Tuesday, May 8, 2012

Ron Kornfeld – The Business Plan Professional


                Ron Kornfeld worked for MCI while they were developing the internet.  He got a degree in classic music playing the piano and composing music, but quickly decided there were not a lot of opportunities within that field.  This company could not figure out how to make this product profitable so he moved on to an internet startup to make money.  He used low end band width of dial up as his startups focus.  He used business plans to help test the idea itself along the way. 
                Ron described the way eyeballs are worth something to websites that use a lot of advertisement by investors through the metadata that can be gathered from the user’s preferences and navigation.  He had a tech business with hard problems solving, but in 2008 he went from almost going bankrupt to liquidated and ended up 100k in the good.  He made this push for his company’s shareholders.  He developed a website for kid learning with an adaptive learning algorithm.  This idea came to him when his son was struggling to learn through other types of learning software.  This was the Dreambox and he brought teachers in to help in the development process along with experts to give opinions and he gave his research out for free to not have to compete with other big companies.
                Ron learned a lot from each of his ventures.  While creating Dreambox he learned when you bring in experts in a field that you don’t want to generalize them.  In analyzing them you want to first see how extensible they are and how flexible.   Then you give higher correction and then you make sure you are not stepping on others within your team by bringing someone new in that specializes in the field you are trying to solve a problem within.

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