MJC Ventures LLC

6MM Businesses with Employees in the United States

2011-03-12T11:21:00.000-08:00

All firms 23,343,821 24,846,832 112,400,654 3,943,179,606 22,832,560,524
Nonemployer firms 17,646,062 17,646,062 n/a n/a 770,032,328
Employer firms 5,697,759 7,200,770 112,400,654 3,943,179,606 22,062,528,196
Firms with no employees as of March 12, but with payroll at some time during the year 770,041 771,135 0 38,127,022 215,139,058
Firms with 1 to 4 employees 2,695,606 2,699,380 5,697,652 155,662,211 937,533,365
Firms with 5 to 9 employees 1,010,804 1,024,081 6,639,666 182,383,776 888,342,543
Firms with 10 to 19 employees 613,880 652,930 8,246,053 241,410,588 1,085,595,864
Firms with 20 to 99 employees 508,249 692,775 19,874,069 623,716,021 2,884,696,648
Firms with 100 to 499 employees 82,334 332,508 15,908,852 535,749,956 2,547,423,855
Firms with 500 employees or more 16,845 1,027,961 56,034,362 2,166,130,032 13,503,796,863
Firms with 500 to 749 employees 5,639 65,551 3,417,297 119,505,263 594,323,923
Firms with 750 to 999 employees 2,687 41,818 2,317,418 81,133,941 394,053,128
Firms with 1,000 to 1,499 employees 2,717 57,004 3,308,797 119,102,361 625,211,077
Firms with 1,500 to 2,499 employees 2,278 72,374 4,361,890 163,164,065 839,662,317
Firms with 2,500 employees or more 3,524 791,214 42,628,960 1,683,224,402 11,050,546,418
Firms with 2,500 to 4,999 employees 1,727 103,810 5,964,080 236,201,022 1,419,783,211
Firms with 5,000 to 9,999 employees 884 117,990 6,131,966 242,128,393 1,458,302,943
Firms with 10,000 employees or more 913 569,414 30,532,914 1,204,894,987 8,172,460,264

600,000 new businesses are started in the United States each year

2009-02-07T12:20:00.000-08:00

SBTN is a virtual campus housing courses, workshops, publications, information resource learning tools and direct access to electronic counseling and other forms of technical assistance designed to assist entrepreneurs.

It is especially helpful to individuals who are considering the prospects of starting a business. The site offers extensive information about starting, growing and financing a small business. Its online library offers hundreds of electronic publications and its Small Business Training Network at www.sba.gov/training features over 40 free online courses.

www.sba.gov/training

SBA also has:

• Over 60 district offices, with at least one office in every state.
• More than 10,000 SCORE counselors who provide free business counseling.
• Over 1000 Small Business Development Centers.
• And, more than 90 Women Business Centers.

www.sba.gov

We need Universal Health Insurance?

2008-10-28T07:56:00.000-07:00

To me this signals another break down in letting the free enterprise system work. What's not working?

Employer paid health insurance prevents the consumer from knowing what health insurance costs. It also perpetuates the one size fits all solution. Like every other insurance coverage we buy auto, homeowners, etc. premiums go up with risk. If you don't take care of yourself you should pay a higher premium.

Price discovery is broken. Where did we get this notion that our health expenses should be covered from dollar one? Again, other insurance coverages have deductibles before insurance engages. We don't need insurance to cover our annual physicals! People don't know what office visits, emergency room, surgeries or prescriptions cost. We need insurance to cover catastrophic illness not ordinary course of life health care.

No responsibility being taken for ones health, eating habits and exercise. Like the old adage says "garbage in, garbage out." The fact of the matter is we can do a lot about our own health. Why aren't we educating people about nutrition, the difference between simple and complex carbohydrates, glycemic index, and aerobic and anaerobic exercise?

46 million people are uninsured? How many are illegal immigrants, unemployed, homeless, mentally ill? Isn't the real issue that people with health insurance and a terminal illness are going through the top of their coverage and end up having to file for bankruptcy? People can't afford health insurance? A catastrophic or high deductible health insurance policy for a family of six (6) only costs $300 a month! Imagine what it costs for young, single people or a typical family of four (4)!

