Startup Kenya

The indecipherable expression on a young man's face as his business partner threatens to sue him for everything is definitely the best scene of Andrew Sorkin's The Social Network. Mark Zuckerberg just stares at his best friend Eduardo Saverin who is flipping out after being screwed out of their business.  Jesee Eisenberg potrays  Zuckenberg the youngest (self-made) billionaire in the world ($6.9B as at Oct 2010) who built facebook into a network of 500 million friends but lost his only friend along the way. No, this is not a how-to get into your business partners pants post. Rather I want to talk about the little considered but very important relationship that you have with your business partner  and how to balance the pursuit of profit with keeping the friendship going. I cannot overstate the importance of maintaining a healthy friendly relationship with your business partner. As Eduardo found out, the minute the friendship starts deteriorating, so goes the business r

Am a great advocate of networking to get new business. Its the best way especially for small and medium sized businesses to meet the people they need to meet to get business in an inexpensive way. The question is however, how do you choose what networking event to attend. Some of them are downright useless and with my goldfish concentration span most tend to be very boring. The other day though, I went for a speed networking event organised by AFRI Business Development. The first time i heard about it I was a bit skeptic. We all know about speed dating so speed networking sounded a bit off key in relation to business. Questions going through my mind included..."is it like speed dating where you are able to get a date"?...Ok I know that's a bit simplistic thinking but really it was hard for me to conjure up what speed networking would be all about before I attended. So i went, not with a business objective in mind but if i am to be honest, out of curiosity. I have to say i