There’s a job opening at Podio and it’s a job I feel very strongly about since it is my old job. Tommy already wrote a great job description that you can read here. Instead I would like to explain why it has been a great job and what you can expect to learn.

First, a bit of context: About a year ago I had just moved all my things back from Italy and was figuring out what to do after realizing that my plan to launch an italian mobile operator wasn’t viable. Thinking that starting a company is the best thing in the world I came to the decision that working for someone else’s startup must be the second best. I already knew a lot of the Danish startups so when I saw a tweet from Podio CEO Tommy Ahlers that they were looking for people, I was thrilled to get the opportunity and joined just before our public launch in March.

Since I joined I have managed our office in Copenhagen and helped out with setting up our office in San Francisco as well as well as been the assistant to the CEO. And boy have I learned a lot and not always in ways I would have expected.

I think that the main reason you should join Podio is because of what you will get the chance to learn and who you are going to work for. As my first job I don’t feel I could have been luckier to have had a better boss than Tommy and the person who will get the job will  be part of building a fast-growing technololy company form the closest range. It’s everything from preparing meetings, taking part in board meetings, accounting and bookkeeping, how to manage suppliers, make sure contracts are correct and how to constantly make decisions under very uncertain conditions. Your relationship will be based on high levels of trust and freedom to make the decisions you see best. If you make mistakes they are forgiven as long as you are quick to share them and ensure that you learn from them so you don’t repeat them. You will work very hard at times but your effort is never taken for granted and there is a great camaraderie among the team.

I don’t think there are a lot of jobs out there offering this mix of trust, working for someone you respect tremendously and being part of a team whose quality never ceases to make you proud of where you work.

I cannot state enough how incredibly proud I am to have been part of the Podio team and in preparing for my new job I’ve already caught myself preaching so many of the things that I have learned at Podio. There are a lot of  important decisions and initiatives coming up so if you’d like a career within technology and startups then this sort of apprenticeship is an opportunity you will not regret. Go here to send your application.

If you have any questions about the job let me know and I will be happy to answer.

If an outsider observes the Italian mobile telecommunications industry, they might be tempted to think that it is an industry that has seen significant changes in its competitive dynamics due to much more competition for customers’ money.
After all, from having to pick an operator between the 4 incumbent MNOs 5 years ago, an Italian consumer today can choose his operator from more than 15 different operators.

However, in reality very little has changed and although Italian consumers have more operators to choose from, they still pay some of the highest prices in Europe. There are multiple reasons for why no new entrants have been successful and they vary from poor strategy to poor distribution to poor marketing. However, on a more overall level new mobile operators must offer a clear value proposition to customers relative to the incumbents. After all, why should you buy your SIM in your supermarket, bank or post office if these operators don’t offer any advantages over the incumbents? And in addition to that, they don’t have the same level of service that you get when you walk into the stores of 3/Vodafone/TIM/WIND.

There are several strategic problems and reasons for why the situation is like this but the most important one lies in the relationship between the MNOs and the MVNOs. You should only launch an MVNO if you feel you have an edge over the existing operators, and MVNOs should negotiate contract terms that allows them to execute on whatever value proposition they offer to customers (e.g. distribution, service, pricing). Observing all the Italian MVNOs reveals a similar an un-creative approach: “We have a brand, distribution and a popular website, we’ll leverage that by launching an MVNO”

Italy has the highest mobile penetration in the world. 1 in 2 Italians have two mobil phones but from an operator’s perspective you want to sell them the primary SIM because that’s where the money is. What you wont hear from any of the MVNOs is that almost all of them only have second SIM customers and their numbers look terrible. As it is today, most MVNOs are part of large parent companies which can afford to bank roll their failed strategies. Negotiating with MNOs in Italy is difficult and full of secrecy so it is time consuming and difficult to find the best deal for an MVNO and they can only succeed if MNOs see them as an effective way to acquire customers. The current regulation, favours the incumbents and makes it impossible for MVNOs who can challenge the status quo to enter and that’s why despite 15 operators, they are all remarkably similar while Italian consumers continue to pay some of the highest prices in Europe. As much as I would like MVNOs to challenge the stale MNOs, consumers simply don’t have any good reason to pick an MVNO as their provider.

If it wasn’t already clear, Nokia is in crisis. While, sales and shipements of smartphones are growing in absolute numbers, they are losing market share fast. Nokia is paying a high price for not paying enough attention to smart phones and the US market which is know the center of the mobile industry.

Nokia’s strategy of producing simple and solid hand sets and being big in Europe and emerging markets, is based on a flawed assumption of adoption curves. It seems to reveal a very linear way of thinking: If we get to be people’s first phone, we will eventually be able to sell them smart phones. However, phone sales are very much driven by carriers and which phones they choose to subsidize and additionally consumers are not particularly brand loyal. This part of Nokia’s business is extremely high volumes and low margins and as their new CEO mentioned in the famous memo, Nokia still haven’t responded successfully to neither Apple or Android products.

Many observers have already called out microsoft as the big winner of the partnership and it remain to be seen whether Microsoft/Nokia can butt heads with Apple, Android and RIM. Nokia has made a very big bet in partnering with Microsoft and essentially letting them control what might be the core to their future competitive advantage.

