Starting A Small Business

December 29, 2008

Where to Locate Your Business

Adam Rousselle needed to move. His firm, then based in Doylestown, Pa., uses sophisticated technology to identify trees that threaten to take down power lines, and ...

November 21, 2008

Contemplating a Business Partnership?

A business partnership (BusinessWeek SmallBiz, June/July, 2007) is usually hatched in a state of inspired optimism when two or more seemingly like-minded individuals ...

September 5, 2008

What I Did This Summer at Business Camp

Several summer camps encourage teenagers to try out entrepreneurship—teaching them marketing, finance, and how to make a business plan.

June 30, 2008

Fresh Entrepreneurs

Welcome to Fresh Entrepreneurs, a new ongoing series profiling startups from across the country. Our first batch typifies the imagination and drive that today's new ...

April 2, 2008

Intrapreneurs and Adaptive Persistence

Culling from their own experience launching new companies and interviews with 55 entrepreneurs around the world, Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek, co-founders of ...

March 24, 2008

A Conversation with Michael Gerber

Over the past 30 years, Michael Gerber, author of best-sellers The E-Myth Revisited and E-Myth Mastery, has coached and trained thousands of small business owners, ...

March 17, 2008

You Don't Have to Ditch the Day Job

Editor's note: This column is adapted from Wright's recent post on his blog on running a sustainable Web business. In the beginning, it's not always practical to dive ...

March 12, 2008

Alumni Networks: Knotting the School Tie

When David Hernandez got laid off from Enron (BusinessWeek.com, 12/17/01) in late 2001, he decided to start his own company to sell retail electricity in deregulated ...

January 23, 2008

The Entrepreneurship Myth

Entrepreneurship creates jobs and drives the U.S. economy, making smart founders and savvy investors rich in the process, right? Not so, says Scott Shane, professor of...

January 11, 2008

Starting a Business Instead of Retiring

Ric Cox retired at 55, but he didn't stop working. Instead, he launched ChicagoCondosOnline.com, a database that sells condo information to realtors and listings ...

December 17, 2007

Kitchen Incubators Get Food Businesses Cooking

Many aspiring entrepreneurs dream of turning their grandmother's cookie recipe into the next Mrs. Fields. Yet because stringent food-safety regulations make it illegal...

December 10, 2007

Building a Facebook for Wine

Michael Stajer bet big on his idea to start an eBay-style (EBAY)Web site for buying and selling wines in 1999. The Bay Area attorney sold his personal wine collection ...

December 3, 2007

How to Write a Winning Business Plan

Venture capitalist Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital (BusinessWeek, 10/17/07) prefaces his comments about what he looks for in business plans with a caveat: ...

November 30, 2007

That Crucial First Year

Barry Thomsen began his entrepreneurial career as a 10-year-old running a paper route and selling lemonade to workers at construction sites. From there, he sold Amway ...

November 21, 2007

How Failure Molded Spanx's Founder

Sara Blakely had been selling fax machines and office copiers door-to-door for seven years when she had an idea for a clothing line that would transform her from an ...

October 26, 2007

The Mundane Realities of a Creative Biz

If you've ever picked up a greeting card and thought: "Hey, I could do that," you're not alone. In the five years since she founded her $5 million gift and stationery ...

September 26, 2007

How Y Combinator Helped Shape Reddit

Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman, co-founders of the social news site Reddit, have become Y Combinator (BusinessWeek, 9/26/07) poster children since their company was ...

September 26, 2007

Y Combinator Inspires Imitators

Paul Graham knows that most startups will eventually fail. But at Y Combinator, the hacker guru's seed fund for young techies, they're encouraged to fail fast and fail...

September 19, 2007

One Giant Leap for Entrepreneurs

This November, Carnegie Mellon robotics professor William "Red " Whittaker and his team's radar- and laser-equipped Chevy Tahoe are top contenders for the $2 million ...

September 12, 2007

How to Sell Your Invention

So you've created a brilliant new product you know will fly off store shelves. Maybe you're considering patenting (BusinessWeek, 2/5/07) it or building prototypes ...

August 31, 2007

Can You Profit as a Franchise Pioneer?

In 2005, business partners and first-time franchise operators Karen McGinn and Gene Bowen bought an iSold It eBay(EBAY) drop-off franchise and opened it in a ...

August 13, 2007

Does Success Hinge on a Domain Name?

Editor's Note: An earlier version of this story incorrectly characterized the owner of the fave.com web domain as a "cybersquatter." As readers have pointed out, the ...

July 27, 2007

Networking Around the World

Business networks made up of homogenous members benefit a startup in the beginning, but may actually hinder it later on. That's just one of the findings in Bat ...

June 20, 2007

Meet the Talking Menu

For Susan Perry, it was a forgetful moment that would change her life. After sitting down for lunch with her niece at a restaurant in Miami last August, the ...

May 2, 2007

Goodbye, Cubicle. Hello, Startup!

Author Michelle Goodman, a self-described former "wage slave," left her cubicle in 1992 to work for herself, and never looked back. But the transition wasn't easy for ...