We recently had the chance to talk with Pablo Villalba from Teambox about how he got started and what advice he has to pass onto new and budding entrepreneurs, better yet, Teambox is now inBloon’s project management solution. The trickle effects of Next Top Startup, but I digress.

So without further ado, the startup feature of : Teambox

How did you come up with the idea for your company?

On one hand, I was looking for something that would tie our team together as a group. We tried some online solutions, excel spreadsheets, blogs and Gantt planning, but nothing worked.

When a client asked to deploy a solution in his own server, I started some real research for a quality open-source project manager. There was not such a thing. So, with a little seed funding, we got started.

The first versions were merely proofs of concept, and were only available on Spanish. However, they taught us important lessons on software development and clients’ needs. All this made a difference for Teambox 2.

Any milestones that you’d like to share?

When Teambox 2 was launched, it was one of a kind. It was the first Twitter-style collaboration tool that grouped team communication and task management.

After exiting the beta period, we set up some pricing plans for users who needed more of what we were doing. So far, we have over 100 paid accounts for the online version and we’re starting to have our first corporate clients. This means a lot of new lessons to learn, and the need to adapt quickly.

We recently acquired an online group chat application in our space, and we have plans to integrate its functionality in Teambox while expanding its offerings. We’re very excited about the possibilities.

Can you tell us a bit about the team?

At the heart of Teambox, we’re very technically minded people with a passion for design.

We had endless discussions over little details, because we care about usability. You can spend months developing the coolest feature on Earth, but unless you make it simple nobody is going to use it.We’re currently 5 programmers and 3 mixed profiles for sales and marketing. We expect to keep things small and simple, scaling our service without a significant increase on staff.

For that, we only work with the best. Our open-source community has been a great talent pool, where people can learn our working style before joining the company.

Any difficulties you’ve experienced in the startup process of your company?

It’s been extremely hard to get funded during the hard times economy has been through. Nevertheless, we were lucky to find the right investors who trusted the startup and team and made it possible.

It has also been very disappointing to see how public grants have more to do with political reasons than real innovation and supporting research and development. Lessons learned from this: Private money is reasonable, and it’s always better to survive with your own money or customers than looking for money from others.

Any advice to pass on to budding entrepreneurs?

Just get started. Entrepreneurship is like a George Lucas film, where you meet your friends during a long journey to an uncertain destination

When you think of the Soviet Union, and in fact communism – the last thing that comes to your mind are the favorable conditions it set for private enterprise. And while undeniable that the “concept” of privatization was “frowned upon” under the hammer and sickle, it’s not to say that it inadvertently didn’t do more good than bad for entreprenerus – at least in today’s world, and looking ten fifteen years down the line.

Have we lost our marbles. Hardly.

The East – West Divide

Let’s look at the nature of things as they were prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall and Perestroika. Not only was food scarce in the Warsaw Pact but so were normal commodity items such as pillows, skirts, toilet paper, or for that matter next to everything that wasn’t either vodka, potato, or beer, or combined product there of, and you can forget about the availability of Levi’s Jeans all together.

So what would happen if say a few individuals gained access to a box of Levi’s, another few, to a couple of crates of Bananas, another to extra couches at the factory, and perhaps someone else to some toddler shirts, etc… etc… effectively an underground economy, which initially arose as a barter system. 3 pairs of 501 regular fit jeans for 1 couch. Done. One pair of regular fit for 10 shirts. Done. 5 shirts for three bushels of bananas. Done.

An entrepreneurial mindset was forming out of necessity to have basic human goods. What’s interesting as well is that – this new basic form of entrepreneurship – spanned the Eastern Block, the Polish would have a surplus of something the Hungarians did not, who in turn had a surplus of something or other that the Romanians lacked, and so the circle went ’round and ’round, and under the table micro international trade was blossoming.

Aside from the trading and the bartering, this did however carry risks, visas were next to impossible to acquire, individuals were putting themselves and their families at stake for just participating in this activity, but history aside, all this came to and end with the fall of the USSR and the introduction of free market reforms, or did it?

The West – West Divide

Let’s fast forward to now, and look at the Western block, aside from a few pockets, entrepreneurship and failure is generally looked down upon. If you fail, it’s as if though you are negatively branded, and instead of being looked a as a brave individual whose attempted something new, and in terms of the general mentality – this is probably the most differentiating factor between the U.S. and Western Europeans.

What do we mean? Well in Spain one of the most sought after positions is a “funcionario” or a civil servant, in Danish there exists a word for being too ambitious, but the buck doesn’t stop there.