However, before it ever got so bad for Nokia, they should have known about OODA Loops. I have written about OODA Loops before, and what is puzzling is how Nokia has failed to go through their OODA Loops at a pace anywhere close to their competitors. As the mobile industry increasingly centres on eco-systems of developers and apps and software, Nokia should have realised that making developers happy and giving them and opportunity to succeed should be their first priority. This is a significant shift from being a “hardware-first” company, and clearly Nokia has so far not been able to reorient their strategy according to their customers who are flocking to their competitors.

As Scandinavian and for the sake of the European tech industry I really hope Nokia pulls it off. But their struggles are  an illustrative example of how a lack of agility is deadly to companies, regardless of their size.

One of the big news about media and tech startups the past days has been AOL buying Huffington Post for 315 million USD. As part of the acquisition the most interesting part of the acquisition was the strategic fit with AOL’s 80:80:80 focus.

“80% of domestic spending is done by women, 80% of commerce happens locally and 80% of considered purchases are driven by influencers. The influencer part of the strategy is important and will be potent.”

This is well known about fast moving consumer goods, which appeal to women who traditionally take care of grocery shopping. However, the quote reminded me of an old statement from management thinker Tom Peters who said that the two largest and underserved segments are women and old people. I heard the quote 5-10 years ago and I still think it holds. Often tech startups are praised for solving their own problems and that’s why they’re so focused on building great products which appeal to a lot of tech-savvy people. The problem is that the problems software engineers, who are all but few young geeky males, are trying to solve are very different from the problems that e.g most women have.

Lots of opportunities to think differently exist because most new products and applications all compete for the same small group of early adopters. Instead of sitting around and waiting for every part of the population to discover the wonders of augmented reality, geolocation etc. more etrepreneurs should try to figure out which problems women and old people have. In the startup world an example of this is some of all the interesting startups being created around fashion such as polyvore as well as the more obvious example of group buying sites such as Groupon who have a majority of female customers. In Denmark, trendsales is doing extremely well and have little competition with a customer base that is also mostly made up of younger females.

Regardsless of the sector or idea, the motivation to focus more on women is very simple. Apart from becoming better educated than men, they are also in charge of a lot of the spending.

Ever since I first signed up on Quora I have been a big fan of the site. My reasons are the same that seems to hold for most people: The community is interesting, knowledgable and helpful and the quality of the questions and answers is far beyond what I have seen on any other Q & A sites.

Another interesting thing about Quora is the repository of high-quality knowledge and advice that is quickly being built around a lot of topics. For now those topics seem to mostly revolve around Silicon Valley and startups. This means that there is little to be learned about e.g. Italian or Danish startups but that could change. However in a country like Italy where few people speak English, I am sceptical that a solid knowledge base will be built, and in any case the answers will not necessarily be the best ones but the ones answered by the minority who speaks English.

Keeping Quora in English might make sense for the Silicon Valley-centric community but I think it could be more powerful if they chose to allow other languages as well. As an example of all the excellent content related to Italian startups, the facebook group Italian Startup Scene has a wealth of knowledge but organized in a very different, and much less structured way than Quora threads.

Finally, an excellent advantage of Quora has been discovery. Since joining Quora I have been exposed to a whole new group of brilliant people whose answers and opinions are very interesting. Since Quora is somewhat a hybrid between a blog and a place to get answers to specific questions lots of people I hadn’t previously heard of have proven to give excellent advice and answers. (blame my 5 years in business school for my veneration for bullet points)

• Keith Rabois Top angel investor and ex-Paypal.
• Michael Wolfe Serial entrepreneur
• Hussein Kanji Ex-VC with Accel partners.
• Roger Ehrenberg Managing partner of Information Arbitrage ventures
• Paul Jozefak European VC

If you are not on Quora and want to check it out feel free to send me an email and I can invite you.

After MVNO News just published the results (in Italian) of their annual survey about MVNOs in Italy, I want to look closer at how the Italian MVNOs are doing, and in some cases compare it to a similar survey MVNO News published for 2009.

The survey is based on people who have visited mvnoforum.info so the sample is clearly biased towards people interested in MVNOs, and the patterns that emerge are somewhat predictable:

• MVNO subscribers are most likely to be men, between 31-40 who has PosteMobile as their preferred MVNO
• It is more likely that the primary SIM is from an MVNO (59% versus 33% in 2009)
• Price on voice tariffs are still the main reason customer’s choose to switch to a MVNO

While MVNOs might seem like they are doing well, all the numbers are relative to each other and the most essential question of average revenue per user (ARPU) is not given so it would be risky to conclude that things are going the right way for MVNOs in Italy.

ARPU is particularly important in Italy. Because Italy boasts one of the highest penetrations of mobile subscriptions in the world. At around 150% one out of every two Italians have two SIM cards and as an operator the value is in having your name on the primary SIM. Therefore, the truth is that most MVNOs are only customer’s second SIM, and it is difficult to be very optimistic as an Italian MVNO. While PosteMobile is significantly dominating the picture in terms of market share, their ARPU is much lower than their MNO competitors and they are therefore far from financially sustainable. In 2009 PosteMobile had an ARPU around €8. This is around 60% lower than their MNO competitors’ and also 50% lower than the most successful Danish MVNOs. PosteMobile has lost a boat load of money since they started (a boat loaded with more than €50 million) and at the same time they are less effective in terms of revenue per employee than their Scandinavian counterparts. So to put it very simply, if you were an investor you should short the entire Italian MVNO industry.

