Lucky You?

I often mention that luck plays an important role in the success or failure of new enterprises, and have previously pointed out that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, has acknowledged that luck was the most important factor in Google's early success. I recently read a quote attributed to Jim Balsillie, co-CEO of RIM (BlackBerry) and heavily involved in its early success. A recent article in Business Week about the rise and fall of BlackBerry ascribes to Balsillie the following statement: "A lot of people who are involved in building a $60 billion company like to look back and attribute their success to smart moves along the way. What I'm going to tell you is a story about luck--and extraordinary luck at key moments along the way." My goal in emphasizing the critical importance of luck in your success is this: You will experience both good luck and bad luck along the way. If you let the bad luck put you under, you will not be there when the good luck would have later come along. This is a primary reason why persistence matters!

BaseCamp Business Calendar Widget Now on Blog

I have added a widget for highlights from BaseCamp Business events calendar, which you will find in the right sidebar column of this blog.  It covers events in PA, NJ, DE, MD, and TN hosted by a number of entities, all targeted to entrepreneurs and especially technology entrepreneurs.  Clicking on a listed item will take you to the BaseCamp Business Events Calendar site for more information.

I hope you find this helpful!

Who's That Following You???

If you jump on the bandwagon--as I have--and set up a Twitter account, you may be pleasantly surprised to find that very quickly several people start following you.  Followers are good, but you should realize that not all of them are real.

Millions of fake Twitter accounts (up to 20 million by one estimate) are for sale, and millions of Twitter accounts are fraudulently used for the sole purpose of inflating the number of "followers" of a legitimate account.

Because having numerous followers is so valuable in increasing "standing" in the Twitterverse, many operators have sprung up that will generate numerous fake Twitter accounts for a client and then program those fake accounts to follow the client's legitimate Twitter account.

In another scam, these fake accounts can be made to re-tweet from legitimate accounts, also increasing prominence of the legit account.

Further still, illicit software is for sale that allows scammers to cause legitimate Twitter accounts to randomly follow thousands of other Twitter accounts.  And this is where you come in with your newly created Twitter account.  When you get that software-generated "follow" of your brand spanking new account, you are naturally inclined to accept the invitation to reciprocate by following the account that just followed you.  Bingo... the account that used a software program to follow you just got a legitimate follower in return!