There is a popular drive not to succeed and just be comfortable in the majority of the populace, and the socially backed government initiatives, the sometimes month+ it takes to get a company up and running, the don’t get us started on various labour laws that make firing people more expensive than keeping them on, it’s no wonder that entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship has been hit with the stick for decades and just now individuals are trying to turn things around led by best practices and initiatives coming from the states and those Europeans who had to leave in order to fully develop their companies and ideas in places such as Silicon Valley, NY, Boston, etc.

The East – West Junction

We’re 20 years on from the fall off the Berlin Wall, the entrepreneurship mentality is still there, the post Warsaw pact citizens are innovating, creating, going around obstacles and taking risks in order to move their enterprises forward, not only on a local but an international front. Furthermore, due to the oppressive nature of the Soviet regime, the region has typically embraced US American ideals and concepts, further positioning themselves to grab the reigns for European Entrepreneurs.

Notwithstanding, many of the C&E Europeans feel that they have something to prove, to show that they too can become magnates of industry, and with the total alienation to socialism caused by the USSR it wouldn’t be surprising if within the next 20 years the focus of entrepreneurship on the European front will shift much further East.

Today we present you with 25 quotes regarding entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs, some hit home, some are inspirational and some are funny, and while Googling “Entrepreneurship Quotes” will give you a list of many many more, we figured the best dang thing to do was to dig through the web and pick the ones we felt were most relevant. Enjoy!

1. “Business opportunities are like buses, there’s always another one coming.”
- Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Enterprises

2. “There is only one way to make a great deal of money; and that is in a business of your own.”
– J. Paul Getty, Former oil tycoon and once the richest man in America

3. “I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work”
- Thomas Edison, inventor and scientist

4. “The only place where success comes before work is in the dictionary”
– Vidal Sassoon, entrepreneur

5. “The best way to predict the future is to create it.”
– Peter Drucker

6. “Failure defeats losers, failure inspires winners.”
– Robert T. Kiyosaki, author, entrepreneur, investor

7. “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things that you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover”
- Mark Twain, author

8. “Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?”
- Steve Jobs, Apple Inc., the line he used to lure John Sculley as Apple’s CEO

9. We were young, but we had good advice and good ideas and lots of enthusiasm.”
- Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft Corporation

10. “Nobody talks about entrepreneurship as survival, but that’s exactly what it is and what nurtures creative thinking. Running that first shop taught me business is not financial science; it’s about trading: buying and selling.”
- Anita Roddick, founder of The Body Shop

11. “I wanted to be an editor or a journalist, I wasn’t really interested in being an entrepreneur, but I soon found I had to become one in order to keep my magazine going.”
- Richard Branson, founder of Virgin Enterprises

12. “The way to get started is to quit talking and begin doing.”
– Walt Disney

13. “If everything seems under control, you’re just not going fast enough.”
– Mario Andretti

14. “In the modern world of business, it is useless to be a creative, original thinker unless you can also sell what you create.”
– David Ogilvy

15. “The most valuable thing you can make is a mistake – you can’t learn anything from being perfect.”
- Adam Osborne

16. “The entrepreneur in us sees opportunities everywhere we look, but many people see only problems everywhere they look. The entrepreneur in us is more concerned with discriminating between opportunities than he or she is with failing to see the opportunities.”
- Michael Gerber, author, entrepreneur

17. “An entrepreneur tends to bite off a little more than he can chew hoping he’ll quickly learn how to chew it.”
- Roy Ash, co-founder of Litton Industries

18. “Every worthwhile accomplishment, big or little, has its stages of drudgery and triumph; a beginning, a struggle and a victory.”
- Mahatma Gandhi, political and spiritual leader

19. “Entrepreneurs average 3.8 failures before final success. What sets the successful ones apart is their amazing persistence.”
- Lisa M. Amos

20. “Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.”
- Steve Jobs, Apple Inc.

21. “Everyone experiences touch times, it’s a measure of your determination and dedication how you deal with them and how you can come through them.”
- Lakshmi Mittal

22. “I always tried to turn every disaster into an opportunity.”
- John D. Rockefeller

23. “Most new jobs won’t come from our biggest employers. They will come from our smallest. We’ve got to do everything we can to make entrepreneurial dreams a reality”
- Ross Perot

24. “Entrepreneurship is the last refuge of the trouble making individual.”
- Natalie Clifford Barney

25. “There is a tide in the affairs of men
Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
Omitted, all the voyage of their life
Is bound in shallows and in miseries.
On such a full sea are now afloat;
And we must take the current when it serves,
Or lose the ventures before us”
- William Shakespeare, author

Tomorrow on Startup Saturdays we will feature – The Foundation for Global Collaboration and Peace -  and when we received their response to our questions – the advice was overwhelming, so instead of putting everything into one long post, we decided to split it in two.