An interesting question for an Italian consumer would also be: “why should I choose an MVNO as an operator?” Except for bundling with their mother companies activities they don’t offer clear advantages in terms of price, value added services or customer service so in most ways I understand the Italian consumers and I don’t see these trends changing anytime soon.

I guess I’ll have to change the title of my blog. After two great years in Milan I have just moved back to Copenhagen.
Part of my decision to start this blog was to blog about my plan of starting a company in the Italian telecommunications industry. However after working on that for more than a year a combination of changes in the contract we were offered and not being able to raise funding I have decided that I prefer to go back to Copenhagen where most of my family and friends are.

To show what I learned from my startup adventures within Italian telecom, I will blog about my experiences and show that the ICT sector in Italy is ripe for innovation in several areas, particularly if the incumbents were a bit more forward thinking.

Despite this disappointment of having to give up something that really meant a lot to me, I have had a wonderful time in Italy and I already look forward to coming back.

This is going to sound hard and I’m sure some people will disagree, however I will elaborate on why it will improve everybody’s chance of success to concentrate high-tech entrepreneurship in Italy in Milan and Rome. The 20 VC investments made last year in Italy, are already highly concentrated particular around Milan and Rome, so the reality already matches my suggestion.

What it meant when talking about an ecosystem is that there has to be critical mass of activties to support new high-tech ventures so in turn there will be increasing returns to being in a certain location. Firms do not exist in a vacuum and they rely on advisors, lawyers, accountant, investors, suppliers and of course employees.

While it is true that web startups can be build virtually today face-to-face interaction is still essential and investors are most likely to invest in companies they can visit within a couple of hours. The most respected incubators like Y-combinator and Techstars also bring people together in a specific place and for the few success stories of virtual startups, the rule is still that co-location fosters transfer of tacit knowledge, something that doesn’t happen much via skype.

What is the way forward then?
As I have argued before, Italy needs a larger pool of potential entrepreneurs to select from and an excellent approach that I admire, is that taken by Fabrizio Capobianco and Funambol which has their business development in Silicon Valley and R&D in Italy. This means more technical people who are exposed to the nuts and bolts of a startup.
Two other initiatives I believe should get much more attention is making the startup scene much more international and focus much more on immigration, particularly from Eastern Europe and South America where Italy can offer higher salaries and quality of life.
The important thing though, is that every regional politician does not want Catania or Bologna or etc. to become the hub for high-tech entrepreneurship. Fragmentation is not going to help and both Milan and Rome are great and vibrant cities to live in, so Italian’s must forget their idea that their home town is the only place in the world to live and move to where the action is.

There are a lot of good intentions in Italy and I think that things are slowly moving in the right direction, however instead of each region trying to become high-tech clusters Italy must make an overall decision for the common good and encourage all aspiring entrepreneurs to go to either Milan or Rome the financial and state capital respectively which both have a good mix of institutions already in place.

P.S There are great companies such as Balsamiq and Yoox that have come out of Bologna, however Milan and Rome remain the two most obvious choices as I see it.

I find that a reason for why people in italy stay away from starting things is a misconception that they have to have some super-wealthy family or be very well-connected with a lot of influential people. In my experience this hasn’t been true at all and I would like to share how I have gotten many interesting people to listen to my startup idea because the recipe is very simple.

About a year ago two friends of mine and I got the idea to start an online discount mobile operator in Italy. It’s quite an ambitious idea since you essentially would be competing against Vodafone, Wind, TIM and 3 Italia (also called MNOs), but we had seen it work in Denmark, so we knew it could work. As I have written about here our professor was not very supportive of the idea but we wanted to give it a shot. I followed a guy on twitter who blogged about telecom and who turned out to work for one of the Italian MNOs. From twitter I emailed him more details about our project and he ended up introducing us to the most senior guy at his firm which was relevant for our project. From that point on we have continued negotiations and are still in contact.

In terms of investors and people from the startup environment, I was lucky to meet some investors through our course. Additionally, I really liked what Stefano was doing at www.thestartup.eu so I emailed him an we met a couple of times and through him I have been introduced to some great people and pitched my project to dpixel where he works. Additionally, a guy Stefano and his firm introduced me to has formerly held key management roles at three of Italy’s four MNOs and is now a very helpful advisor.

At conferences like “mifaccioimpresa” and Milan Startup Weekend, I have also met interesting people. Although introductions work best don’t be afraid to approach the people you meet at these kind of events. Most people, and this goes perhaps particularly for successful people are usually very friendly and are glad to help young entrepreneurs if they can. They have been in the situation you are in, and appreciate how much help and advice can mean.

As i said the recipe for this is really simple: Be very well prepared and try to be convincing. You’re selling your idea and you must convince people that you are going after something relevant and feasible. Also be friendly and flexible. Many people are busy and first impressions last a long time so if you haven’t done your homework and don’t know the market or your competitors or your business model you wont be taken seriously.

It’s fair enough to have blind spots (e.g I still don’t know a lot of things related to the technical aspects and telecom regulations) but be upfront about them and how you are going to solve them. In our case a mobile operator is really a lot of marketing and the legal aspect not even lawyers are sure about, but if you are honest about what you don’t know your can avoid unpleasant surprises later on.

