May god give you the courage to follow your dreams; and we wish you the strength to persevere in 2012.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Friday, December 23, 2011
"If it's not fun, why do it?"
Ben and Jerry started the ice-cream company with $12,000 in 1978 after struggling for many months. $8,000 was from their savings and they had a $4,000 loan. The friend who helped them write the business plan (Jeff Furman) is now the Chairman of the Board. Here are some powerful ideas that have propelled them to do good even when Ben and Jerry's was sold to Unilever in 2000:
1. Business can be a force for good. They were one of the first companies to support the Occupy movement.
2. Businesses should not bankroll politicians. This is going to be their focus for 2012 (get the dough out of politics).
3. Go Fair Trade! Most of their products are fair trade.
4. If it's not fun, why do it? That's their motto.
Truly inspiring! My heroes - Ben and Jerry. Thank you!
Full Conference: http://www.c-spanvideo.org/program/303128-1 (if you are in a hurry, go straight to 24:55 to listen to Ben Cohen)
Tuesday, December 20, 2011
Majamba, a Swiss Innovation that will change the world!
Fact: It is not easy to get funding and support for new ventures. Only 1 to 2 business ideas out of 100 get financing and its only getting harder. And even the ones that do get financing find it difficult to get the right mix of people to grow their venture or not-for-profit.
What if there was a platform that could support anyone starting something new and anything good. That’s Majamba.Me, the world’s first Volunteer Micro-Jobs Exchange.
Here is how Majamba works:
- you collect Majamba Hugs by solving missions, essentially helping entrepreneurs
- with your Hugs, you can reward others who support your mission
- your supporters or you can use the Hugs to get fair trade gifts
The more people use Majamba, the more will be the utility of the network. Success will mean Start-ups will have resources; Students & Professionals will be able to use their skills in new ways and get fair trade gifts; and Social Enterprises will create jobs for the makers of fair trade gifts. The overall goal is to contribute to the fight against youth unemployment and underemployment affecting millions and poverty impacting billions of people.
Majamba Limited is a Swiss company co-managed by two entrepreneurs and four students (three from HEC Lausanne and one from International School Geneva). Yes, we are using the Majamba platform to build the Majamba exchange. Majamba is also supported by the Vaud SELT and the IBM Global Entrepreneur program. Majamba has established alliances with partners such as Self Employed Women Association from India, PayPal and FedEx.
Rajiv Srivastava is the co-founder of Majamba. Rajiv holds an MBA from University of Southern California and international work experience with Hewlett Packard and as Director of Strategy at Orange Communications in Switzerland. Rajiv launched Majamba with his wife Jeannine Srivastava. And recently Enea Bello, Mattia Barardi, Maya Rikhye from HEC Lausanne and John Nicholas Lung from International School Geneva joined the core Majamba strategy team.
Currently the team is working on launching Majamba.Me with the social marketing campaign expected to start in February 2012.
How can you help?
If you have one or two hours of free time to offer, put your skills to help start-ups trying to change the world, please join www.majamba.me for free! You even get 100 Hugs for just joining. You can solve fun missions, collect more Hugs; get Gifts or get others to support your missions.
2011: The Year of Transformation
We are currently testing different campaign concepts before putting our marketing dollars behind the one that gets the most traction. After testing different concepts, we still feel that we are one step away from the campaign that will change the world!
Here is what we are confident about:
1. Concept: A Volunteer Micro-Jobs Network where companies post good Missions; people solve those missions and get Hugs; with their Hugs they get fair trade Gifts or post Missions of their own.
2. Partners: We have an all-star line of partners who have provided Seed Capital, Technology, Guidance and Encouragement.
3. Platform: The platform is pretty comprehensive: social network + catalog + social currency + mission apps. And now we are starting work on the Mobile App.
4. Team: We have a powerful team of Web Design, Web Development, Strategy and Business Development pros.
So what do we need to work on:
1. Identity: A stronger visual identity complete with a cool video to engage audience.
2. Gifts: Boost our gifts catalog. More variety.
3. Missions: More missions. More diversity.
4. Campaign: Once we have the Identity, Gifts and Missions - we will launch a marketing campaign that will target 2 geographic regions at one time.
