December 25, 2007 Women Entrepreneurs More "Bootstrappy" Than Men from http://blog.innovatorsnetwworkorg/2007/12/index.html Joanna Glasner reports on the difficulties faced by woman entrepreneurs seeking venture capital funding in a recent piece at PEHub. "Lack of connections is a common theme as to why female entrepreneurs lag in venture fund-raising[,]" Glasner writes. Because of this dearth of networking contacts and limited access to those with VC money to invest, "women entrepreneurs are much more likely to bootstrap and run their own small companies rather than attempt to grow them by raising venture funding." Also at PEHub, Alexander Haislip outlines the many pitfalls of startup compensation and provides some guidance to negotiate difficult tax laws tied to equity-based plans, IPOs, and deferred payments. "Equity-based compensation can be a powerful component of a company’s compensation strategy, but planning for such programs requires careful consideration of current and future considerations." Take a few minutes to read Haislip's primer on planning for your startup's financial growth with prudence in mind. Lucent junkets incur the ire of the US Justice Department according to a fresh story at Portfolio.com. "The company has agreed to pay $2.5 million to the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Justice Department for ferrying Chinese officials to Disneyland, the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, and other vacation spots." This, after Lucent "flew an estimated 1,000 Chinese officials to the United States for "factory tours"—after it had already closed all its domestic factories and moved them abroad." Along with the fine for its blatantly shady behavior, Lucent will also have to adopt new policies to remain in compliance with anti-corruption codes. Innovation at Work: Factory-Free Factory Tours for all the despicable details. The Center for American Progress presents a down-loadable document that "will identify some of the key ways in which policymakers can support the growth and spread of innovative non-profit solutions, and will offer some policy guidelines and a framework that the Center for American Progress intends to explore and expand during 2008." If your venture has a social aspect or you would like to learn more about progressive social entrepreneurship, including the good works of Wendy Kopp of Teach For America, Geoffrey Canada of Harlem Children’s Zone, President Bill Clinton of the Clinton Global Initiative, and Muhammed Yunus of the Grameen Bank, read Investing in Social Entrepreneurship and Fostering Social Innovation by Michelle Jolin (warning: *.pdf file link). "Competitive advantage is something that should always be foremost in your mind as an entrepreneur[,]" writes Brad Dwyer at the Professionile.com blog. Dwyer makes a good argument for outsourcing whatever it is that you aren't best at in exchange for focusing on your most valuable skill: "It can be very advantageous, both time-wise, result-wise, and money-wise to outsource. Let’s face it, we can’t be good at everything. You have your bread and butter (which better be the product you’re putting out) and then you have all these extraneous things that are necessary to do business but aren’t your primary focus." Take those "extraneous things" and hire them out. Simple as that!