Overall it should be clear that we have spent a lot of time seriously putting together convincing reasons for why an online discount mobile operator is a good idea and could be a good investment, we really haven’t done anything extraordinary but that, to meet a lot of interesting people so there is no reason that you shouldn’t be able to do the same, if you have an good idea and a compelling reason for why you are the right people to execute it. Take my word for it, Italy is full of nice and supportive people that are doing what they can to help people start something cool, you just have to be proactive and persistent to find them and get in touch with them.

Often it can seem strange why people leave very successful technology companies and startups like Google or Facebook. Often they leave to start their own companies and this phenomenon called entrepreneurial spawning has been investigated closer in a big study of US firms which also has relevant implications for European policy makers who want to foster high-tech startups.

You can find the paper in its entirety here, however the paper looks at employees who leave public companies to start their own VC-backed companies and they use data from more than 5.000 firms and 15.000 founders, and I will focus more on their results and the implications.

• Companies that were either based in Silicon Valley or Massachusetts and that were once VC backed them selves are most likely to spawn new firms (results control for firm size, patent portfolios and industry)
• Diversified firms spawn less new firms. Employees in diversified firms are less entrepreneurial
• Spawning is closely related to growth. There seems to be a natural size limit to how big VC-backed companies can get before employees leave to start their own companies. This is what is taking place with the employees leaving from Google to Facebook, and based on this, Facebook might have the same problem in a couple of years when their grow slows down or they go public and employees can cash in their stock options.

The implications of the findings are relevant for a country like Italy that is still a developing country in terms of high-tech entrepreneurship, because they clearly demonstrate that universities are not the only source of founders of innovative companies, but public companies who have themselves received VC might be a great source of new firms. So instead of trying to copy Stanford, Italy would do well to attract existing technology companies and have them setup offices particularly in either Milan or Rome. The study also finds that entrepreneurial activity in a particular area has increasing returns so instead of each region trying to attract innovative entrepreneurs, Italy has to focus on one or two regions which can realistically achieve critical mass of the know-how related to new high-tech firms. This is well-known however, a lot of regional politicians often get in the way of this even though it is completely unrealistic that Italy will have innovative high-tech clusters in Calabria, Sicily, Trieste etc.

So what should Milan do in concrete terms? A visionary plan for e.g. Milan would be to double the number of high-tech employees in Milan by 2015 and attract 3 large foreign technology companies to set up offices in Milan. In the long run, such initiatives might be very good incubators for future entrepreneurs.

PS. A very interesting observation related to entrepreneurial spawning, is that there seems to be consensus (on Quora at least) that no succesful startups have been founded by ex-googlers. For a concrete example of why companies like Facebook play an essential role in spawning new innovative startups take a look at this list of employees that have left the company within the last three years.

Fred Wilson who blogs at AVC has earlier described the venture capital math problem, that there are too many VC funds in the US for them to make good returns. For the record good returns means about returning the fund 3X over 10 years, something that becomes more difficult when there are too many VC firms in the market.

Well as usually with VC, fast forward to Europe for a much bleeker view.

Here the problem is not only that VC is extremely underdeveloped in several parts such as Italy which only saw 20 VC deals close in 2009, but also that returns of VC funds in Europe in general are very bad. Over the past 5 years Europe’s VC firms have returned only 0,7% annually and lost 1,9% annually over 10 years. There are more details in the article here where there is also some more optimistic voices, however if VC funds do not return any money to their institutional investors it’s unlikely they will be able to raise new funds. This is simple natural selection and that funds that lose their investors money have to shut down, however we might have a more serious problem in Europe if there is not only too few VC funds, but the ones that are here are not doing well.

This seems to be a paradox: If entrepreneurs complain that they don’t get funded, a very credible and relevant complaint in e.g. Italy while VC firms might have harder times raising new funds there seems to be a catch-22. More institutional investors and pension funds need to allocate more of their portfolios to the VC asset class and they are not going to to that if they’re not getting any returns.

I think a couple of things are needed to improve this although overall I completely agree with Hussein Kanji’s answer on Quora about what Europe lacks:

• More early-stage investments
• Much more interaction. US colleges have the advantage that Computer Science majors can also take classe at the b-school and vice versa. I think more interaction between different disciplines is essential
• Less bureaucracy and well-meaning states trying to be VCs
• More of the most successful people from abroad. Just as successful Europeans have become successful in the US and elsewhere, we need some of those to come back to Europe to show how things are done. There’s a lot of pattern recognition in VC and transfer best practices can speed this up
• More transparency. Of course funds that are not doing well will be against this but then it’ll serve as a way to let the best peformers to share how they are doing
• More focus on emerging sectors in which Europe may have advantages: sectors like fashion and food come to mind

Another possibility is also that investors are just not very good at their jobs and they have perverse incentives in terms of management fees which reward them hansomely anyway. The few VCs I have met seem genuinely passionate and motivated about creating great companies and I really hope that we will see more VC funds and more successful exits in the near future.

PS. What is considered a disappointing return for a VC might of course be a perfectly acceptable outcome for the entreprenuer (i.e building a sustainable business with a 1-2X return to the VC)

After 5 years of university education, you forget some things you have learned along the way, but the most important concepts, ideas and ways of thinking hopefully stick with you.