Saturday, December 3, 2011
Good vs. Bad Entrepreneurs (instead of Old vs. Young Entrepreneurs)
http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-case-for-old-entrepreneurs/2011/12/02/gIQAulJ3KO_story.html
(This is a reaction to the speech by Mr. Vinod Khosla, who segregates entrepreneurs based on their age).
I think we all look for generalizations that can help us focus on what makes an individual or a venture more successful. Age, gender, race, nationality, wealth, qualifications, grades and experience are just some of the filters people use.
Imagine, if you are lucky enough to get 200 new business plans emailed to you every day along with emails, phone calls and plenty of encounters with hopeful entrepreneurs from all over the world, you can feel compelled to develop a framework, a guiding principle regarding how you say no to people. Also when you do invest in hundred's of entrepreneurs and only a small minority succeed, you end up developing a formula that allows you to filter.
People like Mr. Khosla are super successful, intelligent and networked. They have created their short-cuts based on experience acquired over many deals. Everyone is entitled to his or her views. But I think Mr. Khosla represents a very dangerous point of view (age as one of the most important metric for deciding where to invest) that leads to prejudice against thousands if not millions of highly qualified, generous, hard working people.
Today, more people are starting new ventures and even more want to start new companies but find it difficult to raise money. This is because the venture model has not been adapted to our age. It remains surprisingly "Industrial". Committees find it difficult to understand Innovation so they force the entrepreneurs to write business plans and develop prototypes. In others words, they buy time so they can figure out what to do. So number of companies that "make it" vs. "projects initiated" is around 1%. These so called successful companies attract billions in investment and most fail to do anything that will make the world a better place. And the BIG problems - 300Million people unemployed; 600Million people underemployed; 3Billion people trying to make a living on $2.50 a day - continue to confound us.
What we need is a new way to support entrepreneurship. A new peer2peer approach, where Good People can dis-intermediate the bad people and directly working with other Good People; helping each other to solve the big problems irrespective of your age, gender, race, nationality, wealth, qualifications, grades or experience. Where thousands of entrepreneurs can work with millions of students and revolutionaries to start something good. The only thing that should matter is the power of the Idea. That is what we are trying to do with majamba.me
(This is a reaction to the speech by Mr. Vinod Khosla, who segregates entrepreneurs based on their age).
I think we all look for generalizations that can help us focus on what makes an individual or a venture more successful. Age, gender, race, nationality, wealth, qualifications, grades and experience are just some of the filters people use.
Imagine, if you are lucky enough to get 200 new business plans emailed to you every day along with emails, phone calls and plenty of encounters with hopeful entrepreneurs from all over the world, you can feel compelled to develop a framework, a guiding principle regarding how you say no to people. Also when you do invest in hundred's of entrepreneurs and only a small minority succeed, you end up developing a formula that allows you to filter.
People like Mr. Khosla are super successful, intelligent and networked. They have created their short-cuts based on experience acquired over many deals. Everyone is entitled to his or her views. But I think Mr. Khosla represents a very dangerous point of view (age as one of the most important metric for deciding where to invest) that leads to prejudice against thousands if not millions of highly qualified, generous, hard working people.
Today, more people are starting new ventures and even more want to start new companies but find it difficult to raise money. This is because the venture model has not been adapted to our age. It remains surprisingly "Industrial". Committees find it difficult to understand Innovation so they force the entrepreneurs to write business plans and develop prototypes. In others words, they buy time so they can figure out what to do. So number of companies that "make it" vs. "projects initiated" is around 1%. These so called successful companies attract billions in investment and most fail to do anything that will make the world a better place. And the BIG problems - 300Million people unemployed; 600Million people underemployed; 3Billion people trying to make a living on $2.50 a day - continue to confound us.
What we need is a new way to support entrepreneurship. A new peer2peer approach, where Good People can dis-intermediate the bad people and directly working with other Good People; helping each other to solve the big problems irrespective of your age, gender, race, nationality, wealth, qualifications, grades or experience. Where thousands of entrepreneurs can work with millions of students and revolutionaries to start something good. The only thing that should matter is the power of the Idea. That is what we are trying to do with majamba.me
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