Should an academic write non-academically? I’ve gotten both of these pieces of advice in my first semester of graduate school: Don’t have a blog. When you look for academic jobs, people will wonder why you wasted your time writing a blog instead of publishing papers. Have a blog. Writing publicly is the only way to sharpen …
Toward a practical, impact-focused classification of social enterprises
Below is the second half of an essay that I put together for Alex Nicholls' Social Entrepreneurship course at Oxford's Saïd Business School. It is verbose, thanks to an academic word count target. The nut graf, as my friend Ben has taught me to call it, is that I believe that social enterprises (businesses that hope to have a positive social impact …
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Latino Startups to Watch in 2014
This article was originally posted on Vista Hispano as part of a series on Latino startups. For the rest of the series, go here. When Peter Wilkins of New Futuro set out to raise a round of venture capital this year, he found very few investors that understood his target market: US Hispanics. In the …
The State of Latino Startups: Exploring the Challenges
This blog was originally posted on Vista Hispano as a series on Latino startups. Read the first one here. Startup struggles, generally speaking If there is one topic that entrepreneurs love to talk about more than any other, it is be the trials and tribulations of being a founder. You work impossibly long hours; you wake …
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Where are all the Latino startups?
This was originally posted on the Vista Hispano blog. The US Hispanic consumer market is big. Really big. $1.3-trillion-dollars-and-counting big. Major corporations like Best Buy, Yahoo, and The Home Depot are paying attention and have piled in, attempting with varying degrees of success to capture a piece of this large and growing market. Over the course of the …
Three Unconventional Lessons For Business School Students
It’s unusual when a successful entrepreneur opens a presentation to a room full of business school students with a photograph of her twin baby boys. But then Jessica Jackley isn’t a typical entrepreneur. As one of the speakers of a three-year series funded by the Pears Foundation at the Saïd Business School at Oxford, entrepreneur …
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These 5 Organizations Are Radically Changing the Future Of Education
From my post on PolicyMic: Online education ... cannot exist in a vacuum. Increasingly available and high-quality content [has] inspired a host of organizations to experiment with ways to wrap an educational experience [around] digital content. Read more here.
The Case for Catalytic Funding of Latino-focused Startups
[Note: If you're interested in the updated and much-improved version of this pitch--especially if you're a Latino-focused entrepreneur--my gmail address is mark.c.hand.] This year, the Saïd Business School at Oxford launches GOTO, an ambitious project to focus the university’s attention on a particular topic of global import. The first topic is demography, with a focus on …
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Social Entrepreneurship 101
From my post on the Skoll Centre blog: "If you’re an entrepreneur, you’ll be competing for funding and spots at commercial incubators like Y Combinator with social entrepreneurs that have a head start on a compelling, convincing pitch. If you work at a nonprofit, you’ll be fighting for talent and money with a growing, exciting …
The missing piece of the 30-second pitch
Pitches come in all forms. Good ones, bad ones, long ones, short ones, and everything in between. Many of them, like those I heard at last week's Dasra Social Impact graduation, were carefully sculpted into 30-second pitches accompanied by a single powerpoint slide. If you're an entrepreneur and you get this opportunity, what should you …