There are answers to these issues and they live in self reliance and people taking responsibility for the problem not hoping the government will come to save the day.

How did this credit crunch happen?

2008-10-28T07:28:00.000-07:00

Rating agencies had a conflict of interest getting paid by those who needed a "AAA" rating to sell asset backed securities. Bear in mind there are only 6 "AAA" corporate credits -how could there have been hundreds of securitizations with a derived credit rating of "AAA."

Mortgage brokers underwriting loans not to own but to sell. This is inherently flawed. The motivation here is to sell a loan not to underwrite it properly.

Leverage at 20:1 or 40:1 only gives you 2.5-5% room for error before you're out of business.

It wasn't deregulation but out reliance on regulation that took our guard down. Government regulators can't keep pace with MIT Mathematicians and Physicists. And, the notion of regulation lulls us into a false sense of security that the regulators "have our back" when they obviously don't! If we had no regulation the market would be operating under the old adage "Caveat Emptor" or "Let the Buyer Beware!"

Mortgage Lending that made no sense. How can a person making $9.50 an hour buying a $1MM house happen? Interest only, no doc and negative amortization loans are signs of a bubble and deals not being viable.

Borrowers have to look in the mirror and also take a good part of the blame. They know what they can afford and what they can't afford. Greed here also led to part of the problem. Without sub-prime, no documentation, interest only, balloon, negative amortization loans there are no associated asset backed securities that blow up and take down the financial institutions holding them and/or making a market in them.

IG $2.5T, NIG $745B

2008-10-11T08:08:00.000-07:00

Returns in the $745 billion junk-bond market, debt of companies with weak balance sheets and cash flows, are down more than 17% in the past five weeks, and 19% below the start of the year, according to Merrill Lynch.

The $2.5 trillion market for companies with high credit ratings, the investment-grade market, has fallen 11% since the start of September, and 11.5% since the beginning of the year.

10/10/08 WSJ

Muhammad Yunus interview, Grameen Bank (Charlie Rose)

2008-07-19T12:52:00.000-07:00

Rupert Murdoch interview (Charlie Rose)

2008-07-19T12:47:00.001-07:00

Debt Per Household

2008-07-19T12:09:00.001-07:00

Consumer Credit

2008-07-19T11:04:00.000-07:00

Total mortgages amounted to $14.6 trillion in 2007: $11.1 trillion home, $2.49 trillion commercial, $837 million multi-family, and $117 million farm.

The level of commercial/multifamily mortgage debt outstanding grew by 1.8 percent in the first quarter, to $3.4 trillion, according to the Mortgage Bankers Association (MBA) analysis of the Federal Reserve Board Flow of Funds data.

Overall consumer credit (revolving and nonrevolving) rose 4.2 percent in April to $2.56 trillion. Revolving $961 billion and non-revolving $1,608 billion.

Household debt service payments and financial obligations as a percentage of disposable personal income under 25%

The Evolution of the Sub Prime Mortgage Market

Corporate Debt

2008-07-19T10:22:00.000-07:00

Over $1 trillion of Commercial and Industrial (C&I) loans. The volume of trading of syndicated loans in the secondary market increased from $8 billion in 1991 to $350 billion in 2007.

How big is the corporate bond market?

The market value of bonds issued by nonfinancial corporate business was $2,947 billion at the end of 2004, up from $2,869 the year before. Domestic financial sectors had issues outstanding totaling $3,896 billion at that time, as compared with $3,369 billion at end-2003. Bond issues of commercial banking organizations in the US had a market value of $438 billion. Finance companies, including GMAC for instance, had outstanding bonds valued at $828 billion. Most of the remainder of what the Fed defines as corporate bonds reflects the obligations of issuers of private asset backed securities. They amounted to $2,078 billion at year-end 2004. That is up from $1,774 billion at the end of 2003, a rise of 17%. Most of that increase represents private mortgage-backed securities, which climbed sharply in a year when Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac activities came under intense regulatory and market scrutiny and their own mortgage pool securities grew a miniscule 1.5%.

