Entrepreneurship Case Studies

You have read many of my interviews on this blog. Here’s a synthesis of some of the case studies I have done, in an interview format. These differ slightly from the series that I have titled Role Model Interviews, since in this series, I go into the company and its strategy, market, financing, etc. in more detail, and focus somewhat less on the personal history of the entrepreneur. Nonetheless, these stories are just as enlightening as the others.

* Concur CEO Steve Singh
* TheFind: Lifestyle Shopping
* Wize Up On What To Buy
* Retrevo’s Vipin Jain on Vertical Search
* Job Search Engine Indeed CEO Paul Forster
* Happily Bootstrapping: Zoho CEO Sridhar Vembu
* Web 3.0 & Group Travel: Groople CEO Mike Stacy
* Cracking the Online Video Monetization Nut: Adap.tv CEO Amir Ashkenazi
* Taking on Business Intelligence: Lucidera CEO Ken Rudin
* Re-engineering the Book Business: Blurb CEO Eileen Gittins

* Innovation in Sales Prospecting: InsideView CEO Umberto Milletti
* Sharat Sharan’s On24: Lead Generation Through WebCasting
* Cracking the Very Small Business Market: PayCycle CEO Jim Heeger
* Venky Harinarayan on Kosmix and Vertical Search
* Making SMEs Run Smoothly: Rene Lecarte’s CashView

This series will continue, and I hope you will continue to benefit from the experience of other entrepreneurs who are in the midst of building exciting new businesses.

Meanwhile, here’s an exercise that you can assign yourself. Take one or more of the above cases, and “dissect” it, using the “Clarify your Story” questions, and see what you learn from the process! [If you’re doing an Enterprise/SME facing venture, use this worksheet instead.]