Tag Archives: entrepreneurs

Finally, there's the undeniable appeal of a company overflowing with cash, a tasty target for a campaign to initiate share buybacks or increase dividend payments. Which metric works best in identifying balance sheets that are attractive to activists? The ratio of a company's total cash relative to its market capitalization. The higher that ratio relative to one's peers, the more likely a company is to garner unwanted attention. When ValueAct Capital scored a seat on Microsoft's...

However, it is safe to assume that more women will be involved as VC companies are increasingly being co-founded by women. The data shows that these are attracting more women executives. For example, in these businesses 43 percent of partners are women, compared with the industry norm of seven percent. Ultimately, more women are needed in positions which require making decisions about investments in start-ups. This is the only way for women to obtain a fair share of the overall...

In the end, The Pub Hub, an innovative co-working space concept that uses bar areas as joint workspaces during the daytime, proved to be the crowd favorite. Their concept addresses the growing popularity of remote working, self-employment, and co-working spaces. "By 2020, 40 percent of the US labor market won't even work in an office," predicts Daniel Rubin, one of the founders. The Pub Hub team's inspiration came when they noticed that some of their favorite bars were empty and locked...

How will the interaction between humans and machines develop? We are at the very beginning. Look at past achievements, agriculture being a good example. The plow, the combine and the tractor made us stronger. We could say that the human spirit was paired with the physical strength of the machine. The same applied later to cars and airplanes. Today we have come to the point where machines no longer simply supplement the muscle power or motor abilities we lack; they can take over...

The report's analysis continues to demonstrate that the higher the percentage of women in top management, the greater the excess returns for shareholders. Financial performance metrics verify this superior stock market performance. From YE13 through mid-16, companies where women accounted for 25 percent of senior leadership outperformed at a compound annual growth rate of 2.8 percent; this increased to 4.7 percent at companies where women comprised 33 percent of senior...

Paper, gunpowder, the compass – China has a history of disruption that extends back thousands of years. In the digital age, however, the Middle Kingdom’s technology startups gained a reputation for quickly copying their Western peers, rather than coming up with their own world-changing ideas. All that is changing, though, and in 2016, innovation itself is increasingly being “Made in China”. China’s Internet giants are coming up with ingenious homegrown products, services, and business models,...

The headline data out of China hasn’t exactly been comforting of late. The country is grappling with the challenges of slowing GDP growth, rising debt levels, and volatile stock markets, to name just a few. But if the macroeconomic statistics seem bleak, the picture is brighter among the country’s entrepreneurial class. The quality of Chinese innovation is increasing, the funding environment is improving, particularly for early-stage companies, and the Chinese government is doing everything...

It’s not that the sharing economy itself is a new idea. Monasteries loaned books to the public in the Middle Ages, farmers have shared tools and labor for centuries, and the first known car rental service popped up in 1904. What is new is how quickly an extremely varied set of companies built around sharing, renting, collaborating, and accessing items on-demand are growing, thanks in large part to the proliferation of smartphones. There are 44 privately held sharing-oriented businesses that...