What fraction of total liabilities of nonfinancial corporations are represented by outstanding bond issues?

Credit market instruments totaled $5.2 trillion at end-2004. So the market value of bonds were 57% of the total, as compared to just half of the total back in the year 2000. Mortgages on commercial real estate came to $688 billion. Bank loans, exclusive of mortgages, were $580 billion at that time, or about 12% of total credit market liabilities. Nonfinancial corporations borrowed almost as much from finance companies as they did from banks, often through leases of equipment or airplanes. Nonfinancial commercial paper used to be a significant source of financing (e.g. with outstandings of $278 billion back in 2000) has dwindled to only about $100 billion, reflecting competition from other sources of finance.

Milken Institute Global Conference April 2008

2008-05-12T09:46:00.000-07:00

The 2009 Global Conference will take place April 27-29 at the Beverly Hilton in Los Angeles.

Self IPO, Personal IPO

2008-04-21T20:07:00.000-07:00

The 25-year-old Newsom, a midtier relief pitcher in the Cleveland Indians organization, is the first pro baseball player to hold a self-IPO. Real Sports Investments, the company Newsom hatched last year with two ex-ballplayer business partners, is fantasy baseball minus the fantasy. Newsom is selling off 4 percent of his potential MLB earnings at $20 per share. (A 15 percent "player valuation and share allocation fee" and a 2.9 percent "online processing fee" bump the price up to $23.97). A total of 2,500 shares will be offered, netting the pitcher $50,000 if they all get sold. As of today, investors can only buy shares; selling and trading will come soon, once RSI launches a snazzier Web site. And according to Newsom, this isn't a "one-player thing": In an interview with Baseball Prospectus, he says RSI is in talks with lots more minor leaguers.

The idea of buying shares in athletes isn't new. Football Players Funds Management, a Portugal-based hedge fund, helps pro soccer teams buy the contracts of promising youngsters in exchange for a percentage of the players' future transfer fees. Top poker pros are often staked for tournaments by investors, and a golfer might get his start on tour with backing from a consortium of investors. There's already a popular fantasy site, ProTrade, where fans can buy and sell virtual shares in their favorite players. And last May, Michael Lewis wrote a convincing piece for Portfolio arguing that it won't be long before Americans will be able to invest in their favorite athletes.

Jeff Ma, the co-founder of ProTrade and the leader of the Vegas-busting MIT blackjack team, says it's a winning concept for minor-league ballplayers like Newsom. A ballplayer's career carries substantial risk, Ma says, and it makes sense to shave off potential wealth in exchange for insurance against never getting a major-league payday. (If Newsom doesn't make the majors, his investors get nothing.) Ma is skeptical, though, that players with higher earning potential will care to participate, and without these higher-tier prospects, the market won't be as attractive to investors. "You're not talking about Barry Bonds or [future stars like] Billy Butler or Tim Lincecum selling their future upside," Ma says. "How many people will want to speculate on the Randy Newsoms of the world?"

Newsom acknowledges that he's not a blue-chip stock—he refers to himself as an "anti-prospect." He came into pro ball as an undrafted free agent from Tufts, and he throws his fastball around 83 miles per hour, relying on command and his sidearm delivery to deceive hitters. At 25, Newsom is old for a Double-A player who has yet to see the majors. Still, he's no scrub, putting up a 2.51 ERA last season and making the Eastern League all-star team. I asked John Sickels, a renowned evaluator of minor-league talent, to give his assessment. "Newsom is a Grade C prospect, which means he has a chance to contribute in the majors but is not a top prospect or a likely future star," he responded via e-mail. Sickels adds that he didn't include Newsom in his 2008 Baseball Prospect Book "due to space limitations." Number of players who were included: 1,074.

