Many of us secretly desire starting our own business. Here’s a nice article from Forbes on some of the myths of such an endeavor.
In 2007, Anand Sanwal was managing a $50 million innovation fund for American Express. His job: to identify and incubate new business ideas–and that meant doing gobs of market research, much of it on small, closely held companies. One problem: Public information on private companies was scarce, and the data that did exist wasn’t in much of a structured, useful format. Sanwal knew he wasn’t the only one looking for that kind of information. So he and some partners launched Manhattan-based CB Information Systems to do just that. The company’s Web-based software, marketed under the name ChubbyBrain (www.chubbybrain.com), trolls the Web for data on private companies–what they do, who is buying and selling them and for how much. “We are all engineers who went to business school, so we thought we had what was an elegant, logical and robust plan,” says Sanwal, 35. “We were pretty happy with ourselves.” – From Forbes