In my case, I have been fortunate to have several inspiring teachers and class mates along the way but the main lesson that has really stuck with me is something I learned in my second year: “Always remember the 2nd law of thermodynamics” The second law is described in detail here but the practical implications of it as well as entropy is what really stuck with me: When as system cannot get rid of its energy, entropy increases and increasing amounts of energy is no longer available to do work untill the system eventually overheats.

Taken to a business context this is very simple: closed system always die. This might seem like a simple observation when you observe failures after they have happened, however how do you make you that your system remains open and dynamic and also how can you defined what closed means?

The best answer to both questions is orientation. Orientation is the most important element in John Boyd’s OODA loops. For any firm, entrepreneur or investor for that matter orientation means to realign your self as quickly as possible with the contexts you are embedded in. This also solves the issue of defining closed systems, because open systems are those that constantly reshape their decisions and strategies based on what they see. So although Apple have chosen an integared approach to their products, they are clearly an open system since they are excellent at evolving with and defining their environments. This is in no way obvious to many people who are in the middle of an industry and are bound by all the traditional way of doing things but when firms repeatedly fail to re-orient to match the reality around them, the future catches up with them. Myspace is partly  trying to re-orient their strategy towards Gen Y and music, but they clearly missed the boat on e.g. people being ready to use their real names and information for social networks. An excellent example of a company that has been quick to implement changes based on their observations is Twitter, which based on usage patterns implemented the @ and # features.

I went one to write my bachelor thesis about OODA loops and although I am not an expert in the lean startup movement, they are clearly influenced by OODA loops as well. I will write more about OODA loops and the importance of agility, but if you are hungry for more about OODA loops Chet Richards have written the preeminent book on how to apply John Boyd’s concepts to business. It is hard to find a better business book and you can buy it here.

VCs get to review hundred of business plans a year and while it should be clear to most people that people are more important than the idea. This is because often the idea will have to change and the original business plan never holds so it is important for VCs to find people they really believe can see their idea through all these changes. At the time most VCs are pitched for investment it is very early and it might often be unclear what the business model of the company is and it is still extremely difficult to predict how people will do. Recently Vinod Khosla told the story of how the Google founders wanted to sell it for a million dollars and this illustrates how extreme the uncertainty can be even for the people who have the idea and vision. When entrepreneurs don’t even realize the potential value of their business it’s of course very hard for investors to foresee which investments will be successful and therefore many VC investments will likely fail. These are the rules of the VC game and most people agree on them.

However  just as VCs celebrate when they exit their good investments, it would be interesting to see more have anti-portifolios of the deals they were pitched and turned down, which have gone on to become successful. An old and also very successful VC fund that does this is Bessemer Venture Partners. You can see their anti-portfolio along with the entertaining background stories here.

It’s also clearly not very easy to be a VC and many of them also don’t do a particularly impressive job in generating returns to their investors so they might prefer opecity over transparency but in general I think entrepreneurs and VCs would be better off knowing more about the mistakes VCs have made in evaluating investment opportunities. This takes investors who has also had successes and is honest about admitting their mistakes and from an entrepreneur’s point of view I think it sends a strong signal.

Last weekend I participated in Milan Startup Weekend and overall it was a really nice experience and a great initiavive. If startup weekend is coming to your city you should go. You will meet lots of like-minded people and although the entire thing was in Italian most people spoke English so don’t be shy if your Italian is not perfect you can still attend.

The idea about startup weekend is not so much work on existing startups as actually showing a real demo that has been made in about 48 hours. This means that the main focus will be on web technologies and rightfully programmers and designers are in highest demand where us with business degree were helping out in terms of strategy, market sizing and marketing ideas.

I really like the concept and I was working on someone’s idea of a social Q & A site for shopping, which I really like. It’s still a work in progress but you can see the site here. Overall, there was a very nice and helpful atmosphere the entire weekend and between working on projects there were guest speakers (Massimo Sgrelli, Raffaele Mauro and Alberto D’Ottavi were most interesting in my opinion).

Since time is the main restraint on building something, many of the ideas will be pretty small features and applications but I like the idea of finishing something managable than start out with some big and time-consuming vision that is unlikely to be realized. It has already been explained that it is becoming cheaper to start web companies and here is an excellent explanation of how disruptive cloud computing is for startups.

However, as the barriers to entry has been significantly lowered  a useful  concept taught in business school today is called the resource-based view comes into mind. The quintessential part of strategy is to create sustainable competitve advantages, and sustainable means that you still kick ass after someone repeatedly tries to copy you, however in order for companies to create these advantages they must do things in ways that competitors cannot easily copy. As anybody can now launch a startup in 48 hours and take advantage of the same tools and technologies (Twitter, Get satisfaction, Amazon web services etc.) the competition shifts to being the best at acquring users and build some a brand as quickkly and effectively as possible. Strategic partnerships e.g. with key suppliers or distribution channels (e.g Groupon if they partner with Yahoo) and finding ways to increase switching costs for users become critical.

Aalthough this is not something that should be the main concern at an event like Startup Weekend it is something that anybody who is thinking about starting a company should spend time on thinking about. If you can launch a live demo in 48 hours so can anybody else and from then on it’s game on about who is able to convince users that they should use your site and not any of your competitiors.

