Antigone as a Feminist Icon Free Essays

Antigone as a Feminist Icon Male authority is a prevailing subject in Sophocles’ â€Å"Antigone. † Men involved the land, controlled the towns and relegated the ladies obligations to perform. Antigone, in any case, accepted that she was similarly as solid as the men who decided society during that time, which prompted her defeat. We will compose a custom exposition test on Antigone as a Feminist Icon or then again any comparative theme just for you Request Now The objective of the women's activist development has for the most part been to look for balance between the genders. Through the women’s development, ladies have won the option to cast a ballot, and would now be able to vie for customarily male jobs in the working environment. Despite the fact that the women's activist development has to a great extent occurred during the most recent multi year, numerous figures in history have epitomized qualities of the contemporary women's activist, for example, the character of Antigone in Sophocles’ â€Å"Antigone. † Antigone’s presentation as a women's activist is inside the setting of a wildly misogynist human advancement. Sophocles paints a striking picture of a male commanded society. In 442 BC, ladies accepted that they were second rate compared to men since men held force and impact over the individuals and the urban areas. The male centric society comprised of men who viewed themselves as of higher significance and standing, and men who might relegate ladies obligations and anticipate that them should perform beyond a shadow of a doubt. This tyrant rule put ladies in a subordinate job and quenched any expectations of intensity. Even with this proficiently and firmly controlled organization, Antigone rebels with what Catherine Holland portrays as a â€Å"otherness† and a â€Å"anti-authoritarian† twisted. Her very presence as the hero and, all the while, the opponent characterizes her character as the foe of man and consequently the enemy of the world. Antigone’s dangerously sharp audacity encapsulates present day and early woman's rights as she cuts the cultural texture into which she is woven. Antigone’s relationship with her sister Ismene likewise intensely communicates her women's activist qualities. Ismene says â€Å"You should acknowledge we are just ladies, not implied in nature to battle against men, and that we are managed by the individuals who are more grounded. † These words give understanding into the female ill will. Antigone stands up to the troublesome circumstance of whether to cover her sibling Polynices against the desires of her uncle, Creon the ruler. Ismene accepts that ladies, including herself and Antigone, ought not and can't defy Creon’s arranges by covering their own sibling. Antigone differs and chooses to continue with her arrangement. Her disparate idea puts her at chances with her whole family and her own endurance. This addresses the intensity of women's activist idea. Antigone sparkles as a reference point for her counterparts and for people in the future who seek to imitate her boldness and respect. Crucial to the play is Antigone’s struggle with Creon. Her fearless women's activist philosophy is maybe generally significant concerning her connection and relationship with her misanthropic and ground-breaking uncle, the King of Thebes. Creon is a focal man centric figure in the public arena, and he disavows his convictions so as to observe the laws of man. He esteems the laws of man over every single other statement of faith, be they strict or moral. Then again, Antigone adheres to the laws of the divine beings. She holds these principals central to the laws of Creon. At the point when her mores, specifically, her family esteems, are reproved by the abusive, nearsighted laws of the day, Antigone conflicts with the unbearable, liberal impact of Creon. With a bold face she crashes into Creon in an agent â€Å"battle of the genders. † Creon disallows the internment of Antigone’s sibling Polynices, which vexes the center of her family esteems. This significant loyalty constrains her to ignore her place in the public arena, while simultaneously holding fast to the customary obligation of ladies of that period. She currently typifies an entangled and dynamic on-screen character in her own story and the account of women's activist idea. Antigone shows the apogee of human fidelity, including determination and approval for the divine beings. The law of the divine beings order that a legitimate internment right be given to a body. To Antigone this was more striking than Creon’s affirmation in any case. She holds a customary job as a lady; while additionally boldly standing up to this picture. Testing him through word and deed, she verbally condemns him and disregards his announcement against covering her sibling. Creon gets infuriated by this dismissal of his self-governance and sentences Antigone to death. Despite the fact that Creon realizes that Antigone is the little girl of Jocasta, he realizes that he should perfect his judgment to monitor his deserve over and admiration of the individuals of Thebes. This fight between bullheadedness of Creon and the aware of Antigone makes way for the new ruler to make sure about his job as a solid and commendable pioneer. On the off chance that he is dreaded and respected, he will be affirmed as the superb legitimate power in Thebes. His respect to the state will cause the submission of the individuals. Creon’s ridiculing control to force others clashes with Antigone’s brave test to his initiative. A significant number of the men of Thebes grasped Creon’s striking attestations against ladies. As a model of resistance, Antigone is utilized to set a guide to the entirety of Thebes. Antigone isn't just the primary lady yet first individual whom deliberately resists Creon’s request to not cover her sibling, who has been recognized a deceiver to Thebes. Creon will not lower himself before others, or bargain on the issue however above all with ladies. He expresses that it is † Better to tumble from power, if fall we should, because of a man-never to evaluated substandard compared to a lady, never†. Antigone doesn't give Creon extra regard dependent on the way that he a man in man centric culture or in light of the fact that he is above all else. Or maybe she contends that there will be equity under God and the uniformity among the entirety of the genders. Antigone makes it understood to Ismene that she will make a move identifying with their sibling in any case if Ismene concurs or not. In spite of the fact that they contend, there distinction in assessment hang out at long last. Antigone is fearless enough to stand firm on her choice and in spite of the fact that Ismene is dreadfully frail to