As such here are the majority of best practices as coined by the FGCP.

1. Try to be as transparent as possible (nobody knows you when you’re a startup, show them who you are by your actions)

2. Only make promises you can deliver

3. Take time to think over decisions before making them

4. Make time for yourself and your loved ones

5. Listen more than you talk/do

6. Give credit where it’s due

7. Refuse to be taken hostage by seemingly immediate needs–other solutions will come in due time

8. Keep your eye on both the long-term and short-term horizon

9. Be your own best cheerleader and loudest critic (when in doubt, choose the first)

10. Learn to admit when you’re wrong (what’s more important to you, having a pristine ego with no one around to give a hoot or a good team that appreciates you as a fellow human being?)

11. Correct mistakes whenever possible and feasible

12. Be open to unanticipated opportunities and leave room for unforeseen errors–give yourself some breathing room

13. Treat people like intelligent human beings, until proven otherwise

14. Know the difference between assumptions and facts and be especially vigilant toward assumptions underlying other assumptions

15. Do your research: make sure that expert advice you’re getting is suited to your organization’s needs.  If that’s unclear, ask the person to clarify and get a second/third opinion.

16. You are NOT your enterprise: we want our business to grow bigger than ourselves, so learn to let go when the time is right.

17. Check in with yourself once a day to take stock of how you’re feeling

18. Be honest with yourself: don’t put on a happy face just because you think you should.  It’s better to realize that things are going wrong and deal with them than leaving them to get worse and become unmanageable.

19. Know your cash flow.  LOVE your cash flow.

20. Get enough sleep

21. Have a good sense of proportionality: a) setbacks are not the end of the world; b) you are not god; and c) neither are your expert advisers

22. Trust reason above good delivery

23. It’s better to do and fail than to do nothing at all

24. Celebrate small victories, even if no one else appreciates them

25. Get to know your limitations and learn to say no

Innovation is an ongoing process that your company should be taking a strong stake in, and as an entrepreneur it should always be on your mind. Why? Because as long as you’re working towards goals so are others, process improvements happen all the time, and new ways of doing things will always keep on evolving. If you’re not evolving, you’re in a way killing your business.

Look at it this way, you may have a technology that at the moment can clean water in a manner that is thus far cheaper and more energy efficient than your competitors, you have a decisive competitive advantage because of this technology, however, you know that there are also engineers out there working on similar products, ones that may be cheaper and more energy efficient than yours? So what do you do, you innovate. You look for different processes, different materials, ways to improve the process that will help you keep that advantage.

Today, we look at that relationship, the one between innovation and strategy. In all there are really three ways in which you can approach innovation within your company, and each is designed to work a bit differently. Read the methods, and think about which one of these works best for your enterprise and how you can most effectively apply in.

1. Strategy Defines Innovation – The company collects CI, looks at the market and then defines a strategy, i.e. in 5 years time we want to be at point X, we want to have Y% of the market and be in Z countries. How do we get there. In this scenario innovation effects are pursued to deliver and ensure value to the strategy, and the goal.

2. Innovation Defines Strategy – The company through the most excellent ideas of its board, entreprenerus and others has developed a number of concepts. These concepts are mapped, and a strategic evaluation is conducted based on CI, market factors, etc.. the selected innovation then fuels the strategy of the enterprise.

3. Innovation and Strategy Inform One Another – This is an ongoing dialogue between the two, Innovation and Strategy both affect each other equally, and the C levels manage the process throughout.

In terms of startups and smaller companies, you will find that option two tends to work the best. Why? Because chances are that you’ve embarked on a business venture due to the fact that you had a few good ideas, and chose to pursue one of them. This is the innovation process for those that are starting, or launching something totally new.

With that, your product, service, what have you can be easily augmented and adjusted to suit market needs, additional products, support products can also be added to your product, this is where No.1 comes in. How do you get from A->B how do you grow, and what and where can you innovate to help your business grow.

The last is the hardest to manage, specifically as it needs constant and ongoing attention which most startups lack do to limited resources. In practice it’s strongly supported by larger companies in high-innovation industries, bio, clean tech, hardware & chip design, etc… However that does not mean you should forget about it, Innovation and strategy should always be informing one another, always.

Entrepreneurs are definitely a special breed, this is motivation, personality as well as a number of additional factors. So before you or someone you know wants to jump in and tackle the world, we recommend gauging your personality to see if you possess any of the critical success factors that make up an entrepreneur.

