A metaphor describes one thing in terms of another, hopefully making that one thing easier to understand. Here are seven metaphors to help better understand the logic of entrepreneurship. The logic may surprise you, as it is not the logic taught in business school.
1. Find your flow.Do what concentrates your motivation. Based on Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s work entitled Flow, find the work that brings you joy, where you are creating things spontaneously, as if you were in a jazz band. Who you are, who and what you know determine the means of your entrepreneurial endeavor. According to Saras Sarasvathy in Effectuation, the founders of Starbucks did not study market trends but their own need for quality coffee. Facebook began as a sophomoric (pun intended) social comparison tool.
Shacole Henderson is a trailblazer and pioneer for both African-Americans and women of Louisville KY. At just 25 years of age she has become Louisville’s youngest Black bakery owner.
Coco’s Cakes is located at 501 West Oak Street in Louisville and operates,Tues-Sat, from 7am-6pm. The menu consists of cakes (sheet & specialty), cheesecakes, turnovers, donuts and much more.
Young Richard Turere lives at the edge of the Nairobi National Park in Kenya. He lives with his family and their livestock. The lions would come through the reserve at night and kill off the livestock. Turere hated the lions because they were always killing off his family’s cows. There were people around the reserve that would stand guard and kill the lions so that the livestock survived but this was not a solution that everyone was happy with as the Maasai people value all life. Turere knew that he had to come up with a solution and had to do it quickly so that no more animals died. He was 9 years old when he began helping his father tend to the cattle. He was just 12 years old when he became an inventor.
Read the rest of this interesting story at Meet Richard Turere, the Boy Who Invented Lion Lights at Age 12 | The Black Home School.
According to MTN Business, it has embarked on a long-term supplier development programme that will empower young, black entrepreneurs to take their place at the forefront of South Africa’s evolution to a knowledge-based economy.
“For MTN Business, local supplier development is more than a box-ticking exercise,” says Alpheus Mangale, Chief Enterprise Officer at MTN Business. “It’s true that enterprise and supplier development has taken on a new significance in the revised BBBEE codes, but we’re looking beyond these metrics to make a more tangible impact on the economy.
Stop the presses: Paris Hilton doesn’t really go out anymore. These days, you’re more likely to find her behind a desk or in a boardroom than on a dance floor. Sure, you’ll see a picture of her, from time to time, with her trademark near-platinum locks and famous pout and pose (oh, that pose), a micro-mini teacup Pomeranian in her arms. And yes, she’s often photographed at a club or a party; she’s not exactly hibernating. But chances are good she’s getting paid to be there. And heftily. Remember when Linda Evangelista said she wouldn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day? Paris gets a lot more than that.
She may be the original celebutante—a party girl from a fancy family who turned herself into a household name using risqué outfits, reality TV and the requisite sex tape, in the process spawning a whole genre of wannabe girls eager to follow in her well-heeled footsteps. But over the last 10 years, while those girls have been parading on red carpets and keeping up with the Kardashians, Hilton has been busy creating a billion-dollar brand. A whopping 18 perfumes (the newest one a limited 10th-anniversary edition) have resulted in $2 billion in sales…
Nigerian billionaire Tony Elumelu has decided to fund 1,000 budding African entrepreneurs as part of a $100m (£67m) initiative to boost the continent’s private sector.
Mr Elumelu said the entrepreneurs were Africa’s “hope for the future”.
The 1,000 come from 52 African states and territories and were chosen from some 20,000 applicants.
NerdWallet.com, an online personal finance provider, recently rated the best cities in the country for Black-owned businesses. The ratings were based on more than 100 U.S. metropolitan areas with populations over 100,000 and included economic indicators such as median income for blacks, percent of black-owned businesses, and cost of living.
In celebration of International Women’s Day this past Sunday, I had the chance to speak briefly with Yetunde A. Odugbesan-Omede about her powerful new book, A Young Woman’s Guide. I was truly inspired by her fearlessness at sharing her personal story as well as advice on how young women can put their best selves forward.
VENTURES AFRICA – The Nairobi Dev School equips youth in East Africa with computer programming skills and helps them build technology-based solutions to everyday challenges. The school was established in 2012 by Martha Chumo, a 21-year-old self-taught programmer, after she was denied a visa to study in the US.
Chumo gave up a scholarship to study medicine after bumping into the tech world during an internship. When her attempts to refine her skills in the US failed, she decided to start her own school. The Nairobi Dev School has since conducted skills development training in Kenya, South Sudan and Somalia.
Once upon a time in Silicon Valley, a billion dollars was a big deal. These days, companies can catch multi-billion-dollar valuations on the fly. Take, for instance, the big numbers bandied about this week. Investors are waving term sheets at Snapchat for $500 million in financing under the assumption that the app is worth $19 billion. Pinterest is also in the process of raising $500 million, but at a more modest $11 billion valuation. “Facing overwhelming demand” from investors, Uber agreed to accept an additional billion dollars in financing, just a few weeks after the e-hailing app closed a $1.2 billion funding round that valued the company at $40 billion.
Fortune and The Wall Street Journal have both illustrated the growing number of startups that investors think are worth $1 billion. (Companies that have crossed that threshold are called “unicorns.” It’s a term used mainly by insiders, but it helps illustrate this age of magical thinking.) To put the recent fervor in perspective, it also helps to see how rapidly these multi-billion-dollar valuations have multiplied…