oppose the rulers laws, she despite everything feels as though she holds to some degree an obligation towards her sister. Without the assistance of her sister, Iseme, Antigone is eager to place her life in danger so as to accommodate her sibling and give him what merits similarly as the what the Gods state ought to be finished. Regardless of Creon, Antigone is eager to test male position despite the fact that it might mean not satisfying her obligations as a sister. Ismene states: â€Å"Remember we are ladies, we’re not destined to fight with men. At that point as well, we’re subordinates, controlled by a lot more grounded hands, so we should submit in this, things still worse†. These words express Ismene’s outrageous dread of subjection towards men. It gives her perspective on how the laws limited the lives of lady and mediocrity men put upon ladies. An awareness of other's expectations is place upon Ismene to bite the dust with her sister as the consequence of Antigone’s supplication for help and her dread of being without family. At the point when Creon addressed Haemon, about the activities of his life partner, he firmly focuses on the significance of commitments and the connections of a man to his dad over his better half. Besides, he accentuates the situation of guys in judgment making by expressing, â€Å" Oh Haemon, never free your feeling of judgment over a woman† Haemon’s insubordination to his dad lead Creon to broadcast him a â€Å"woman’s slave,† a man who is sadly agreed with a lady. Creon had solid conviction that these kinds of activities were near submitting a transgression. On the off chance that Antigone had been brought into the world the child of Oedipus, Creon would not have the position to pick, as his crown would settle upon Antigone’s head. On the off chance that Antigone were a male and Creon had been best, the chance of her sentiment on Polynices entombment may have been thought of. Notwithstanding, Antigone’s womanliness made her circumstance more hazardous than it was, as the King totally ignored Antigone’s judgment over the issue. Taking everything into account, Antigone approves women's activist sentiments from numerous points of view. She starts to challenge society by her reality in the foundation of a predominant male society guided by her own uncle. Antigone resists her own sister and her own mortality as she remains faithful to her convictions paying little heed to Creon’s dedication to his own laws. Antigone as a lady, carried on in commitment as an obligation for her family and for the Gods. Her respectability fills in for instance for her general public. Antigone confronted her mortality head on, which recommend that she has a solid attribute of courage and resolution. Her inheritance will live on to motivate numerous different radicals to stand firm on their standards. Antigone’s strong women's activist position as a revolting and male-controlled despot shows that individualistic reasoning and activities can be incredible in over a significant time span current society. Works Cited Amacher, Richard E. â€Å"Antigone: â€Å"The Most Misread of Ancient Plays†. † National Council of Teachers of English 20. 7 Apr. (1959): 355-58. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. ;http://www. jstor. organization/stable/372655;. Holland, Catherine A. â€Å"After Antigone: Women, the Past, and the Future of Feminist Political Thought. † American Journal of Politcal Science 42. Oct. (1998): 1108-32. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. ;http://www. Jstor. organization/stable/2991851;. Klemperer, Klemens V. â€Å"†What is the Law That Lies behind These Words? † Antigones Question and the German Resistance against Hitler. † The Chicago Press 64 Dec. (1992): S102-11. Web. 4 Nov. 2012. ;http://www. jstor. organization/stable/2124971;. Knapp, Charles. â€Å"A Poin t in the Interpretation of the Antigone of Sophocl

Aztec Essays - Aztec Society, Aztec, Mesoamerican Ballgame

Aztec The Aztec lived in the city of Tenochtitlan, which is a ripe bowl around 50 miles in length and as wide. Encircled by mountain ranges and a few volcanoes, the Aztec has plentiful gracefully of water. With being 8000ft above ocean level the day were gentle and the evenings are cold during a significant part of the year. The Aztecs name implies heron individuals their name is gotten from the legendary country toward the north called Azatlan. This as a main priority their language(Nahuatl) likewise have a place with the etymological family as the Soshonean, a tongue will spoke to among the Indians of the Untied States. In the Aztecs culture their fundamental chief yield was maize. Maize was normally cooked with lime at that point ground to make mixture, at that point tapped into tortillas, other chief harvests were beans, squash, tomatoes, cotton, chilies. The two yields maguey and agave were utilized as rope, sacks and shoes and a substitute for cotton in dress. From the juice of the m aguey was use in a gentle type of liquor called pulque, which was the stately beverage. Just the elderly people men of the advisory group had the option to drink pulque unreservedly, in any case among the more youthful age couldn't become inebriated aside from at certain strict gala. Inebriation was viewed as a genuine offense even deserving of death. In the Aztecs culture there were groups, every family there was clans and every clan was split. At that point every family were assigned adequate land for its upkeep, on the off chance that nobody else were alive in the family, at that point the land were returned to the clan. Urban people group, the land were collective, each gathering called capulli was made out of a couple of families that together possessed a real estate parcel. At that point some portion of the yield was given to the state as an expense. Rest of yield would be either sold, exchanged or for their own utilization. There were two sorts of rancher, first there was the general field laborers. They were in control with setting up the dirt, separating lumps, hoeing(with the coa burrowing sticks), leveling, defining limit markers, planting, flooding, winnowing and putting away grain. The second sort of rancher were the horticulturists their activity was planting of trees, transplanting, crop arrangements, turns and an administrative job, for they were relied upon to peruse the Tonalamatl chronological registries to decide the ideal opportunity for planting and gather. One of the bizarre component of the Aztec farming were the skimming gardens. These nurseries were incorporated by burrowing trench with squares or square shape, at that point they would accumulate mud on the territory which the trench encased. When that was done the mud was held in position by stick and parts of trees. This