ENTREPRENEURIAL CRITICAL SUCCESS FACTORS

1. Belief in success – if you doubt yourself, if you don’t think you can do it, climb up a mountain and conquer the world, or if you don’t have somewhat megalomaniacal expectations of yourself and understand that accomplishing event half of those expectations will mean success to others, read no further and go get a 9-5 day job.

2. Possess valuable practical world experience – you may have a great idea, but having real world experience is vital, schools can only teach you so much, and this experience will often mean sink or swim for your enterprise. Furthermore, you should always be getting this experience, before your venture, during it, and after.

3. Be unusual and unconventional - Let’s face it, normal never got anywhere. Are you unusual, quirky, do you visualize the world in a unique and peculiar way? Great. This factor is key to you identifying opportunity.

4. Embrace risk and failure – The majority of the population is risk averse, they don’t like it because it means, possible failure and people are afraid of failure because of the way it will be perceived by others. But what is failure other than a great learning experience?

5. Want to leave the large Co. behind – If you like the large company, the security of belonging to someone on a fortune something hundred list, then Entrepreneurship is not for you. Entrepreneurs are independent thinkers, they are leaders, not followers.

6. Think like or belong to a society where above normal expectations are welcome – If the expectations in your society are to get a comfy job, because that comfy job provides security, and better yet it’s a government job. You’ll have a a harder climb than someone who belongs to a society that encourages risk taking. See how your societal culture holds up, if need be, leave.

7. Be ambitious – If someone tells you you’re thinking too big, maybe you’re not thinking big enough. As innovation is the mother of invention, ambition is the mother of innovation, and even though the developers of some new iPhone app will tell you it’s the next most innovative thing since sliced bread. It probably isn’t. Real innovation sprs positive change, be ambitious, think you can change the world. Do you?

And we’ll close this with words from one successful entrepreneur, Sidney Pulitzer, who started an undergraduate entrepreneurship course at Tulane University with the following opener.

“95% of the people on this planet have no clue what the hell is going on, out of the other 5%, 3% do know what’s going on, but they’re too God damn afraid to do anything about it. Those last 2% boys and girls, they’re the movers and shakers, so take a moment and ask yourselves. Where do you belong?”

So… where Do you belong?

Let’s face it, each city of medium size and up has events slated at the entrepreneur, and they tend to fall into one of two categories. The speaker series, or the networking drinks series, but there are very strong underlying problems with each.

Let’s look at Entrepreneurship Speaker Series.

You sign up, you go, you are seated and then you listen to one guy speak for 30 minutes, then the next for another 30, then the third and are eventually moved into a space to network for 30 more minutes. Alternatively, you’ll get one speaker, and then a networking session on top of that.

Great, or is it. Aside from the fact that most speakers lack the charisma of a Barak Obama or Churchill, these series tend to go over time, and if people are sitting in a hall, you’ll find a percentage of the crowd dozing off. If the speaker series extends to two or three individuals this percentage will undeniably go up.

After the event is finished, everyone will huddle around the speaker and try to get a word in, in order to have a bit of face time and hope they’ll remember them. While the rest of the group stands in their corners talking to people they already know. Sounds familiar?

The Networking Drinks Series

You head to a bar, you get a “Hello my name is” tag and you’re supposed to network. But with whom? Who do you talk to, how can you get the most out of it, and what about those people who simply put aren’t good at talking to others, i.e. the introvert/extrovert scenario.

You have tons of these, Drink Tank in London, Founders Lounge in Barcelona, even First Tuesdays succumbs to this. A drinks – event is good fun, but it’s productivity is questionable. Why? Because you don’t know who will be at the event, nor will you know that if there are people there worth talking to you’ll necessarily network with them.

Long story short the current model is simply not efficient – and there are many means for innovation and improvement within events targeting the entrepreneurship sector.

So What About Solutions

Here’s the thing. When you’ve got a speaker, get the crowd involved from the onset, break them up into small groups, whether they know each other or not, it doesn’t matter, have them collaborate – bringing in people from different walks, industries is good, it opens them up to other ways of thinking and problem solving. Don’t make the interaction one way, make it tow way, or event triangular.

When putting on a networking event, don’t just plop people in a room and say network, see who’s coming and pair them up, have a few people putting on the event make introductions, ask people when they sign up, who they want to meet, what they’re looking for. Make the whole thing interactive.

And make it fun, whether it’s a speaker, a networking event, a funding event, what have you, be sure to make it fun, engaging, and provide something that all aprticipants will take away from it, bring valie to everyone involved.

F3FundIt is planning an event for later this year, if you are interested in learning more about it or how you can get involved – please send an email to info @ f3fundit.com with the subject line f3f-event. Thanks.

