Quite often I am being approached with the question when and how a young startup will qualify for Venture Capital funding. The short version of my monologues can often be found online in the Q&A parts of your neighbourhood investor.
Some nice examples are e.g. available on the homepages of the two HHL-related Venture [...]

René from the Holtzbrinck elab blog wrote a nice summary (and critical extension) of a HBR-article on "what makes entrepreneurs entrepreneurial". Read the German essay here or download the paper in English here.

A very good example for reverse engineering is iSuppli‘s attempt to analyze the production cost of the ipod shuffle. 

Apparently, the 75$ Shuffle does only cost ~22$ in production – making for a whooping 40+$ gross margin for Apple.

Two main points I find remarkable here. First, yes, Apple does a good job [...]

Hm, I have been thinking a while whether I should put this post online. You know, at HHL we have a businessplan-seminar that is compulsory for all students taking our elective. And the study I found actually says that businessplan are useless.

So wait a minute, is this true? Basically, the study shows [...]