sort of farming can at present be seen today at Xochimilco, a couple of miles south of Mexico City. In most culture there were residential creatures in the Aztecs c ulture there were turkeys, ducks, and mutts. The pooches were raised as food and were viewed as an incredible delicacy. The wild creatures that were eaten were bunny, deer, gopher, iguanas, snake, turtles, lizards, creepy crawly eggs, numerous types of frogs, hatchling, grasshoppers, ants, worms, tadpoles and 40 types of water winged creatures. The corixid water creepy crawlies an inexhaustible protein source, were gotten from the lake, crushed together in balls, enclosed by corn husks, and bubbled. The metal specific skilled workers were gold, silver and coppersmiths. In the calfskin office were the lapidaries who made expound plans of plumes for capes, crowns and shield covers. The plume laborers accomplished the most noteworthy respect and notoriety, living in networks of their own their procedures was passed down from age to age. These quill laborers (Amanteca) were held for the respectability and the most elevated positioning authorities. One of the notoriety of Aztec riches wa s jade, turquoise and plumes of the quetzal. With these prize belongings you were viewed as well off, however just the honorability or high positioning authorities could get them. To get these prize belongings a substantial tribute was forced on vanquished individuals. Other tribute incorporate gold residue, cochineal color, shell, cocoa beans and produce, for example, beans and maize. In the Aztec culture cocoa beans were utilized as a cash, wares, for example, quetzal quills, gold, heaps of maize or slaves were esteemed regarding cacao beans. In Tenochtitlan the costs were higher

Blumberg Capital

Blumberg Capital INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the Blumberg Capital Office with David. David, who are you and what do you do?David: David Blumberg, I’m the founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital. And we’re a very focused specialized fund. We focus very much on early stage information technology, that’s mostly software and it brings us across different geographies. We’ve started in the Bay Area, San Francisco and branched out quite early to Israel, New York as a triangle then along the way found out about the great brands in Germany and so I’ve been in Berlin mostly, with some in Munich and Hamburg, some investments there. And then along the way I also have found some great opportunities up in Vancouver, our neighbor to the north and then down to Los Angeles. So those are the four or five places. It’s interesting because I just read yesterday a study saying that in the opinion of US investor, the top four countries for early stage venture capital invest ments are US, Israel, Canada and Germany.Martin: Canada as well, okay.David: Yes, so somehow we’ve got it just exactly right per the view of other investors and that’s the places that we have main investments and where we have some successes to talk about.Martin: What did you do before you started this fund?David: I’ve been in venture capital for many years and I really started out directly in venture capital which is very rare. What happened is in college, I had thought I wanted to solve big problems in the world and at my age, when I was in that young high school, college time where I thought, oh the solution to big problems for the world is government. Government knows best. They know how to solve problems. So I started studying international relations in government at Harvard College and I went to work in Washington for three summers. And at the end of those three summers, I realized, ‘Ooh, I don’t think government is the solution, I think it’s more of the cause of t he problems’. The Politicians like to reelect themselves and so they’re willing to offer or promise anything to anybody to get elected and they don’t really think about the long-term solutions. Whereas, in the market economy, there’s so much competition, if you’re not serving your customers on a daily basis, you go out of business. So for that reason and other reasons that science needs business to make a takeout out of the lab, I think the niche of a combination of science and entrepreneurship is fantastic for unleashing great things into the world and helping lots of people move up into a happy middle class safe, healthy lifestyle. That’s what my personal mission is.Now the way that it worked is when I was in college, I started a company, because I was a poorer or middâ€"not poor, I was a middle class student that I needed to pay for Harvard which is very expensive. And I got this job and I had such a great success personally, fulfillment about being an entrepreneur. I t led me to say, I should really think about business rather than law school and foreign policy and the state department. And so, I went to business school instead of law school. I decided to work in the entrepreneurial and tech sector instead of government and foreign trade. And this has been a fantastic luck. I really chanced out. I have a choice of going towards biotech or software, I chose towards software, because I thought it would be a lot easier. I didn’t have to go through organic chemistry and med school. And then, right out of undergrad, I had a choice at business school to go straight away or to work first. I thought I won’t appreciate business school fully until I have some experience in the real world. And I also needed to pay for it. So I had a job offer at T. Rowe Price, a fantastic firm, money manager firm in Baltimore, Maryland which manages tens of billions of dollars across many mutual funds. And the job that I was offered was to be an analyst for hi-tech sto cks that were going IPO. And T. Rowe Price among other groups is a large buyer. It’s like one or two in the US buyerâ€" of these big IPOs. And so, I was able to analyze these companies before they were public and that’s when I met a lot of venture capitalist and how I saw what is the output goal for a great successful startup. Essentially, in my mind I’m thinking I need to please T. Rowe Price or Fidelity or Wellington or any of these great firms with the startup that comes into my office now looking for a million or two dollars. Eventually, I want to be able to bring it ultimately into a great IPO.Now, as we all know, many, many more companies get acquired along the way to an IPO, but IPO is still sort of the gold standard for great exits. And so, that training, the other way of saying it is, it’s a biological metaphor, I was looking at the estuary where the salmon come out from the rivers to the ocean and then swim back upstream. And I also knew in my career I wanted to go upstream to where they breathe and find the little salmon and help