Course

Competing with Giants, Choosing Investors, and Building Company Culture

Stanford University
Course Lectures
  • Competing with Giants
    Mitch Kapor

    Serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor encourages start-ups not to compete with giants.Instead, the young upstart should consider how it could benefit by working in concert with their giant's footsteps.He cites as an example his own young enterprise, Foxmarks, which tracks search trends through the amalgamation of Firefox bookmarks.

  • A solid business model can't survive long-term if it just draws traffic.Serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor points out that a concrete business plan must truly offer a solution to a well-worn market conundrum.While a flash-in-the-pan Facebook app may draw millions of users in minutes, without staying power it's not viable long term.

  • While entrepreneur and former Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor understands how selling finance can boost a burgeoning enterprise, his experience has also acquainted him with some of the disadvantages - mainly accountability and a forced schedule of progress.Here, Kapor outlines some of the many alternatives to the traditional VC paradigm, including self-financing and angel funding.

  • Choosing an Investor
    Mitch Kapor

    Selecting a financial partner for your growing enterprise should be as careful a process as selecting a member of your senior staff, says serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor.Here he discusses why real start-ups offering real opportunity can afford to be choosy.

  • Former Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor has launched a number of new ventures, and he knows firsthand the difficulty of competing with the Valley's best-known brands for top engineering and executive talent.He shares his solutions to luring the best in human resources to his door, including distributed development and opening doors elsewhere in the Golden Gate.

  • Former Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor speaks candidly about the most valuable legacy of his wildly successful 1980's technology company: the management of free-thinking creatives.He stands by the quality of his products, but it was his huge investment in human resources, Libertarian management style, and incentives toward great job satisfaction and accountability that he's most proud of.He claims that the thousands of Lotus alumni have helped set the standard for how tech companies are managed on the East Coast and beyond.

  • Social entrepreneur Mitch Kapor believes that social responsibility must be integrated into the organization, and not just the frosting on the cake.

  • Mitch Kapor has been an entrepreneur since the 1980's, and here he pinpoints useful websites, educational programs, and learning opportunities that help level the playing field between seasoned venture capitalist and the first-time business operator.