What excites me most about the startup ecosystem in Michigan right now is the momentum that we are building. Not only does 2018 represent a significant milestone with Duo Security’s $2.35B exit, but we are also seeing an increasing number of exciting new companies that are being built in Michigan focused on disrupting very large and…
Lately the frequency of people who contact me asking about how to get plugged into the Ann Arbor Entrepreneurial Ecosystem is growing. 10 Years ago when I moved from the California high tech scene back to Michigan it was me who was asking people how to get connected… I’m hoping to return the favor by sharing this…
What do CDs, laptop computers and 4-year universities have in common? They all are being disrupted. Disruptive innovation is a term coined by Clayton Christensen, which describes the process in which a simple application that appears (and are initially dismissed) at the bottom of a market consistently moves up market until they eventually displaces the…
Each decade the technology we use gets smaller and more portable. In the 1980 & 1990’s we were set free to work from home (or on vacation) with laptop’s going mainstream. The smartphone changed the last decade for us to forever being able to answer any question at anytime and redefined the word “bump”. And…
The largest business plan competition, Accelerate Michigan, had just completed its main award ($500,000) a week before. This week, however, a dozen startups gathered in the basement of Ann Arbor SPARK to give their pitch after weeks of hard work not for prize money but for the opportunity to learn the skills necessary to take…
The wind was a steady 25 knots gusting to 30 at 10am Saturday morning. Outside the harbor break wall the waves were 8-10 feet rolling South towards our next port of call and I had a decision to make: Stay put or leave our safe harbor to engage the open water towards our next adventure.…
I’m often asked by people if a startup really can compete with a behemoth software company like Microsoft? After all, couldn’t Microsoft just turn their attention on any startup and squash it like a bug? In theory, possibly… but in reality, not likely! Big companies are usually so full of bureaucracy they can’t even do…
One of my favorite entrepreneurial quotes is by Reid Hoffman, the founder of LinkedIn. Reid wrote: “The entrepreneurial journey starts with jumping off a cliff and assembling an airplane on the way down.” This perfectly captures the essence of the fear, leap of faith, commitment and urgency that surrounds the entrepreneurial journey! But it doesn’t answer the big question…
This week was the kick off of the University of Michigan Innovation Corps (I-Corps) summer session where 80 scientists, engineers and mentors gathered in Ann Arbor to participate in the 8-week entrepreneurial-immersion program developed by Steve Blank and the National Science Foundation (NSF). For those not familiar with I-Corps, it is an intense entrepreneurial training…
First of all, the title of this blog doesn’t make sense. Entrepreneurs don’t typically apply for jobs – they create them! That said, I wanted to use this subject to illustrate something we talk about a lot at the University of Michigan – the entrepreneurial mindset. Too often I hear from people who are frustrated…
Its not often scientists get to witness seismic events in our Earth’s crust that produce tidal waves. Although our science is getting better they are still hard to measure and even harder to see up close and personal. I, however, had the distinct pleasure of personally witnessing a seismic event in the entrepreneurial ecosystem of…
When I co-founded Mobile Automation in 1997 we had developed an idea (and some technology) to allow IT Administrators to send large files to mobile employees with laptops when they were away from the corporate office. Back then, high speed Internet access outside of your office ethernet connection was very rare and the few employees…
Last week, the homework assignment for one of my entrepreneurship classes was for each student to think about and write down what the value of the Internet is to them. The purpose of this assignment was to teach the students the difference between describing how they use something and its true value. As entrepreneurs, we often…
Great progress has been made in developing processes and tools to help entrepreneurs take an idea and search for the right business model and turn it into a new venture. Not a lot, however, has been done to develop processes around taking an interesting idea and evolving it into something truly amazing and disruptive. Imposible?…
I’ve sat through approximately 50 pitches in the last 2-3 weeks and many times I hear a common example of how the teams have tested their ideas with customers… “We went out and showed our prototype to a bunch of people and everyone we showed it to said yes, they would buy it!”. The problem…
Doug Neal 