them grow the big strong fish, getting a little too deep in the metaphor.But the idea is that, I knew I didn’t want to stay in Wall Street and look at it as an analyst, more secured portfolio manager of public companies because I like to be more involved with the companies. I want to be working with the entrepreneurial teams and in my little way helping them maybe pivot a bit toward a faster more strategic fit into the market. But you have so much more influence at the early stage that’s what I find fun and if I’m not going to be commercial, I also think it’s the area where there’s much more much more arbitrage opportunity. The information is much less widespread, it’s much less as an economics we say, it’s not perfect information. So there’s a great gap and if we can have better information, the insiders albeit legal, we have a better chance of making a great buy whereas at the public markets, there are so many smart people analyzing the same data. It’s hard to have an edge consistently.Martin: And did you then start out of business school in a VC fund or did you just start your own VC fund directly out of business school?David: Yes, I’ve had wonderful mentors. So I’ve had three mentors chiefly Frederick Adler from Adler Company. He was one of the great VCs of his generation. There were probably about 5 to 10 major venture capital firms in those days, in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, he was one of them. He’s still alive, he’s still doing well. And then, the next one was Alan Patricof of Patricof Company which now became Apax and then Charles Bronfman and his family office up in Montreal. So each of those three, they had amazing networks, they had a lot of capital, they had lots of success by the time I got there, so the deal flow was already coming in and I was really privileged to get to see excellent entrepreneurs, make some serious investments and learn a lot along the way. The joke about venture capital is how do you train a venture capitalist, let them lose or her lose $20 million and then they’re trained. And so along the way, I’ve lost and so on. And now, it seems to be working and we’re making but it does take a lot of training and mentorship so for that, I’m ever grateful.Martin: But at some point, you decided, ‘I’ll stop working as an employee and start my own fund’. What was the reason behind that?David: Yes, well when I came from the Bronfman family office, I started consulting and what happened is I started consulting to a Japanese technology distribution company from Tokyo and two family offices. And I would find the deals for them and they would pay me a bit of a retainer and I would have some carried interests from the companies, share options or shares from them and something on the deal closing, transaction fee. And I was working along that and four of them went IPO out of nine. It was very successful. And then wh at would happen is we were these three groups, you have family offices who can’t add a lot of value typically to a company when it’s in startup phase and this Japanese company who could add a lot of value in Japan but nothing in the States. But the entrepreneurs would come back to me after we had funded them and say, ‘Now would you help us in America?’ and so that I fell into an operating role with one call Check Point Software which became one of the most successful in my career. And that was a firewall company software, so listed, publically traded, very successful. And I was very fortunate again to become an operating officer, I came for all time purposes the vice president of business development in their first 18 months in market.And that was at the dawn of the internet, so everyone needed internet connections and then the first thing they said, we need security. And a firewall was the front door lock, so to speak and so I had a fantastic time doing deals with Sun Micro systems, Hewlett-Packard, Tandem, bringing them to Japan, Australia, other places and the rest is history. It went very, very well and so I had that entrepreneurial experience in biz dev where market meets product especially in a company coming from overseas with a lot of engineering strength but not much in the resource packet of sales and business development. Developing all that, their marketing, their tradeshows, PR, all that experience of what a startup has to go through if they’re successful was super great training and I’ve had that now multiple times. But that was the impetus from those four IPOs in that little portfolio, we were able to then raise a fund one which is about $36 million then we’ve had fund two, $91 million then recently closed in October of last year fund three at $150 million and now things are going so well and we’re going to be investing at a rapid pace, so we’re going to be raise our next fund, early next year.UNDERSTANDING BLUMBERG CAPITALMarti n: David, let’s understand Blumberg Capital.David: Sure.Martin: So you said that you have active investing in so many countries, do you have office in all these kind of countries in all of these kind of areas or are you sourcing them directly here from the US and just travelling abroad?David: That’s a very fair question and a lot of people don’t understand how we do what we do. So let me first explain that as a VC we don’t think we’re smarter than the entrepreneurs and that we have a better crystal ball it’s the other way around, we think the entrepreneurs know more, especially about their specific domain than we do. So we like to listen a lot and be sponge and try and gather information from our network which is quite extensive, we have an outstanding network of friends and associates over the years that have become loyal, trust worthy sources of information and deal flow. So we get deal flow from a lot of places and we cultivate that, we go and speak at conferences and we go to start up competitions and we are judges and we try and give back to the community in that way, that’s it.Why the specific areas? Israel was a personal passion of mine early on and I had that zionist dream to try and help build the country from nothing; deserts and swamps to something that could be respectful and help the rest of the world with maybe technological output in an export way. So, I took maybe extra risks there that wouldn’t have been seen as natural or logical for a business person. It’s paid off handsomely, I mean they have done all that they have said they would do and more. I mean the output of Israel per capita is higher I think than anywhere in the world, maybeâ€"even including or close to Silicon Valley. So in terms of that it’s astonishing. Canada and Germany are places I feel comfortable in, we have good relationship with some of our investors, I lived in Canada, if you know that I lived for