-day, post-pandemic market. It recently filed for bankruptcy protection in Delaware.

So Many Things To Do; So Little Funding To Do It

The start of a new business is a pivotal time for any entrepreneur. Unless you happen to be a serial entrepreneur who has played this game before, you are likely overwhelmed with your to-do list and rarely feel like you have a good sense of whether you are making the right strategic choices for your fledgling company. Many first-time entrepreneurs are laser-focused on the product or service they are hoping to bring to the masses, but with that laser focus they may overlook some important considerations, like having the proper legal protections in place.

Even those entrepreneurs who have thought through legal considerations as part of their business planning process often try to get by with the bare minimum in the early days. Let’s be honest, the term “legal” often conjures thoughts of grey clouds in an entrepreneur’s otherwise sunny and optimistic vision for their new company. One of the key drivers of a start-up not putting in place all the legal protections that will help it to be successful as it continues to grow is a lack of funding to obtain expert advice. With minimal available resources, most entrepreneurs prefer to focus their initial dollars on getting their product or service to market.

Women Who Mean Business

In previous posts, we’ve talked about the unpleasant but inescapable reality that an entrepreneur needs money to get a new business up and running, and to keep it running. Friends and family, crowdfunding, Shark Tank—all good possibilities.

Today, though, I’d like to remind all the women entrepreneurs out there of the numerous resources available to women-owned businesses. And out there you are! The 2023 Annual Report of the National Women’s Business Council estimates that women own more than 14 million companies, around 39% of privately held businesses, representing an increase of 13.6% from 2019 to 2023. Check out these:

Startups are Booming!

One of the many interesting side effects to the COVID-19 pandemic has been a reported boom in American startups.

On one hand, it makes sense. The world was faced with an almost unimaginable crisis that forced entire facets of society to pivot to new ways of operating. From zoom calls to facemasks, new needs required ingenuity and presented opportunities for entrepreneurs to answer the world’s problems. Many businesses repurposed themselves, adapting to the services they could and could not provide. And, of course, as social safety nets caught large droves of workers forced out, at least temporarily, from the workforce, it provided many people the space to reexamine their relationship with work, their families and the way they spend their time.

“MoviePass, MovieCrash,” an Interesting Exploration of the Entrepreneurial Roller Coaster

Stuck with a rainy Sunday afternoon this past weekend, I found myself landing on the just released HBO documentary “MoviePass, MovieCrash.” I didn’t really know much about the story in advance of my viewing, although I did recall a company that had launched a moviegoing subscription service about a decade ago. Maybe it’s my interest in the entrepreneurial experience, honed by a few decades of helping entrepreneurs build companies, but I found the movie quite interesting. Spoiler alert—if you want to watch the film (which I think it is worth your time), don’t read any further!

Last Call for 2024 MN Cup Submissions

The MN Cup, a program of the Holmes Center for Entrepreneurship at the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota, is the largest statewide startup competition in the country! Since its founding in 2005, it has served over 0,000 entrepreneurs and awarded over $5 million in cash prizes; in addition, MN Cup alumni have raised over $1 billion in capital.

First-Time Inventors Receive Boost from U.S. Patent Office

A patent portfolio can be one of the greatest assets that a company owns.

Patented technology provides value to a company that can lead to improved sales, revenue growth, and increased investment. Patents can convey great value and provide many avenues for sustaining and growing business operations. The exclusionary power of the patent right can create a foothold for innovative technology and enable a company to stake out territory that forces competitors to design around the patents, license the technology, or risk being sued for infringement. Patents also provide a basis for continued innovation and expansion through investment in R&D, covering improvements in technology, increasing the zone of exclusivity, influencing the prevailing state of the art, and tapping into new areas. And they provide added cachet in the marketplace: there is an inherent PR benefit to being able to advertise patented technology.

Generative AI Developments

Earlier this month, Minneapolis hosted and Lathrop GPM sponsored the 2024 Midwest Legal Coneference on Data Privacy and Cybersecurity. The conference covered a wide range of topics including generative AI developments, emerging state privacy laws, and strategies to mitigate cybersecurity risks. The generative AI sessions were particularly popular and had attendees buzzing with excitement (and admittedly, some trepidation) throughout conference. Conversations about the quickly developing tool spilled out into the hallways during session breaks and continued well into the evening—lawyers are an exciting bunch, aren’t they…

Holiday Receiving and Giving

The end of the year is always a hectic time for everyone, with many holidays around the world. It is also usually a big time for retail businesses.

