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August 28, 2014

What Separates Successful Startups from Everyone Else

By Mae Kowalke, TMCnet Contributor

How many of us invented Facebook (News - Alert) before there was a Facebook?



Whether or not this has always been the case or is just a recent phenomenon, one thing about business in the Internet age is really clear: Ideas are cheap. Execution is what separates Facebook’s founder from all of us who also came up with the idea.

“Anybody can come up with an idea,” stressed Steve Brumer (News - Alert) during a recent TMCnet interview at ITEXPO in Las Vegas, partner at the business consultancy, 151 Advisors. “It is selling that idea.”

That’s why Brumer is pleased with the recent trend away from entrepreneurs thinking they know everything about business.

“What trends are we seeing? That people actually are accepting help from the outside. That they don’t feel like they know it all,” enthused Brumer.

Brumer’s firm, 151 Advisors, focuses on helping companies that might have a great product or service, have a good team, even have funding—but lack the connections and experience to effectively take their invention to market properly.

“We see a lot of geeks who have a hard time selling something, and they are marketing their product. And those really are the great opportunities for us,” he said. “So we work with VCs and private equity firms and investment groups. Most of the time our clients have already had some type of investment in them by somebody.”

With technology, often the elegance of the solution can feel like an end goal in itself or maybe the goal is found in the altruism of changing the world through an invention. But Brumer knows that in the end, every tech firm needs to make money above all else.

“Somebody has to make money somewhere along the line,” he stressed. “I’m all about giving an idea of how to make money. What are you looking for from a market, are you priced right, is there competitive pressure on you to have a low-ball price on something and you really might not need to do that. So we try and come up with strategies for being able to take things to market and how you go to market.”

While there still is a trend toward doing it yourself when it comes to technology firms, more are waking up to the fact that tech expertise is not the same as winning the market and pulling a Facebook. It takes business skill, too, and the same people who invent the next great product are often not the ones who market the next great product.

Basically: Every company needs both its Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs (News - Alert). And, all the advisors who don’t usually get mentioned in the story of how Apple became the giant it is today. More are waking up to realize that fact. 




Edited by Maurice Nagle
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