several years in Canada, because of Bronfman. So there ’s that tied. The technical talent in both countries is really high, the ethics are very high, the level of business knowledge is very strong and they are both strong economies. Canada obviously tied very much to North America, Germany is the center of Europe, so all of those things work well. Now that’s it.We see the world as, and this may be offensive to some people, a bit of a hub and spokes. The US is the big.., and North America is the big early adopter market, especially the unified currency, unified language, relatively unified market and has the biggest group of early adopter, and it has the biggest group of major strategic partners for distribution, and it has largest group of later stage venture capitalists for onward funding. So for those three reasons, if it’s a company starting in Canada or a company starting in Germany or a company starting in Israel, if they have any degree of goal to get into the North American market and launch as a global company, we feel lik e we can really add a lot of value.For example, we would not think we can add a huge amount of value, in Germany for a German company that would be arrogant on our part. The same Canada, in Canada. No, that’s not where we would have the most value and in Israel, there is no market in Israel, it’s way too small. So we are inbound to the US in that respect. Now that said, the world has changed dramatically in the last 10 years with the advent of mobile as a platform and the advent of social media networks and just the cloud infrastructure. So all that makes it much easier to reach far flung markets. And if I can give an example of a German company, where we’re very happy to be investors, Credit Tech is doing phenomenally well doing consumer lending from a base in Hamburg, but not in Germany. They are lending in Poland and Russia, in Spain, Czech Republic, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Peru, etc., far flung places from Germany. And this is because everything is done on mobile phone s; they have no offices anywhere in any of these countries. All of it is done through machine learning with giant algorithms that can grab data through APIs that were never available even 5 years ago. So all this is to say that the world is becoming easier to become Global as an investor and as an entrepreneur and we are taking advantage of that because we’ve seen that we can work with global teams on distributed basis. And that the rising middle class in the middle tier of counties is quite a surge, it’s going to continue for the next 10, 20, 30 years and another 500 million people will move up into middle class and they have every right and need to have services that meet their needs and we can hope to bring them some of those services. So that’s a slightly different model from the US centric model of the classic enterprise businesses where we’d bring stuff in from let’s say Israel or Canada and sell it in North America. Now this is the additional model which we find fru itful where we can start anywhere and address mobile markets of a vast numbers of consumers as well.Martin: Okay, great. David, what types of companies are you looking for when you want to invest your money?David: Great. We like to be an investor very early so we are almost always investing either pre- product or pre-revenue, or at the down or revenue and so it’s what we consider typically the seed stage and A, series A are the main entry points. We typically are the first institutional investor we are very glad to invest with other angels, other VCs, other strategic partners, but we are typically the first venture capital fund in. And we like to lead those rounds, we’re not dogmatic, we don’t have to we can collate etc., but we tend to that a lot. I think that’s probably because a lot of the larger firms that we have known historically that were our peers have gotten so big that they really prefer to come at the A,B, and C rounds, whereas we prefer to come in the seed and t he A, so there is a nice division of labor. We do the, what I call the hard work early on and they can come in with the big dollars later and help with assets and distribution and so on. And then there is the Angel community, that’s a very community for us to work with. We like to work with angels because the find the deals first, entrepreneurs usually go to their friends first and then they would perhaps come to an institution after they have tried it out a little bit with another angel or taken a little bit of money and that’s fine with us.Now within the realms, let’s go domains, we like things that are capital efficient traditionally. So that has led us towards software, it has led us away from energy production or clean tech, other than software kind of things or the biotech side, the wet lab related or things with a lot of FDA approval. Those are difficult for us invest in or material science, it’s traditionally been difficult because they’re capital intensive and the y’re in the realms of either long regularity approval or large rollouts for scale up and that has not been where we canplan. So traditionally it has been software where we find our niche. And I think that is also changing, we are on the cusp of the new world in synthetic biology and the internet of things and new types of hardware that are astonishingly light and small and flexible that we are starting to see, that are been created on kickstarter and indiegogo, and so on. So we are looking at some of those with interest, haven’t done them yet, but we are open to it.Martin: Okay. What are the properties of a great team, if you could imagine the properties of a team, what would it be?David: First you it said the right word, team. It’s rare, it’s possible but it’s rare that we find a single entrepreneur. Usually one person needs a complement, either in live as a spouse or as an entrepreneurial group but there are 4 or 5 roles that are key, and so we look generally for somebod y who really understands how product market fit and that can be a CEO with a sales background or it can be a CEO with a product background, or it can be a technology person with an understanding of where the world needs to go, or what a new platform will mean in terms of opportunity or in the security space, what a new platform means in terms of treat and hence opportunity. So those are the areas and by the way I should make more precise; we’ve tended to focus about 70% on B2B, the business to business, the enterprise focus. And partly the reason we do that is because most of us come from those background, the other is that we have a great network, we have a specific CIO council, chief information officer council, a chief marketing officer council and a group of CISO, chief security