This year, retailers have settled the long debate on when the holiday season begins—the earlier the better, as reflected in the surge in Black Friday deals. According to the traditional explanation for Thanksgiving-linked Black Friday sales, retailers—after an entire year of operating at a loss (“in the red”)—supposedly begin to earn a profit (“move into the black”) on the day after Thanksgiving, mainly because shoppers begin to spend heavily on discounted merchandise.

One Toke Over the Line?

One Toke Over the Line?[1]

As the hazy post-legalization world of cannabis in Minnesota comes into focus—after it became legal to possess, use, and grow the plant on August 1, 2023—challenges and opportunities abound for business owners to take advantage of a new market worth potentially millions.

The trick will be figuring out how to turn the excitement into profits. Cultivators may learn that marijuana—like any cash crop—is subject to the same constraints and external variables that make agriculture an inherently difficult industry to master in general.

Growing an Entrepreneur Farmer

Today I’d like to share an unusual and inspiring story of entrepreneurial spirit, originality, creativity, and, perhaps most important, perseverance.

Scottie Thelman grew up in Lawrence, Kansas, the son of a doctor and a minister. Although Lawrence is a smallish town (and home of the 2022 NCAA Champion Jayhawks – just sayin’), it’s not a completely rural community. Lots of wheat and other fields around, however, and Scottie was originally inspired to focus on the business side of agriculture.

I’m From the SEC, and I’m Here to Help!

Most entrepreneurs (okay, actually pretty much most people) don’t typically think of industry regulators as their friends, but the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Office of the Advocate for Small Business Capital Formation is here to change that!

Let’s take a moment to conceptualize the SEC for most entrepreneurs and start-ups: they’re the ones that burden you with those complex (and pricey!) registration requirements for offerings of your securities, and those pesky licensure requirements for anyone who wants to help you sell them. Yeah, yeah, there are a number of exceptions, but if you miss a step or try to get too creative, the SEC may be waiting with sanctions, penalties, or hefty fines (just ask Kim Kardashian what Section 17(b) of the Securities Act has to say about undisclosed payments for touting a security). And trying to do everything by the book generally requires filing of multiple notices and sometimes ongoing reports, all of which can get complicated and run up expenses and legal fees. So yeah…entrepreneurs might not think of the SEC as their best friend.

WIPO Global Awards reward small and medium-sized enterprises making a global impact

In 2022, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) launched a new initiative to recognize the innovative efforts of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) from around the world. WIPO’s new Global Awards are designed to identify new inventions and creative commercial solutions that impact economic, social, and cultural progress, and in turn, encourage innovation and the commercialization of IP assets.

WIPO is a self-funding agency of the United Nations (comprising 193 member states) that provides a global forum for IP services, policy, information, and cooperation. WIPO’s mission is to ensure a world where innovation and creativity from anywhere in the world is supported by IP rights for the good of everyone. An aim of the Global Awards is to recognize and support enterprises and individuals striving to make a positive impact through innovation both at home and beyond borders.

Domain Names and Branding – What’s in a (Domain) Name?

In the internet age, a good domain name is a crucial part of any business’s branding strategy.

In a previous post on this blog directed at domain name owners, I covered the importance of domain names and identified some common domain scams. But what about new businesses that are just starting their branding? Ideal “.com” domain names can be in short supply these days. What is an entrepreneur to do?

Spectacular Failures: Case Studies of Business Implosions

For those of us who are avid multitaskers and prefer to consume our media aurally, podcasts are a great source not only of entertaining content but also new and valuable information. It can be intimidating to jump in on a long-running podcast with potentially hundreds of episodes, so I’d like to highlight a shorter series consisting of twenty standalone episodes: Spectacular Failures.

This podcast by American Public Media and the Carlson School of Management at the University of Minnesota examines one corporate catastrophe in each episode, taking an irreverent but educational approach to documenting each business’s rise and fall. Many episodes trace the collapses and scandals of corporate giants such as Pan Am and Forever 21, but others examine events involving smaller, more local businesses, such as the Los Angeles-based restaurant Squirl’s moldy jam scandal that went viral in 2020. The “spectacular failures” covered in the podcast range in date from the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in 1911 to the current state of the NYC taxi industry, illuminating key points in the history of American business over the past century.

TSMC

About this time last year, I posted my top five favorite podcasts for entrepreneurs. Avid readers may remember that one podcast, Acquired, was far and away my favorite listen—and I am happy to report that after a year of searching, downloading, subscribing and un-subscribing, Acquired still remains a must-listen in my podcast rotation.

For those who do not remember (or did not heed my suggestion), each episode of Acquired examines the history of a different tech company and the founder(s) who built them. Most of the companies featured on Acquired are familiar (think Apple, Uber, Lyft), but every so often, the hosts, Ben and David, pull back the hood of a Company I have never heard of before—the most recent case being Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC).