Bizstartup.ie - NewsDoug Richard shares entrepreneurial lessons

Speaking to Bizstartup.ie, he said: “I had to keep the shares for 100 days and on the 89^th day they fell in value by 99pc so I was wiped out. The lesson from that was always take cash.”

The company was Visual Software, which brought high-end 3D technology applications to the PC market. It was sold to Micrografx, a publicly quoted software company, which Richard then went on to be CEO and president of until 2000.

“Any entrepreneur who says they’ve had an effortless ride is lying. As an angel investor it’s my experience that one out of ten start-ups is successful, the other nine are lovely failures,” he said.

Speaker in Donegal

Richard was in Ireland this week speaking at Enterprising Donegal Business Week. A dragon in the first and second series of BBC’s Dragons’ Den, he is currently founder of School for Startups in the UK and is chairman and CEO of Trutap, a mobile phone service provider. He’s also a founder and member of the Cambridge Angels and a non-executive director of AlertMe, VizWoz and BeatsDigital.

All in all, Richard has 20 years’ experience in the development and leadership of technology and software ventures, both in the US and UK.

An 'unnatural entrepreneur'

“I was an ‘unnatural’ entrepreneur. I don’t think I had an inbuilt urge to own my own business, but rather I was a difficult and awkward employee and got fired a lot. My brother Ken was the same. We were ‘The Unemployables’. So in 1985 we set up a small business in Los Angelus as a PC reseller to the aerospace and defence industries which became ITAL Computers,” he said.

Teaching start-ups

School for Startups is a social enterprise, Richard explains. “We provide intensive bootcamps to people who own their own company or are contemplating setting one up.”

The courses cover topics such as how to start a business, how to find investors, how to design great products and services, how to implement fast, cost-effective marketing strategies, how to build effective management teams and how to scale a business safely. It also runs business networking events and web-based TV programmes where Richard talks to business owners about their problems etc.

Keeping the cash-flow going in the early days

On the subject of finance, Richard said he’s “never been poor, but I’ve been broke a lot”. When he set up the business with his brother they used credit cards in the early days to keep going. “Back then you could draw money out on credit cards and not pay interest for 30 days, so we signed up for every credit card there was, and put them in two piles. We used half of them to draw out what we needed on day one and then used the other half to pay this amount back on day 29.”

Photo: Entrepreneur Doug Richard, who has 20 years' experience in the development and leadership of technology and software ventures, Richard featured in the first two TV series of the UK version of 'Dragons' Den'. He is the founder and vice-chairman of the Cambridge Angels and chairman of the Conservative Party Small Business Task Force in the UK. As founder of the social enterprise School for Startups, Richard is aiming to inspire people in the UK to set up and run their own small businesses