Ron Kornfeld (Self-Proclaimed Serial Entrepreneur)

Ron Kornfeld, self-proclaimed "serial-entrepreneur", was the guest speaker today in my entrepreneurship class at UW Tacoma.  He began his talk by explaining that no one likes business plans; the purpose of a business plan is to put an idea into a standardized format that can be consumed efficiently by prospective partners/employees and venture capitalists.  In addition, the process of articulating the details of a business venture makes you test that business (it forces you to define smaller details that you maybe wouldn't have normally have thought of).
Ron worked for MCI, but left and started a company that wanted to simplify dial-up in the early days of the internet.  He has since encountered three net bubbles, solved some of the world's problems, and been involved with start-ups like Dreambox (which was acquired by Netflix), NimbleSource, Personal Grid, Normandy Partners, Harmonetrix, Cygnisoft, XactLabs, and Tweetiator.  I took a couple of very interesting pieces of information away from this lecture.  The first was that most start-ups don't need to raise millions of dollars.  This was something that I assumed coming into the class, but was being swayed to think otherwise by many of our class lectures.  Ron mentioned that start-ups do need some form of capital, but it doesn't have to be from venture capitalists; it can come from many different types of investors.  The second was the way that venture capitalists and the firms that they work for get their money.  I had just assumed that they were made up of billionaires who were looking for ways to invest their money (and hopefully earn a large return).  What really happens involves the government: government employees have pension funds that are paid into by current employees, but that money needs to be grown to meet the need of a generally increasing amount of retirees dipping into those funds.  Some of those funds are given to V.C. firms as a high-risk investment.  These firms then seek out the best start-ups to invest in, and this is done by looking at BUSINESS PLANS!  Which takes us full circle back to the idea that a business plan is crucial for any business idea that could be brought to fruition.
One last thing of note was that Ron discussed "disruption", which is basically the idea of breaking into a market and doing something better than what is currently available.  There are many pieces of software that I use on a daily basis that I believe could do things much better than what is currently available.  This inspired me to rethink my business idea, and I may be changing the business idea that I use for this class entirely.