KACHARAGADLA

If you’re an entrepreneur, you probably have an unstated yet pervasive fear of a competitor copying your work. I know I certainly did when I first started  BodeTree . My co-founder and I chuckle now when we look back at how paranoid we were in the early days. We went so far as to request prospective venture capital firms to sign nondisclosure agreements before we agreed to talk about our product. Eventually, and after many sobering conversations with our advisors, we came to our senses. Here’s the thing about competition: if you’re good at what you do, others are going to follow suit. Sometimes that means “borrowing” successful product features, while other times it’s out and out plagiarism.  Regardless of its form and severity,  intellectual property theft is deeply personal for entrepreneurs. However, that doesn’t mean you have to be paranoid. Instead, you simply need to be prepared. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery My company, BodeTree, has always marched to the

Hollywood may dramatize the plight of the entrepreneur. But sometimes the best way to capture reality is through fiction. Wherever you are in your business venture, you can glean some insight from these 18 provocative and wildly entertaining films. Subject: Entrepreneurship. 1.  Startup.com . Startup.com  is a 2001 documentary film that examines the rise and fall of the real-life startup GovWorks that raised $60 million from Hearst Interactive Media, KKR, the New York Investment Fund, and Sapient. It’s good viewing to better understand the boom and bust of the dotcom period and serves as a cautionary tale on how friendships can easily be threatened by business partnerships. Topics covered include finance for entrepreneurs, capital raising, growth management, entrepreneurship skills, team building and management skills.  2.  Catch Me If You Can . When you hear  Catch Me if You Can , you picture the successful con artist Frank Abagnal

Today’s teams are different from the teams of the past: They’re far more diverse, dispersed, digital, and dynamic (with frequent changes in membership). But while teams face new hurdles, their success still hinges on a core set of fundamentals for group collaboration. The basics of team effectiveness were identified by J. Richard Hackman, a pioneer in the field of organizational behavior who began studying teams in the 1970s. In more than 40 years of research, he uncovered a groundbreaking insight: What matters most to collaboration is not the personalities, attitudes, or behavioral styles of team members. Instead, what teams need to thrive are certain “enabling conditions.” In our own studies, we’ve found that three of Hackman’s conditions—a compelling direction, a strong structure, and a supportive context—continue to be particularly critical to team success. In fact, today those three requirements demand more attention than ever. But we’ve also seen that modern teams are vulne

If someone quits the firm in Silicon Valley to start a company that ultimately crashes, it’s more than OK to go back to the old firm. Supervisors will celebrate the attempt as an educational rite of passage even if it failed. Why do Americans, especially in the Silicon Valley, tolerate failure in  startups  while Asians don’t and what makes some hardy people in Asia take the risk anyway? Answers matter because Asian millennials have launched sharing economy apps, a  solar energy firm  and even  venture capital  firms. But Asian startups lag the West in terms of valuations. That’s partly because the startup trend formed here relatively late in 2007 and began notably spiraling just a couple years ago. But “fail” is a four-letter F-word in Asia, discouraging aggressive pursuit of original, high-stakes new companies. Once a startup fails, their founders usually disappear in shame rather than lionizing the experience and trying again, Asia business hands say. That trend will ultimately