Newsom may be Real Sports Investments' first product, but he doesn't want to be the company poster boy. While he acknowledges that the game's most promising young players—the high draft picks who rake in huge signing bonuses—likely won't want to sell off future earnings, he insists that RSI won't just peddle misfit anti-prospects. Newsom cites Johan Santana, who struggled in A-ball before becoming the best (and soon the richest) pitcher in the game, as a player who was overlooked early but cashed in late. But unless RSI is discernibly better than pro scouts at identifying hidden talent, the company will end up selling shares in lots of players who won't stick in the majors and very few who strike it rich like Santana—most players who struggle in the lower minors never make it.

RSI is selling 4 percent of the pitcher's career income for $50,000, meaning his own company estimates Newsom's career earnings at somewhere around $1,250,000. (Pritz says the exact details of RSI's valuation model are confidential; Newsom says they ran "a lot of statistical regression models.")

Going off these assumptions, it appears that Newsom must make the MLB minimum (with regular small raises) for more than five years for total cash flow per share to approach $20. (Check out that spreadsheet here.) Considering our high discount rate, that career path would put the present value of Newsom shares at around $9. What if he makes about as much money as Chad Bradford? As seen in this revised spreadsheet, that would give the $20 shares a present value of $29. Since it's fair to say that Newsom's chance of becoming Chad Bradford is no greater than the chance he'll fail to stick in the majors due to injury, a lack of opportunity, or a lack of skill, it's hard to call the pitcher a good investment. Blodget notes that even if Newsom is an absolute star player, the value of the stock has a relatively low upper limit. Compared with a business, which has a theoretically infinite lifespan, a "human professional baseball career" only operates for a finite (and short) amount of time. "Given the likelihood that he'll get hurt or flame out or just be average, I can't say I'm jumping up and down to be the first to buy," Blodget says.

Speculators probably won't have any interest in a sports exchange that peddles bad investments. But perhaps Real Sports Investments isn't really comparable to a stock exchange. In its current form, as a venue for needy minor leaguers to solicit contributions from fans, a closer analogue is Kiva, the popular Web site that connects microlenders to entrepreneurs in the developing world. Kiva has become a success by giving lenders a personal stake in the people they're helping—say, a woman selling used clothing in Uganda—by documenting their stories and posting their photos. Real Sports Investments could work in the same way, with fans choosing players who appeal to them based on their particular needs (say, a newborn to support) and career goals (I'd send a few bucks to anyone who wants to lead the Mets to the promised land). Prosper.com is another structured as a debt market for individuals.

Newsom doesn't think of himself as some kind of charity case, but he does see his $50,000 windfall as a way to level the playing field against guys who don't have to worry about finances. He told me that he wants to invest the money he gets from investors back into his career by enrolling at Athletes' Performance, a training facility in Arizona. It's performance enhancement, without the drugs.

While a savvy investor would probably short his Newsom shares, I'm guessing there are plenty of sports fans who'd be willing to support him regardless. Take me, for example: After a few minutes talking to Newsom, I forgot that the point of this whole thing was to make money. Instead, I got caught up in Newsom's dream to win a World Series. It would be a lot of fun to be even 0.0096 percent of making that happen.

PlentyofFish.com (Online Dating Site)

2008-04-19T11:24:00.000-07:00

Markus Frind of Vancouver, BC is the surprising owner of an online dating site called plentyoffish.com. He's famous for being pictured holding up a check for $900,000 from Google, for Google AdSense ads he runs on the site. According to Hitwise, plentyoffish.com currently holds a 3% market share in the "lifestyle-dating" category, despite having only one employee.

1. What were you doing before you founded plentyoffish.com? What made you suited for the task of conceiving and promoting a community site with rapid growth in a highly competitive vertical? I know, a lot of people will say - "just make it better," but then they don't implement and can't achieve that. You did. Why do you think that is?

Every 6 months or so I was jumping from 1 dot-com to another as the entire Internet industry was going down the drain here. I didn't start the site with a grand plan in mind. I had been doing ASP for years and the market was going towards ASP.net. I don't like learning from books and the only way to really learn was to just sit down and write in it. So one day I just sat down and started writing a dating site in ASP.net/ASP, once I learned enough I started porting my ASP pages into ASP.net.

