Word: entrepreneurs
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...first bit of unpleasantness for O'Leary. For most of the 1990s, he was the president of educational-software company Softkey, which he co-founded with fellow Canadian entrepreneur Michael Perik. O'Leary and Perik sold the firm, which they renamed the Learning Company, to Mattel in 1999 for $3.6 billion. But almost immediately the deal turned sour. The Learning Company lost $200 million in the second half of 1999 alone. O'Leary and Perik, who joined Mattel after the merger, left the toy company six months later in a management shake-up. In 2001, Mattel disposed of the Learning...
...fact that French private enterprise is surging in the middle of the world's worst economic crisis in 50 years is as surprising as its cause. The motor driving all that bustling start-up action is an innovation known as auto-entrepreneur, a government scheme introduced in January to help would-be bosses bypass the formidable process of founding a small business. The scheme cuts through the jungle of administrative red tape usually required to launch a company, and dramatically lightens the heavy taxes and social charges companies pay. While other firms face set charges whether business is booming...
...surprisingly, the scheme has accounted for more than half of all new companies founded thus far this year. "The auto-entrepreneur plan has been an impressive success, beyond what we'd been counting on," noted Hervé Novelli, secretary of state for small- and medium-size businesses, in late July...
Prigent-Chesnel is spreading the word on a blog that offers encouragement and tips to people contemplating joining the ranks of the new entrepreneurs. So far, two-thirds of that group are men, aged 40 on average. About 33% are salaried employees starting up a sideline business, 25% are unemployed and 6% are retirees. Later this year, the program will take private enterprise to the public sector by opening auto-entrepreneur to civil servants. If it continues at its current pace, the scheme will prove that France not only has a word for entrepreneur, but also a growing army...
What's working, exactly, is a series of viral humor sites intended simply "to make people happy for five minutes a day," as Huh puts it. Huh, 31, a journalist turned dotcom entrepreneur, was born in South Korea and moved to California when he was in his teens. He launched Pet Holdings in 2007 when angel investors helped him buy a new website called I Can Has Cheezburger?, which is a compendium of "Lolcats," laugh-out-loud feline photos captioned in "kitty pidgin," or artfully misspelled imaginings of cats' inner monologues. (The original Lolcat features a fat gray fur ball...