officers from fortune 500 and similar companies and those folks answer the question that follows, if we build this, will you buy it? And they are very good at helping us separate the wheat from the cha ff and focusing us on areas of their concern, so that has been very helpful, it’s been helpful to the companies we’ve invested in because if they answer ‘yes we will buy this’ they often become the source and the locus and the focus of the first paid customers, the first proof of concepts that the company has.Martin: Are you asking the CIOs, in their due diligence process, pre-investment?David: Yes, often, not always. Often, but certainly, once we’ve made the investment we go to them a lot for help but we often make this question during due diligence. Again part of it is because we don’t think we always know the answer to everything, we wanna look around and get advice. And I think that’sâ€" you know you didn’t ask this question yet but I want to make another distinction, our model at Venture Capital is not that we know better and we’re going to tell you as an employee, CEO, how to work for us and do things better. Ours is a little bit more, ‘You’re the race ca r driver and we’re the pit crew or maybe the manager’. So we’re going to give you some coaching of course and try to stop you from crashing around the track, but we’re going to change your oil, fill your gas, maybe bring the crowd into the bleachers and maybe give you some guidance from watching you go around the track many times and say, we’ve seen this kind of patterns before, here’s what we learnt from it, maybe that can help you.So I think that model is appropriate especially at the early stage. I mean these people are working incredible hours, they are highly motivated, they are very smart and I just want to be very careful that we’re not trying to squash that creativity or say that we know better. And if I may, I think that’s why start-ups break off from bigger companies; the innovation just can’t happen in the structure of a big entity for a variety of reasons. One is the equity motivation but the other is that more informal sense of ‘We, a small team, tha t are empowered, can do something great and novel’. Whereas in a big structural organization you’re offending a rival, there is politics, there are procedures that just get in the way of that gorilla flexibility and speed and nimbleness that one needs as an entrepreneur.STARTUP ECOSYSTEMMartin: David, let’s talk about how you perceive the eco system, the startup eco system. Can you tell us in what type of areas, countries, industries, ticket sizes do you perceive there are some kind of under or over allocation of capital and what is driving that?David: Okay, here we are in 2014 and these questions have to be answered very specifically to a time we’re sitting and where we invest. We invest at the early stage and I think it’s never been a better time to be an early stage, it’s never been a better time to be an early stage entrepreneur. And you might say well, right before the bubble of 2000â€"during the early part of the bubble of 99’,2000, that was a great time, you mig ht say, ‘Not really, that was fake, this is much more real.’ We stand on the shoulders of giants, the people who built the cloud, the internet, mobile networks, social networks, machine learning and things like that, are really making our lives a lot easier, whether an entrepreneur or whether funding entrepreneurs as a venture firm. So it’s a great time to be investing in that regards. The world is blossoming in terms of GDP per capita even though in the developed countries like Germany, US, Japan, etc., it’s been a really bad recession and recovery has been weak almost everywhere. The rest of the world has been doing a lot better. And I think probably because the really bad economic systems of communism and socialism in China and India are kind of getting taken away. They are just getting rid of the bad stuff and once you, like a brick on aâ€"as a weight, if you take the brick off and you let the natural resources of entrepreneurship thrive, you get GDP growth and you get p eople who move from poverty to middle class, which I think what we should all wish for.So that is making is have big new markets to reach and it’s making the entrepreneurial journey realistic for people in many, many new countries. So the fact that we operate outside of Silicon Valley has also been great for us. We have, I think a much outsized presence in Israel and then in Germany if I may say so, then our size would be compared to here, in the States. We are a small firm in the states and I think we are prominent, well known in our niche, but in Israel we are very prominent and in Germany probably more than we deserve because we are so unusual in doing this.So now let’s go back to the ecosystem. The US venture capital industry has become what I would call bimodal, like a donut. The middle has eroded away, the early stage is doing very well, the late stage is doing very well. But in a recession, or in an interest rate spike, or in some macro collision, I’d be more worried ab out being in the later stage. People buying late stage pieces of very expensive, high flying companies, because the evaluations can pop very down here, if we are down at the very bottom level of these early stage companies and if we allocate enough money for follow on for say 2,3,4,5 year period, over life of our funds, we can survive through a down turn. And our returns might be lower, but everyone’s returns would be lower. But the volatility is much less at the early stage when their companies are well supported compared to the volatility of exits and the time frame that’s required of late stage investors so, I’d rather be frankly jumping out of a first floor than jumping out of a 47th floor, God forbidMartin: And if you look at specific industries like if you were looking at hardware, social networks, advertising, etc., what industries do you think are more overvalued?David: Okay, we’ve taken a slightly different approach. Our approach has basically been that if you take 3 centuries of economic history, what were the big game changers? The 19th century was really about automation or infusion technology, that was really automation and agriculture, transportation and mining. 