As for the growth, a think a lot of that was accidental or first-mover advantage. Here in Canada LavaLife was the only real dating site, and they had a monopoly. I had a couple of my friends sign up from the major cities and after that the site just started to grow and spread. Every successful business is about being in the right place at the right time.

2. How did you come up with the idea to get a foot in the door of the online personals market by making the whole service free? Just your personal dislike of existing personals sites?

I was running the entire site off my home PC and ADSL connection for the first 8 months. There was no real plan, I wasn't even sure what I was going to do with the site. At the end of October 2003, I was getting so much traffic that I had to buy a server and move it to a hosting facility. I always liked free sites and couldn't see why companies had to change insane amounts of money for something that was trivial to make. At the time I was also working and I didn't have the money to convert the site to a paid service, or hire all the customer support people necessary. I also didn't feel my site was stable enough to charge for.

3. You're legendary for having no employees. How many people currently work at your company? Do you have expansion plans?

Just me right now, my girlfriend helps with some of the customer service stuff when I don't want to do it. I am planning on expanding into other markets but I don't think I need to hire any employees any time soon. Nearly all the work can be automated away except for user stupidity that leads to crazy questions.

4. What do you think the relationship between offline promo and online success has been for your service? Do you do more and more real-world networking nowadays?

Offline promo works well when marketing to huge existing customer base. It does not work well when trying to grow big. I allow my users to host singles events all over the world and many of the people that show up to these things end up not even being members of the site. Like nearly every other site I sort of ignore offline marketing, as it is far too expensive when you don't have huge numbers of people in your target market already using your service.

5. Have you noticed the established players copying your ideas? When did that start happening?

This happened from day one, the first thing that was copied was allowing people to select things like "I don't want to receive messages from Americans," etc. The other sites don't innovate they just copy what works from the other sites. The complete lack of originality from the established players is probably the main reason plentyoffish.com has been able to grow so fast and so big in such a short period of time.

6. A cursory look at Alexa or similar stats reports shows your site's reach growing rapidly from inception. But did you feel like there was a tipping point, say when you reached in the top 10,000 of sites overall? Not that these numbers are accurate, but the pattern looks like steady growth with a brief period of even faster growth when you got under the top 10,000 overall, in late 2004. (Currently Alexa says you're #679 of all sites. Again, not that this is accurate, but it's roughly helpful.) Any insight into when steady growth either stops, or accelerates?

This graph here is closer to my real traffic growth. Online dating really sucks when compared to social networking. Every month I lose 30% of my traffic as the average dater only stays 3 months. Social networks, on the other hand, retain users and just keep growing and growing and end up making a hell of a lot more money. I don't think there really is a tipping point; the growth is slow and steady, things speed up in January and then slow down over the summer months. That can be said for all Internet companies, though. You can't draw many conclusions from an Alexa rank of 10,000 -- that is only a sample of 30 Alexa users a day.

7. I read you actually blocked Alexa users from signing up in the early days. You wanted to fly under the radar. Surely that wasn't 100% effective?

It blocked about 70% of them, so not all of them. Blocking Alexa is very trivial -- all you need to do is check for Alexa in the browser user-agent. My Alexa rank of 600-700 means I have a grand total of 190 Alexa users per day. You need very few users with the Alexa toolbar installed to rank high, just take a look at DigitalPoint.

8. Do you have plans to sell the company? How much is it worth? If you go by 5X revenues or so, that's a lot of coin. As you know, Weblogs, Inc. sold for some ridiculous multiple like 25X annual revenues. They actually *needed* to sell.

I have no plans to sell, and the company is worth as much as someone is willing to pay for it. Weblogs just sold for a crazy amount, especially considering they had such huge overhead and little profits.

9. What do you see other startups doing wrong? Other dating startups? Are there any you particularly admire? Why didn't Friendster make it?