Competing for the future is one of the best management books I have ever read, and it also has some important lessons for entrepreneurs or anybody who is thinking about starting a business. Competing for the future is written by Gary Hamel and C.K. Prahalad who are among the best and most original management thinkers in this generation and their most famous contribution to the field of strategy is probably that of core competencies.

Some of the important consequences of Hamel’s and Prahalad’s work is that while companies have core competencies and things they do extremely well, industries change and evolve and companies might not be able to change with them and so they become stuck while continuing to focus on the things that were yesterdays success parameters. Of course managers could avoid some of that by asking themselves more questions about where their industries are headed in the future, however when a certain strategy has brought you success in the past it is very difficult to change the direction the company is going in. Also don’t underestimate how much ego is at stake, most corporate cultures still stigmatize failures so it is quite rare for the same CEOs to strategic shifts that differ significantly from the strategy followed in the past. Therefore a good way to look at it for entrepreneurs today is that there are a lot of companies today where the future has essentially caught up with them and all the systems and processes they have in place are geared to an industry an environment that is no longer relevant.

One of the quotes that I have really taken to me from the book is that “starting resource positions are a very poor indication of future leadership”. This is tremendous news for anybody who’s trying to start something, bacause it means that whoever is going to leas in ten years is not decided by who has the biggest budgets today. Many industries today change at a break-neck speed and there are loads of opportunities to find things that large corporations today are not doing very well and attack those niches with all the scrapiness and clout you have. As an example of this opportunity take advertising. Advertising continues to drive many business models online and yet as this blog shows the majority of the billions of advertising dollars are still spent on television and newspaper ads so there is still a lot of billions in advertising dollars thar are going to migrate from offline to online. Even outdoor advertising is still a huge market that seems ripe for disruptions, possibly by these guys.

So I suggest you go ahead and read the book and study some of the examples of successful cases where corporations that have been huge underdogs have ended up overtaken their much larger competitiors. You can buy the book and read reviews of it here.

One of the lesser know parts of Bocconi which deserves a lot more recognition is the Bocconi Learning Lab. On a daily basis the learning lab creates various applications and games, primarily for the executive management school SDA Bocconi, however they also do all sorts of hacks on other projects.

I went there a couple a weeks ago to see what my two friends who work there Luca and Luca were up to and they are extremely helpful and passionate about building applications and talking about technology. Their philosophy is inspired by that of 37signals and they’re particularly into building web applications with Ruby on Rails. Very few people know about the Learning Lab and that’s really a shame. I would also hope that a place like the learning lab could organize evening courses or events in general for the Bocconi students who are interested in web and startups. Something like in “web development for beginners” or something like that.

Both Luca and Luca are very helpful and great at explaining complex concepts in a simple no-fuss manner so if you’re at Bocconi and interested in technology you should send them a message or just drop by their office and see if they have time for a chat.

On his blog at il sole 24ore Gianluca Dettori recently pointed to a new proposal for VC in Italy. The gist of the purpose is to create a fund of funds with a mix of public and private money. The proposal is nicely summed up here and the idea is clearly to create an Italian parallel to Yozma, which was fundamental in creating Israel’s thriving VC and high-tech clusters.

VC getting more love and attention from politicians is very nice, however there are in my opinion several reasons why the “let’s make an Italian Yozma” is unlikely to be an ideal approach. (disclaimer: I don’t follow Italian politics, so if you believe my assertions below are wrong, please point it out).

First of all, it is a traditional cause-effect fallcy within public planning to observe a successful effect in one context and trying to replicate it without thinking more about all the underlying causes. This is similar to why many companies have failed in trying to copy the Toyota Production System. They observe that any employee can stop the entire prodution line by pulling a chord and then the problem is traditionally resolved quickly, so the key to lean production must be to install this system. However the system works because of all the tacit knowledge, trust and mutual understanding between the workers and therefore it is extremely difficult to copy and require a change in all the underlying processes that lead up to the “pull the part chord”. The similarity to the VC system is the countless and failed attempts to emulate Silicon Valley and just like I consider it unlikely that Italy can successfully copy Yozma, the people behind this proposal should start somewhere else and study the conditions in Israel when Yozma was launched.

Before Yozma became world famous they had the Inbal program which was a similar approach that suffered from problems such as too much bureaucracy, low upside and difficulty to attract good VCs. If an initiative in Italy is going to work there has to be a compelte minimum of bureaucracy, and the state has to acknowledge that private VC fund managers have to have an upside and might become very wealthy if the fund is successful. Paricularities of Israel, that I doubt are present in Italy:

• A strong domestic military indusstry. A lot of Israel’s successful startups had a background in the military industry.
• Office of the Chief Scientist (OCS). Excellent capabilities in applied sciences and a generally the OCS was a very respected and admired  institution.
• Tech-heavy foreign multinationals such as Intel, IBM and Motorola.
• Immigration in the form of thousand of highly skilled engineers and scientists.

Another aspect that is critical is that the Yozma program was seen as the third phase of the VC industry lifecycle which began with the background being set in the 1970. You therefore can’t ignore what happened in the 20 something years leading up to the Yozma program and instead Italian policy makers should study this period and find out why conditions in Israel were ripe for a VC cluster. Particularly, the experience from Israel also showed that there needs to be a critical mass of high-tech entrepreneurs before a VC cluster can successfully emerge, and as much as I wish this was the case in Italy, I think we are at least a decade from where Israel where when Yozma was launched. A good start would be to educate more engineers and scientists and make Italy more open to the best immigrants in these disciplines.

