Entrepreneurial

Somehow I don't think President Obama had the home-mortgage interest deduction in mind when he mentioned the U.S. tax code before the U.S. Chamber of Commerce this week.

Yet winding down and eliminating this write-off for homes would be good for business. It's unfair, doing nothing to revive the housing market and can be put to better use shifting it to entrepreneurs to create jobs.

Most of the job creation in the U.S. economy comes from small businesses, which typically have no public shareholders to sate and are not primarily interested in fattening pay packages of overpaid executives.

The home mortgage deduction needs to go because it doesn't make housing less expensive, either. If anything, it makes homes more expensive because the subsidy inflates prices. Most homebuyers don't even itemize to take advantage of it. Nixing it would make homes more affordable.

As Alan Mallach, senior fellow at the Center for Community Progress, wrote in this space: "It is one of the most regressive parts of the tax code, since it affects all house prices, including the price of houses bought by lower-income home buyers, who rarely itemize and get little benefit from the deduction."

Gene Simmons – rocker, reality TV star and self-styled marketing genius – may be the shrewdest businessman to have donned face makeup and six-inch heels.

In the business world, as in music, Simmons boasts an impressive record. A classic immigrant rags-to-riches tale, he’s worked tirelessly over the last 36 years to turn the KISS brand into an empire. His former blood-spitting “Demon” alter ego now graces more than 2,500 different products such as ketchup, condoms, coffins and credit cards.

In addition to KISS album sales (over 100 million units sold), Simmons earns $100,000 per speaking engagement, and has more than half a dozen booked for 2011 already. Among his other non-musical ventures are estate planning (he is a co-founder of Cool Springs Life Equity Strategy), books, magazines and a handful of television projects.

Misery loves company but not when it comes to the Forbes magazine list of “America’s Most Miserable Cities.”

The report ranked Stockton, California dead last among U.S. places to do business for reasons that include a ravaged housing market, violent crime and the high rate of unemployment.

A recent Huffington Post article referred to the city as “Foreclosureville, U.S.A.” based on its 9.5-percent foreclosure rate – one of the nation’s highest.

– Chris Dixon is co-founder of Hunch and founder of Founder Collective, and an investor in many early-stage companies like Skype and Foursquare. Previously he co-founded Siteadvisor, which was acquired by McAfee. This blog originally appeared on cdixon.org. The views expressed are his own. –

There is a saying in the startup world that “you can mine for gold or you can sell pickaxes.”

This is of course an allusion to the California Gold Rush where some of the most successful business people such as Levi Strauss and Samuel Brannan didn’t mine for gold themselves, but instead sold supplies to miners – wheelbarrows, tents, jeans, pickaxes etc. Mining for gold was the more glamorous path but actually turned out, in aggregate, to be a worse return on capital and labor than selling supplies.

Nic Sulsky hopes this weekend’s anticipated record Super Bowl television audience helps boost traffic to his online sports gaming startup.

InGamer Sports, the Toronto, Canada-based company he co-founded in 2008, lets users choose a team of players from live games and awards points based on how they actually perform on the field.

Sulsky said it fuses the three dominant screens in our lives: television, computer and mobile.

– Steve Blank is a teacher, writer, and serial entrepreneur. He teaches at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School and at Columbia. He is the author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost”. This article originally appeared on www.steveblank.com. The views expressed are his own. –

One of the biggest mistakes entrepreneurs make is not understanding the relationship they have with their investors. At times they confuse venture capitalist’s with their friends.

At Rocket Science our video game company was struggling. Hubris, bad CEO decisions (mine) and a fundamental lack of understanding that we were in a “hits-based” entertainment business not in a Silicon Valley technology company were slowly killing us.

The way immigrant-owned small businesses sustain relatives back home is a testament to entrepreneurial ingenuity underscored as the political unrest unfolds in Egypt.

Take Sharif Alexandre, the 38-year-old Egyptian-born founder of an electronic payment service in Philadelphia called Xipwire. He’s betting technology like his – which lets people send secure payments within the U.S. using mobile phones – will help centralize money for delivery to Egypt.

“This can be an organic effort,” said Alexandre, a Coptic Christian who is launching a Twitter campaign to rally like-mind Egyptian Americans. Earlier this year he ran a texting effort to send aid to a Christian church in Egypt following a bomb attack.

– Steve Blank is a teacher, writer, and serial entrepreneur. He teaches at Stanford University, U.C. Berkeley’s Haas Business School and at Columbia. He is the author of “The Four Steps to the Epiphany” and “Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost”. This article originally appeared on www.steveblank.com. The views expressed are his own. –

Maybe because it’s a company town and everyone in Silicon Valley has a family connection to entrepreneurship. Or maybe I just encountered the most entrepreneurial 12-year-olds ever assembled under one roof. Or maybe we’re now teaching entrepreneurial thinking in middle schools. Either way, I had an astounding evening as one of the judges at the Girls Middle School 7th grade Entrepreneurial night.

In this school every seventh-grade girl becomes part of a team of four or five who create and run their own business. The students write business plans, request startup capital from investors, receive funding for their companies, make product samples, manufacture inventory, and sell their products to real-world customers. This class is experiential learning at its best.

By Robert Cyran
The author is a Reuters Breakingviews columnist. The opinions expressed are his own.

Internet start-ups have needed less cash and left the venture capital industry out in the cold. The latest response to this growing conundrum comes from Yuri Milner, the Russian founder of DST Group, which has invested in Facebook, Zynga and Groupon. He has decided to back dozens of start-ups sight unseen. It shows just how far power has shifted to digital entrepreneurs.

The cost of everything from servers to software to Internet bandwidth keeps falling. And businesses can grow very quickly these days if an idea catches on. The result is that it's cheap to give birth to online companies and they can command high valuations while still young. So there's a push by investors to get into start-ups earlier in their life cycle, but at higher valuations.

– P. Griffith Lindell is a veteran business consultant, speaker and author. His newest book is “Struggling With Your Business? Ten Questions to Consider Before Investing A(nother) Dime“. The views expressed are his own. –

President Obama focused part of his State of the Union address on the need for “government (to) create the conditions necessary for businesses to expand.” I applaud and agree with him. The lifeblood of America must flow through micro and small-business veins.

It’s going to take more than political pronouncements, however, to produce the revenues and profits that will change the rules of the current economic game.