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Showing posts from January, 2025

Thoughts on the 2001 Documentary, "Startup.com"

For me, the 2001 documentary titled, “Startup.com” made the idea of starting a business seem daunting. The film follows Tom Herman and Kaleil Tuzman in their endeavor during the dotcom boom. Their company GovWorks was based around letting you handle government related tasks online, such as getting a fishing license or attending a town hall in your underwear, per their own pitch. Ultimately the idea has succeeded as we can take care of many tasks online like renewing a license or paying a ticket, but the company did not succeed. I think this was due to Kaleil and Tom being in over their heads in the business. They did great at raising capital, but from what was shown it seemed like they were not great at running the business. Maybe if they had brought in a CEO to run things it could have gone differently. My main takeaway from this though is that a startup looks stressful. Through the film we saw their friendship take a hit. They were high school friends with an ambitious idea that ulti...

Strengths and Weaknesses

My strengths that could help with being an entrepreneur is a blend of determination, interpersonal skills, and curiosity for trying new things.  I like to think I can get along with anyone that I come across, and that could help in building relationships and networking.  Although I do not enjoy presenting, I have been working on it to where I believe it is a strength of mine now.  I also pride myself on my punctuality, as I believe that showing up on time is important.  The last strength that I’ll mention for this post is optimism.  I believe this helps in maintaining a positive atmosphere when you believe in what you are doing and the success that you can have. However some weaknesses that I think could be a hindrance would be that I can be very one track minded at times.  I can focus too much on a single task or idea and other tasks can be pushed to the side.  I also have a tendency to be forgetful at times or question smaller details too much with o...

3 Business Ideas

Here are three entrepreneurial ideas for a business. My first idea is a trash holder that can slot in underneath the seat of a car.  Many people will hang a plastic bag around the shifter in the car, but it can get in the way and be an inconvenience for the passenger.  Having a removable trash can that fits in a center console could work as well, but center console sizes and shapes vary a bit more than underneath a seat.  If it could be fitted on both sides of the vehicle to slide in and out, it would remain out of the way while also helping keep vehicles a bit cleaner. Second, is that there are many companies out there that do not know how to handle their data effectively, and what to do with it. One that comes to mind is financial institutions. They are often behind in technological trends, and medium to small businesses may not have a dedicated department set up to handle business intelligence and data processing.  This business would be a contract company that sp...