20th century manufacturing became highly automated and very efficient. Now what is the 21st century about? we would argue it’s the service economy and probably with now the internet of things and synthetic biology is also going to have a renaissance in the later part of the 21st century in actually manufacturing in a new way. But for now, the service economy dominates Europe, the Europe mainly and the US. 60%, 70%, 80% of our GDP and our employment more enforces in the service economy so strictly an example would be financial services. What are financial services? It’s services to people run on computers and communication networks using some kind of processing to crunch numbers and a way of communicating information out. Now, the communications and computational infrastructure plus storage in the past 10 years has rocketed to more efficiency and past 20, and past 30 years. Most banks, most insurance companies are running on systems that are 10, 20, 30 years old. So the new entrance can come in with almost a green field advantage in terms of much more efficiency and now the world is again opened to new platforms of mobile, we can reach consumers for the first time that could really never be reached except through traditional expensive branches. So we are deconstructing, disrupting and innovating the whole area of financial services across probably 18 or 20 companies in our little portfolio. And it’s amazing to see our little Davids go up against the Goliaths, but they are doing very well, I am seeing incredible growth. And sometimes it not that just that we are going to disrupt and destroy the big but we’re going to offer something new that they could never do at scale, it just wouldn’t work and that is very exciting. And so if I would say it again I would simplify and say the services economy is both capital efficient for us to go after, it’s expanding, it’s very inefficient still and it has a lot of room for innovation. So, those are the keys so far we are interested in. I would say further on in the horizon, very interested by new hardware modality, internet things again and thenâ€"the intersection we call synthetic biology but that’s where essentially computation meets the human and the biological for the new developments, not done in a lab but really done on a computer almost as in CAD CAM does for engineering, makes sense?Martin: What other service industries can you identify that are right for disruption and big enough?David: Sure, sure. Travel is a huge industry, very inefficient and ready for disruption, insurance, banking, lending, real estate, education. Health care is complicated but we think there are a lot of opportunities of disruption there making it much more efficient and better, we have a couple of opp ortunities on our table right now in that round. And the thing about the medical science itself, it’s more about delivery and access and payment, that’s where I find the infrastructure to be lacking dramatically. Security is not exactly a vertical domain it’s more horizontal but with every new platform, the bad guys find opportunities to poke holes and so the good guys have to come and build solutions and so we see security as the new platforms arise becoming great area for us we’ve had a number of great exit’s there and new investments that are very promising, so those are a few areas that look good for us.Martin: Great.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURS In San Francisco, we talked with venture capitalist and the founder of Blumberg Capital, David Blumberg. David talks about the investment due diligence process and startup ecosystem. Furthermore, he shares his learnings and advice for young entrepreneurs.The transcription of the interview is provided below.INTRODUCTIONMartin: Hi, today we are in San Francisco in the Blumberg Capital Office with David. David, who are you and what do you do?David: David Blumberg, I’m the founder and managing partner of Blumberg Capital. And we’re a very focused specialized fund. We focus very much on early stage information technology, that’s mostly software and it brings us across different geographies. We’ve started in the Bay Area, San Francisco and branched out quite early to Israel, New York as a triangle then along the way found out about the great brands in Germany and so I’ve been in Berlin mostly, with some in Munich and Hamburg, some investments there. And then along the way I also have found some great opportunities up in Vancouver, our neighbor to the north and then down to Los Angeles. So those are the four or five places. It’s interesting because I just read yesterday a study saying that in the opinion of US investor, the top four countries for early stage venture capital investments are US, Israel, Canada and Germany.Martin: Canada as well, okay.David: Yes, so somehow we’ve got it just exactly right per the view of other investors and that’s the places that we have main investments and where we have some successes to talk about.Martin: What did you do before you started this fund?David: I’ve been in venture capital for many years and I really started out directly in venture capital which is very rare. What happened is in college, I had thought I wanted to solve big problems in the world and at my age, when I was in that young high school, college time where I thought, oh the solution to big problems for the world is government. Government knows be st. They know how to solve problems. So I started studying international relations in government at Harvard College and I went to work in Washington for three summers. And at the end of those three summers, I realized, ‘Ooh, I don’t think government is the solution, I think it’s more of the cause of the problems’. The Politicians like to reelect themselves and so they’re willing to offer or promise anything to anybody to get elected and they don’t really think about the long-term solutions. Whereas, in the market economy, there’s so much competition, if you’re not serving your customers on a daily basis, you go out of business. So for that reason and other reasons that science needs business to make a takeout out of the lab, I think the niche of a combination of science and entrepreneurship is fantastic for unleashing great things into the world and helping lots of people move up into a happy middle class safe, healthy lifestyle. That’s what my personal mission is. Now the way that it worked is when I was in college, I started a company, because I was a poorer or middâ€"not poor, I was a middle class student that I needed to pay for Harvard which is very expensive. And I got this job and I had such a great success personally, fulfillment about being an entrepreneur. It led me to say, I should really think about business rather than law school and foreign policy and the state department. And so, I went to business school instead of law school. I decided to work in the entrepreneurial and tech sector instead of government and foreign trade. And this has been a fantastic luck. I really chanced out. I have a choice of going towards biotech or software, I chose towards software, because I thought it would be a lot easier. I didn’t have to go through organic chemistry and med school. And then, right out of undergrad, I had a choice at business