Emails to a young entrepeneur

By Nueno Iniesta Pedro

Entrepreneurship continues to gain attention on a world-wide basis. It is the best way to renew society and tobuild a strong and diversied economy. Entrepreneurs fol-low a process: identify an opportunity, transform it intoa business, stimulate it to grow. This is easier to say thanto do it but, fortunately, over the years a lot of knowl-edge has been created which facilitates the entrepre-neurship process.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ediciones Experiencia
• Release date: Aug 18, 2014
• ISBN: 9788415179948

Book preview

Emails to a young entrepreneur

Keys for fast changing times

Pedro Nueno

Emails to a young entrepreneur

Keys for fast changing times

@ Pedro Nueno, 2014

@ Ediciones Experiencia, S.L., 2014

Original title: Emails a un joven emprendedor (Crítica, S.L.,

Barcelona, 2014)

Ediciones Experiencia, S.L.

c/ Ametllers, 16

08320 (Barcelona)

Tel. [phone]

Fax [phone]

[e-mail]

www.edicionesexperiencia.com

No part of this work may be reproduced in any form or by any means, including photocopying, or by any information storage and retrieval system and no copies may be distributed through public rental ar loan without the written permission of the copyright owners. Any violation of this copyright is prohibited by law and may result in penalties.

First edition: February 2014

ISBN: 978-84-15179-85-6

National book catalogue number: B-3645-2014

Cover design: Interact-me

Production: Gràfiques 92, S.A. Avda. Can Sucarrats, 91

08191 Rubí - Barcelona -

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is another step forward in the process of understanding the entrepreneurship phenomenon and trying to stimulate it as a way towards personal development and social improvement. But it would have not been possible without the help of a great global team of people who helped me studying the process from a variety of perspectives.

first of all, I must express my gratitude to my students and alumni. They shared with me their ideas, their plans for new enterprises business plans, their concerns in critical moments, or their success as entrepreneurs. And these students and alumni come from all over the world and many have allowed me writing cases on their dilemmas. The cases made possible afterwards to bring these situations to the classroom and stimulate learning sharing different approaches to deal with them.

Also, I must thank my colleagues for the possibility to learn from them: Julia Prats, Juan Roure, Christoph Zott, Hakan Ener, Anindya Ghosh, at IESE; Rama Velamuri and Kevin Li at CEIBS; Howard Stevenson at the Harvard Business School. Also colleagues and friends who work in the financing of new ventures and with whom I have collaborated in the fascinating process of making possible to transform a business idea into a real company. I can mention Albert Fernández, Adelaide Cracco, Silvia Gomáriz and Isabel Cuesta from Finaves, at IESE. Marcelino Armenter from Caixa Capital Risk at La Caixa. Eric Li from Chengwei Ventures and Edward Ng from HGI Finaves, both projects close to CEIBS in China. Naana Winfull Fynn from Sagewest, venture capital fund open to CEIBS in its campus in Ghana.

Also, I appreciate very much the collaboration of Montse Rivas, organizing with thoughtful criterion the complex set of relationships that have made possible the progress of many projects with efficiency and learning potential. The strong commitment of IESE on entrepreneurship has always been a stimulus for my career development and the acceptance by my family, and especially by my wife Montse, of the requirements of my working with this wide international scope, have been the most solid pillar for this project. With my deepest appreciation and gratitude, I present this project to all of them.

INTRODUCTION

Joint action, negotiation and cooperation between people are essential components for starting up any business. Entrepreneurs must work as part of a team and run their ideas past friends, family, investors and teachers. Investors must have a professional, venture-capital approach or simply be looking for an opportunity to protect and maybe even build on some of their savings. Lawyers, consultants and experts in specific areas are also required. Complex start-up projects are materialised through hard work and under pressure from entrepreneurs and investors with an innovative, international and technologically ambitious outlook.

One approach to the study of the entrepreneurial process is to analyse the communication between the parties involved. Nowadays, much of our communication is via email. When we put something in writing we often need to be slightly more precise than when we have a conversation. Important conversations are often written down after the fact in the form of an email.

This is the approach used in this book, which closely follows and updates that published in 2007 under the title Letters to a young entrepreneur.

Like the latter, this book contains emails exchanged between entrepreneurs and their associates. They are all based on real cases although care has been taken not to disclose confidential details. Some entrepreneurs with a close relationship with this author will more than likely recognise themselves in it, as occurred with Letters to a young entrepreneur, although the people who recognised themselves in that book were happy that their slightly camouflaged story had proven useful in analysing aspects of the difficult endeavour of starting a business.

As with the previous project and in the courses taught by the author, this work follows the life cycle of a new business, from the moment that the entrepreneurs ask themselves whether they are truly entrepreneurs to the point that they consider their work as entrepreneurs done and decide to sell the company – or their share in it – and move on to something new.

Since the publication of Letters to an entrepreneur five years ago, a lot has changed in the world: globalisation is speeding along; the growth of technological innovation appears to know no bounds, and an economic crisis has made its way around the world, unleashing its effects on the majority of businesses today. And all of this has contributed to the rising popularity of entrepreneurialism around the world as a logical response to these changes in the environment.

Entrepreneurship is a key subject in business schools. This author has had the privilege of teaching all over the world, as a Professor at IESE Business School, as Professor and President of the China Europe International Business School (CEIBS) with centres in Shanghai, Beijing and Shenzhen (China) and Accra (Ghana, Africa), and through his close links with Harvard Business School, on whose board the author was a member between 2006 and 2011. In that five-year period, the three schools organised a number of joint programmes.

In 2000, the author and a number of his colleagues set up the Finaves venture capital fund within IESE business school to enable students with good business plans to obtain funding from their school; in recent years, he has helped to launch two funds (Chengwei Finaves and HGI Finaves) at the school he presides over in China, in addition to the SAGEWEST-CEIBS Finaves fund at the Accra branch in Ghana, also with the aim of enabling students of the programmes in China or Africa to set up their own businesses.

Cartas a un joven emprendedor was translated into Chinese and English. In July 2013, the English version, Letters to a Young Entrepreneur, was among the books on display at the entrance to the Harvard Coop bookstore at Harvard Business School. The author happened to be at the school giving classes on entrepreneurship and on seeing his book there, he suddenly thought: "Why not bring it up to date? I’ll call it Emails to a Young Entrepreneur." And here it is.

Chapter 1

ARE YOU SURE YOU’RE AN ENTREPRENEUR?

Francisco had completed a post-graduate degree in information technology at a prestigious university that offered its graduates a mentoring programme with support from university lecturers. Francisco was assigned Professor Mentorius, a man with many years’ experience in the field. The programme consisted of one or two visits a year and monitoring in the form of email exchanges, which were to be brief and to the point. Francisco had been on the programme for two years when in late 2013, at the age of 26, he wrote his mentor the following email:

Dear Professor Mentorius,

We met up three months ago and I left that meeting feeling very satisfied, so I’d like to take this opportunity to thank you again. We talked about my job at the bank and about information technology issues and how we should always keep them in mind, both from the perspective of devices (PCs, iPads, mobile phones), and