Guest Lecture from John Dimmer [TINST475]

I appreciated the getting the chance to hear the views and learn from Mr. Dimmer's experience. His view of entrepreneurship provided some contrast to the instructor's views, especially when it came to the reason for being an entrepreneurship (his focus primarily being to grow a company and make money, while the instructor viewed entrepreneurship as an opportunity to do something your passionate about). His information on the funding side of the business was very interesting an applicable. I definitely appreciated the discussion of equity dilution, including the equation for calculating percent of the company sold. Additionally, his discussion about the importance of maintaining more than 50 percent of a company, and methods for raising money that do not involve selling equity was also fascinating. I am very interested in searching out business plan competitions and looking to crowd-sourcing for some of my funding. I wish he had touched on crowd funding more as an option for raising funds. Something I hope there is a bit more of in this class is a more clear description of how to go about the legal process of creating a company. In that vein, I found the information Mr. Dimmer presented about the different types of structures for company to be very illuminating, and something I hope that gets touched on further over the coming weeks. Finally, I was simply blown away to hear Mr. Dimmer's estimates for the total amount that angel investor groups would put into a single raise! I never would have expected anywhere from 500,000 to 2.5 million. This was a very interesting guest lecture, and I am very thankful that Mr. Dimmer came to speak to the class!

-Don