Freelance Consultant's Diary

I often meet with frustrated entrepreneurs who are trying to raise venture capital and just can not convince them. While dealing with entrepreneurs can be a frustrating experience, here are a dozens or so points that you may want to know about investors before you put your investor presentation together: Investors don't like risk. In other words, if the risk could be zero, they would be all over you. So what they want to do is to minimize risk or take only as much as risk as they have appetite for. They also expect you to have thought about risks and how you will manage them. You can convince many investors if you have identified all possible risks and have also developed a risk mitigation program . Investors have a rational set of criteria. It might appear that they are just being irrational or "they don't get it" but the reality is that they they do have a criteria that use to evaluate an investment opportunity and it is rational for them. So just respect it. Pla...

As I have been arguing all along, a tax increase was bound to happen in 2005 . The economic policies during last four years were predicated on using tax cuts to revive the economy so that a boom will bring in more tax revenue. A highly optimistic (and therefore risky) argument it was! Unfortunately, we have now reached a point that the only way to balance the federal budget is either we cut benefits and government programs to a point that Americans will revolt or we raise taxes. It seems that Fed Chairman Alan Greenspan prefers raising taxes. In a speech yesterday, Greenspan said, "Indeed, under existing tax rates and reasonable assumptions about other spending, these projections make clear that the federal budget is on an unsustainable path, in which large deficits result in rising interest rates and ever-growing interest payments that augment deficits in future years. But most important, deficits as a percentage of GDP in these simulations rise without limit. Unless that trend i...

Let us review some of the facts for Pfizer since the recall of Vioxx by Merck in September of 2004: (Related article: Merck's flawed Vioxx recall strategy ) Net income in Q1/2005 dropped to just $301 MM compared to $3.3 billion in Q3/2004. The stock has rebounded to ~ $27 since trading in the $24-25 range in January 2005. The company was forced to recall Bextra and a black-box warning has been added to Celebrex. The company has received warnings for misleading advertisements for Celebrex, Bextra, and Levitra. There is more trouble for its drug portfolio. So what does Hank McKinnell, the company CEO, think how Pfizer is doing? "Pfizer continues to deliver steady performance." In other words, Pfizer is in denial about its problems and merely slashing costs the way Pfizer is doing is not necessarily the best strategy for Pfizer. (Related article: Celebrex and Bextra problems hurt Pfizer ) As I have pointed out in the past, Pfizer got to this point for lacking a clear strateg...

If you think that you can simply create great content and let the search engines do the rest, then you might be in for a rude surprise, if you have not already been shocked. Following are the reasons why the relationship between great content and traffic is not so direct: Each search engine is different. They not only use different algorithms, they also keep changing them often. So you would find that you might do well with Google but not so good with Yahoo or MSN . In fact, some websites do extremely well in one search engine while the others throw them out. In other words, there is no way you can satisfy all search engines equally well. So just learn to live with it. The Internet is very dynamic and truly global. So every time a new page is created by anyone on the net, the percentage of real estate that you own on the Internet is proportionately reduced. In other words, you are less popular than you were a few moments ago. So do not expect that if you simply keep adding n...

The uncertainty over Bextra and Celebrex ended last week as we at iProceed had predicted. Read my previous article on Pfizer's wrong strategy for Celebrex and Bextra . If you have not been following the story on Cox-2 drugs, below is a brief background: Merck, the maker of Vioxx, recalled the drug in September 2004 after dragging its feet for years. Only when the data was so overwhelming that FDA may have forced it to do so, Merck acted on its own. The very same day, Pfizer (maker of two competitive drugs Celebrex and Bextra) saw the huge upside for its business and started to aggressively market the drugs as alternatives to Vioxx. In early December 2004, Bextra received a black-box warning on its label. Bextra sales plunged. As Cox-2 drugs came under scrutiny, more disturbing news came about Vioxx, Celebrex, and Bextra, but Pfizer continued to stand by the safety of its drugs and refused to take any action. At a FDA panel hearing in February 2005, all three drugs were deemed as h...