If you want to read more in detail about the the co-evolution of Israel’s high-tech and VC clusters, I co-wrote a paper about this two years ago. I couldn’t embed it but you can read it here.

Last week there were a couple of positive entrepreneurship-related events that I think deserve to be mentioned.

The first was the inaugural meeting for Bocconi’s new entrepreneurshup club Young Entrepreneurs at Bocconi. The club has the valiant purpose to encourage more entrepreneurship and to be a place where young entrepreneurs can meet and exchange ideas and help each other out. The idea is also to have guest speakers and work shops with various purposes so its activities are like entrepreneurship clubs at most universities. It’s a great initiative and it seems like Bocconi is also supportive, so I hope it’ll be succesful. However there is also room for improvement:

• First of all more people have to know about it. Only 6 people showed up and three of us were foreigners so foreigners are perhaps more apt than Italians to have entrepreneurial aspirations?
• If it’s going to be helpful people have to openly share their ideas and what they need help to! I can’t say this enough but it’s really a banal and unjustified fear to be afraid of having ones idea copied.
• More technical focus and not being afraid of bold projects. The challenge with an entrepreneurship club just for business students is that the skill sets are very similar and whenever somebody has to built somethng technical, software developers are needed. I think it would be ideal to have the entrepreneurship clubs of Bocconi and the different technical universities meet up and share ideas.

The club doesn’t yet have a website but if you are at Bocconi and interested in joining I really suggest you go check it out, since it is just getting started you have a great opportunity to get a lot of influence from the beginnig! If you want to know more then send me an email and I will get you in touch with the founders.

The second event I attended was “mifaccioimpresa” this weekend at Bocconi. It was a fair dedicated to entrepreneurship and with lots of panel discussions about everything from financing and marketing to legal issues and the role of VC in Italy. The fair lasted all of Friday and Saturday however I only attended on Friday and the most interesting thing for me was a panelk discussion about innovation and financing and SMEs and the role of VC in this.

The panel consisted of Roberto del Giudice head of the Italian Private Equity and Venture Capital association AIFI, Francesco Perrini from Bocconi and an investment manager from the Italian VF fund Quantica sgr. The discussion was about the status of VC in Italy and although this might be already know to some, the state of affairs is pretty bleek. Here are the main takeaways from the discussion:

• A total of only 20 VC investments were made in Italy in 2009
• 5 VCs represent 50% of all the deals and out of these, the most active were Innogest, Piemonte High Technology and Quantica
• Some funds barely average 1 investment per year from 2004-2009
• Italy is completely divided in North-South in terms of VC and no investments at all in e.g. Calabria, Puglia and Sicily.
• Overall, Italy is a country of SMEs but not innovative SMS.
• To put innovativeness in perspective, the 20 VC investments are out of 5000 new firms formed every year.

Overall, the picture is bleek and anyone who has tried to raise seed or venture capital in Italy knows that it is extremely difficult, however one can also look at in a more contrarian and positive way. Since so few innovative companies are founded in Italy you actually have a better shot at being funded if you offer something cool and innovative!  The start-up scene is not exactly Silicon Valley so if you do something original there are plenty of chances to get yourself noticed. One of the reasons I do not worry much about anybody copying our business idea is simply that most people Italians think it’s nuts and that it can’t be done.

So get started and don’t blame the bad economy, now is a great time to start a company!

One of my favourite blogs is easily kissmetrics which offers great insights about marketing, webdeisgn and usability.

A couple of weeks ago I read their post about how colours affect purchase decisions and it is does a good job of showing which message different colours convey to US consumers. Startups should think about this when designing their website but don’t overanalyze it and if you are unsure you can run A/B test to test which colours are most effective with your visitors.

While it might seem obvious today that facebook is blue, they actually chose this because Mark Zuckerberg is red-green colour blind so since you will be looking at your website a lot, just choose a colour you really like and which supports your products’ message.

You should also look at which colours the existing competitors are using and choose a different one. In the industry I am trying to start a company in, there are few very large companies. Since I have always liked green and none of the current companies use green we chose green and are sticking with that. Choosing colours shouldn’t become a major decision to make and in the early stages and it can be changed if you completely regret it.

The startup I am trying to launch is a cheap, simple and online mobile phone operator. Since there is little data available about this it would be a great help if you can fill out the survey below.

And if you find it worthwhile to answer please share and retweet it!

Like many people I like blogs written by VCs and entrepreneurs who have successfully raised VC funding. Some of the best information about startups and consumer web trends can be found on blogs by VCs such as Fred Wilson, Mark Suster and entrepreneur and investor Chris Dixon. These blogs provide terrific insights into what some of the savviest people think and are also a great source for budding entrepreneurs on everything from how to pitch VCs to get ideas for your next startup.

Their blogs are a way to make a name for them selves, to clarify which kind of companies they invest in and of cours to ideally make their investments more valuable by giving them access to the best deals and entrepreneurs. While the final results remains to be seen it is worth noticing that some of the most successful VCs in the business do not blog and that clearly does not keep them from spotting the best deals or being approached by the best entrepreneurs.

