A Great Lecture - More Please

On Friday we had a lecture from Jörgen Adolfsson founder of Aspiro a Swedish Telecoms company which specialises in mobile phone applications, was listed publicly in 2001 at a value of around $US1 billion, soon after which Jörgen sold his share and got out of the company.  This was an inspiring and frank discussion painting a picture of the highs and low of what it takes to become an entrepreneur.  What made this lecture great was the wealth of practical information presented in an intellectually stimulating way.  To me, this is the way business should be taught, theory certainly has a place but its place is in textbooks as a precursor to a lecture that use's case studies and real life examples to stimulate your thought processes and enable the student to challenge the theory they have been learning.  Here are some of the highlights from the lecture for me:

• The amount of change a company goes through from initial idea to launch and the continued evolution after launch.
• Aspiro launched in 1998 when there was a lot of VC funding available for this sort of technology - the three founders retained only a 30% ownership of the company.  The share in ownership however did not directly translate to a loss of control over the company, Jörgen estimated that the founders retained a 90% say in the strategy and direction of the company due to the fact that none of the investors had the technical knowledge to challenge them.  However, financial decisions were very much in the hands of the investors and a lot of time was spent by Jörgen  preparing and answering to rigorous questioning on finances "when things are going well its all limosines and champagne but when its not going so well its a lot more standing in a board room answering a barrage of questions.
• The only reason to take your company public is to cash out your shares.  Once a company goes public it almost always starts to perform worse.

Finally, something I found particularly fascinating was his 'back of the napkin' drawing of the initial idea for his company and the way the technology would work.  Unfortuneately I do not have the slides to share with you but some further research on 'back of the napkin' business plans elicited some fascinating finds.  The video embeded below is an interesting lecture from Dan Roam, the author of "The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures." D taking part in an excellent series of videos called authors@google from @google talks which I highly recommend you check out.