“As entrepreneurs we strive to make the world a better place, we drive innovation, and we lead, though sometimes we haven’t a clue as to where we’re going” so said the entrepreneur.

Today’s video series is about leadership, and how it affects the world, it’s more a think piece than anything else, and we hope you’ll very much like it. We did, and it’s one of our favorite video series so far.

However, as much as we would like to take credit for such an absolutely amazing video we cannot, it comes from the good people at XPLANE a company that specializes in visual communication, and with clients such as the Economist, BASF, UNICEF, Vodafone, etc…, you know there’s something to them.

This video however, comes from a more academic background and was put together in collaboration with Nitin Nohria and Amanda Pepper of Harvard Business School’s Leadership Initiative in order to get people talking about leadership, and what is specifically interesting to us, and the wider entrepreneurship community out there is that the majority of leaders presented in the video were / are entreprenerus.

We as entrepreneurs work every day, to change and make the world a better place, we do this because we see possibilities, and because we love it and have an undying passion for it, and if you do it just for the money, I’ll tell you now, save your breath, you’ll fail. You have to enjoy it.

And with that ladies and gentlemen of the wider internets entrepreneurial and otherwise community, we at f3fundit.com present you with Imagine Leadership

BEFORE YOU SKIP AWAY – THINK ABOUT THE FOLLOWING.

• Am I a leader? And was I born this way or made? What are my strengths, weaknesses?
• Does an entrepreneur have to be a leader, or a leader an entrepreneur?
• What is the defining difference between a leader and a manager? After all managers can start companies can’t they?

We’d love to hear your thoughts?

One thing about providing a good service to all our readers is to try and provide it on an almost continuous basis, and while we do talk about starups, entrepreneurship, best practices, capital and a whole array of other topics relating to new and small enterprises – we figured, if most entrepreneurs are working six days a week, so should we, after all, we don’t want to be called hypocrites here at F3FundIt.

So we got to thinking, Saturday should be a time to at least wind down a bit, and what better way to wind down than to each Saturday feature a new promising startup. Now this being week zero of this feature series we figured we might as well give you a general guideline on what to send us in order to qualify for … wait for it….

Startup Saturdays…

Just send an e-mail to info@f3fundit.com with the subject line “Startup Satuday Submission” or “S3” with the following information.

: Satrtup Name -
: Website -
: Industry -
: Where are you located? -
: What exactly do you do? In one sentence please. -
: How did you come up with the idea? -
: What stage of the startup process are you currently in? -
: Any milestones we should tell the world about?
: How about your team? Who are they? -
: Any fears, phobias, anxieties? -
: Any advice to pass onto new budding entrepreners? -
: Anything you want to add? -

Groovy, that ought to cover it. And when you do submit your startup, it’d be killer if you could provide a logo that we could throw up and if you have a video or any other media, well… you can submit that as well.

Someone once said, that humanity is at its best when faced with great adversity, or something to that effect. This statement is as true now, as the day when it was coined.

If we look at human history, when times were good – we find that there is little to social, technological, literary, nor artistic innovation, we as a species innovate when times are tough, it is the human spirit to persist survive and come out stronger that pushes us against odds to overcome obstacles and adversity.

The same can be said now, the world is in shambles, global economies are in the dumps, and all indicators point to a horrible year, with no sun on the horizon, those of us lucky enough to have jobs are holding on to them, and those of us who are not so fortunate are competing against even greater numbers for a piece of a pie that has been decreasing drastically.

Luckily, consumer spending is not bottoming out, but getting less – Changewave.com -reports that the outlook for Q1/2 of 2010 is grim, but it is not terminal, and figures coming in from the NPD Group a market research company – show that initial figures of luxury tech products – games, and hardware – are in fact increasing although not at the same year on year rate.

So who is to be believed, masses or samples? Logical reason points the way towards the masses, but there is no indication that we are nearing the end of the slump yet, and consumers may in fact reel in spending more leading to future figures showing a strong decline.

So what does all this imply, simply that there needs to be rhyme to reason, things are bad, but are not drastic, established companies are trimming at the seams, partially due to mass hysteria, and partially to red bottom lines – hence hiring freezes and layoffs, cutbacks, etc…

But the shimmer here is, that when people are put against the wall, they fight back, and create innovative ways of getting by, we are going to see new products and services emerge from this recession that will undoubtedly change the way we life and function, with technological investment still moving forward, there can and will be new opportunities, and when all is said and done the entrepreneur will stand triumphant, above the crowd, and the NY Times’ and the Economists of the world will cover them next.

So here’s to thinking – where is the next Ockham’s Razor?