Take a look at this post with the exits of Sequoia which shows that they are creating huge value. While Michael Moritz doesn’t blog his investments account for $5.5B of exits in the list. This is a good reminder that while VC blogs are a great asset to entrepreneurs some VCs do just fine without them. Another VC firm absent from much blogging is KCPB but clearly that does not prevent them from excellent deal flow and entrepreneurs who love them . While Kleiner Perkins and Michael Moritz do not share their thoughts via blogs they clearly do a great job adding values to the companies they invest in and help them build successful businesses.

p.s In Italy I have not been able to find many examples of VC blogs so if, you know any let me know where to find them.

It’s ironic that business schools, the places that are supposed to teach people management and leadership, always seem to be very poorly managed them selves. This was said by one of my former professors and I have found it to be surprisingly accurate.
Studying for my undergraduate degree at CBS there was a lot of bureaucracy and overall not a supportive administration. At Bocconi, the administration has been mostly helpful and cooperative, however my view has changes after I have had to register for graduation.
The process is mind-boggling complicated and very kafkaesque.

Here is what you have to do in order to graduate at Bocconi: It’s taken from the incredibly long guide to submitting the thesis and graduating.

1. Access the thesis procedure online and enter the abstract
2. Download and print an approval form in 2 copies
3. Fill out and sign this form
4. You now give this firm to your advisor who has to sign it
5. Now hand in the signed approval form to the graduate secretary
6. Now you’re finally ready to submit your thesis on a CD Rom and collect a receipt for having submitted!

Mind you that this is the very last step and before this you need to have handed in other signed forms and also have approved your internship which goes something like this:

1. Bring internship documents to the internship office and get a signature
2. Now get your program director to sign the same document
3. Go back to the internship office and you can now sign it

It’s incredibly how poorly designed these processes are and they could and should easily change this to make it much less bureaucratic. It’s really a matter of trust and if Bocconi really trust their students they would not need this cumbersome bureaucracy and they could cut down on it and give their students a much better experience.

Following the interesting and lively debate about the Italia startup environment kicked off by he founders of Mashape and followed up by Stefano Bernardi, I want to add my point of view of the startup environment in Milan as I have experienced it. Particularly, I like a lot of the ideas and comments to the two blogs about an Italian eco-system and how we can improve the conditions for startups and entrepreneurs in Italy.

My perspective is after finishing a graduate degree at Bocconi and working on a startup idea in the Italian ICT sector for the past year. After two years at Bocconi it is hard to come away with any other conclusion that it is every young Bocconi students’ wet dream to either work in fincance, consulting or for a huge multinational corporation. That can be fine as well but it means that you’re an outsider if you want to start a business and while the US celebrates failure, it is scorned upon in Italy.

It is true that a major problem in Italy is the culture, and most Italians never fail because they never try. I had no contacts in the industry we’re trying to start a company in and yet I have received advice and help from Italian top executives and successful Danish entrepreneurs as well as been introduced to Italian VCs and angels. My experience has been that people are extremely helpful when you approach them as well-prepared and with an open mind.

First of all, there is only one elective in English at Bocconi focused on entrepreneurship and having taken that elective it leaves a lot to be desired. The ideas people had for startups and business plans were mostly very poor and showed the classical mistake to focus much more on the idea than the execution (Italian restaurant in Dubai anyone? Also we have no competitors were often considered to be a good thing).

The problem as Stefano pointed out, is simply that the pool of potential entrepreneurs is extremely small. Therefore the ideal strategy is to bring as man of these people together as often as possible.
What really disappointed me in my experience with the University here is the complete lack of interaction between the different universities. Why aren’t there common classed for CS students from Politecnico, business students from Bocconi and the Design students from Marangoni for example? Interesting things happen when people who think differently meet and I think this is vastly misisng in Italy! In a similar vein, the startup scene in Italy has seemed very un-international to me. Although it is silly and a waste of energy to dream of a Silicon Valley like eco-system there are nice things about Italy: People are friendly and helpful, the weather and food is good and the living standard is high compared to many countries. Certainly, Italy could leverage this to do much more to attract e.g Eastern European and South American talent but for that to happen the culture has to become more international.

Finally, Bocconi like many European business schools suffer from the problem that they view entrepreneurship from a very academic perspective and except for the interesting guest speakers students would be better off reading the list of popular startup and VC blogs. Instead of these courses being taught by accomplished entrepreneurs they are often taught by dry academics and it is easy to lose your hope if you only listen to this type of people. Our professor hated our idea and since it was the only idea that would require VC he also considered it far to risky and big for us to undertake.
This in many ways sums up my experience with entrepreneurship at Bocconi: An Italian restaurant in Dubai is considered a better idea than a business model with several successful exits in other European markets.

p.s a great and much needed initiative to encourage more startups is also to reduce bureaucracy. I particularly like David Welton’s initiative to reduce the costs of creating an SRL. Read about it here and sign the petition here

This is the first post on my new blog.

My blog will mainly be about my thoughts on business, technology and media and my  life as new graduate trying to start a company in Italy. I have benefitted greatyly from the blogs of many smart people so in some ways this is my tiny contribution that I hope can be of help to someone.

Since I have spent the past 5 years in two different business schools (CBS and Bocconi) I also have an itch to share the takeaways from some of all the articles I have been force fed.

Anyway I hope you’ll enjoy reading it.