There are so many startups, and they are here one day, and gone the next. There are around 300 social networking startups now, and maybe 5 to 10 of those are going to be around in a few years. It's not that these startups are doing stuff wrong, it's the fact there can only be a handful of winners. There are a lot of dating startups, but I don't pay much attention to them as they only last a couple of months and then fade away.

The biggest reason Friendster didn't make it was because there was no purpose to the site. You sign up bring your friends to the site, that is great and all, but there was just nothing to do once you were there. People got bored and left, and the extreme slowness of the site didn't help them at all.

10. Sites like Yahoo, Google, and Craigslist are famous for getting ahead with "anti-design" (though Yahoo got cluttered as it grew). Is that a source of your success? Did any of them inspire you?

I like simplicity, and I am not a graphic designer at all. Success doesn't come down to just one thing. Its not like Microsoft can clone Google's layout and be the largest search engine. Success is a combination of things and having the right idea at the right time.

11. Did any major design or development dilemmas crop up along the way? What was your most important user interface decision, beyond keeping it smooth and simple, I mean?

Database and performance issues. Online dating is one of the most complex applications there is online. Every single one of my competitors has several hundred servers because the CPU/ RAM needed to generate search results and support tens of thousands of concurrent users. I have a lot of issues these days especially when I peak out at 35,000 concurrent users. I redesign my site every couple of weeks so it doesn't get crushed by the sheer number of users online. As for front-end design I could care less, lots of users are using my site and more are coming every day, my number one focus is making sure the site stays up for another day.

Thanks for your time, Markus! Believe it or not, you are the first interviewee in our "Innovators" series. We've got a few others on the list, but I was more motivated to contact you than any of the others. :)

About the Innovators Series

Online innovation, be it soft innovation or revolutionary breakthrough, drives the contemporary economy. Traffick.com interviews leaders in e-business models, search, and vertical niches to find out what makes them tick. Like the interviews
(11 questions), our innovators "Go to Eleven."

Type of person who grows a company to $100 million

2008-03-03T12:17:00.000-08:00

95% of companies will never reach even $1 million in annual sales. If you've done that, you are in the top 5% of entrepreneurs and you are rare and to be congratulated. But of those that get that far, 95% won't ever make it to $5 million. And of those that get that far, 98% won't get to $10 million. And think of the tiny, tiny percentage of companies that make it to $100 million in annual revenue. So what makes the difference between Arnold's corner coffee shop and Starbucks? Zero to $100 million: It's a mindset! An analysis of the type of person who grows a company to $100 million and what everyone can learn from that mindset.

Answer: It's not the product or service; it's the skills of the entrepreneur. What kind of person builds a company? A person who is dedicated to improving every area of his or her company and who works with a talented team.

Chet Holmes is author of The Ultimate Sales Machine. For more information on how to double sales go to www.howtodoublesales.com.,

Autoline Detroit Interview (Mark Campbell, CEO, Car.com)

2008-03-03T08:01:00.000-08:00

Prediction Markets, Event Derivatives and Prediction Exchanges

2008-03-02T10:16:00.000-08:00

Prediction markets produce dynamic, objective probabilistic predictions on the outcomes of future events by aggregating disparate pieces of information that traders bring when they agree on prices. Prediction markets are meta forecasting tools that feed on the advanced indicators (i.e., the primary sources of information). Garbage in, garbage out... Intelligence in, intelligence out...

A prediction market is a market for a contract that yields payments based on the outcome of a partially uncertain future event, such as an election. A contract pays $100 only if candidate X wins the election, and $0 otherwise. When the market price of an X contract is $60, the prediction market believes that candidate X has a 60% chance of winning the election. The price of this event derivative can be interpreted as the objective probability of the future outcome (i.e., its most statistically accurate forecast). A 60% probability means that, in a series of events each with a 60% probability, then 60 times out of 100, the favored outcome will occur; and 40 time out of 100, the unfavored outcome will occur.

Each prediction exchange organizes its own set of real-money and/or play-money markets, using either a CDA or a MSR mechanism.