school to go straight away or to work first. I thought I won’t appreciate business school fully until I have some experience in the real world. And I also needed to pay for it. So I had a job offer at T. Rowe Price, a fantastic firm, money manager firm in Baltimore, Maryland which manages tens of billions of dollars across many mutual funds. And the job that I was offered was to be an analyst for hi-tech stocks that were going IPO. And T. Rowe Price among other groups is a large buyer. It’s like one or two in the US buyerâ€" of these big IPOs. And so, I was able to analyze these companies before they were public and that’s when I met a lot of venture capitalist and how I saw what is the output goal for a great successful startup. Essentially, in my mind I’m thinking I need to please T. Rowe Price or Fidelity or Wellington or any of these great firms with the startup that comes into my office now looking for a million or two dollars. Eventually, I want to be able to bring it ultimately into a great IPO.Now, as we all know, many, many more companies get acquired along the way to an IPO, but IPO is still sort of the gold standard for great exits. And so, that training, the other way of saying it is, it’s a biological metaphor, I was looking at the estuary where the salmon come out from the rivers to the ocean and then swim back upstream. And I also knew in my career I wanted to go upstream to where they breathe and find the little salmon and help them grow the big strong fish, getting a little too deep in the metaphor.But the idea is that, I knew I didn’t want to stay in Wall Street and look at it as an analyst, more secured portfolio manager of public companies because I like to be more involved with the companies. I want to be working with the entrepreneurial teams and in my little way helping them maybe pivot a bit toward a faster more strategic fit into the market. But you have so much more influence at the early stage that’s what I find fun and if I’m not going to be commercial, I also think it’s the area where there’s much more much more ar bitrage opportunity. The information is much less widespread, it’s much less as an economics we say, it’s not perfect information. So there’s a great gap and if we can have better information, the insiders albeit legal, we have a better chance of making a great buy whereas at the public markets, there are so many smart people analyzing the same data. It’s hard to have an edge consistently.Martin: And did you then start out of business school in a VC fund or did you just start your own VC fund directly out of business school?David: Yes, I’ve had wonderful mentors. So I’ve had three mentors chiefly Frederick Adler from Adler Company. He was one of the great VCs of his generation. There were probably about 5 to 10 major venture capital firms in those days, in the 1970s, ’80s, ’90s, he was one of them. He’s still alive, he’s still doing well. And then, the next one was Alan Patricof of Patricof Company which now became Apax and then Charles Bronfman and his family office up in Montreal. So each of those three, they had amazing networks, they had a lot of capital, they had lots of success by the time I got there, so the deal flow was already coming in and I was really privileged to get to see excellent entrepreneurs, make some serious investments and learn a lot along the way. The joke about venture capital is how do you train a venture capitalist, let them lose or her lose $20 million and then they’re trained. And so along the way, I’ve lost and so on. And now, it seems to be working and we’re making but it does take a lot of training and mentorship so for that, I’m ever grateful.Martin: But at some point, you decided, ‘I’ll stop working as an employee and start my own fund’. What was the reason behind that?David: Yes, well when I came from the Bronfman family office, I started consulting and what happened is I started consulting to a Japanese technology distribution company from Tokyo and two family offices. And I would find th e deals for them and they would pay me a bit of a retainer and I would have some carried interests from the companies, share options or shares from them and something on the deal closing, transaction fee. And I was working along that and four of them went IPO out of nine. It was very successful. And then what would happen is we were these three groups, you have family offices who can’t add a lot of value typically to a company when it’s in startup phase and this Japanese company who could add a lot of value in Japan but nothing in the States. But the entrepreneurs would come back to me after we had funded them and say, ‘Now would you help us in America?’ and so that I fell into an operating role with one call Check Point Software which became one of the most successful in my career. And that was a firewall company software, so listed, publically traded, very successful. And I was very fortunate again to become an operating officer, I came for all time purposes the vice presi dent of business development in their first 18 months in market.And that was at the dawn of the internet, so everyone needed internet connections and then the first thing they said, we need security. And a firewall was the front door lock, so to speak and so I had a fantastic time doing deals with Sun Microsystems, Hewlett-Packard, Tandem, bringing them to Japan, Australia, other places and the rest is history. It went very, very well and so I had that entrepreneurial experience in biz dev where market meets product especially in a company coming from overseas with a lot of engineering strength but not much in the resource packet of sales and business development. Developing all that, their marketing, their tradeshows, PR, all that experience of what a startup has to go through if they’re successful was super great training and I’ve had that now multiple times. But that was the impetus from those four IPOs in that little portfolio, we were able to then raise a fund one which is about $36 million then we’ve had fund two, $91 million then recently closed in October of last year fund three at $150 million and now things are going so well and we’re going to be investing at a rapid pace, so we’re going to be raise our next fund, early next year.UNDERSTANDING BLUMBERG CAPITALMartin: David, let’s understand Blumberg Capital.David: Sure.Martin: So you said that you have active investing in so many countries, do you have office in all these kind of countries in all of these kind of areas or are you sourcing them directly here from the US and just travelling abroad?David: That’s a very fair question and a lot of people don’t understand how we do what we do. So let me first explain that as a VC we don’t think we’re smarter than the entrepreneurs and that we have a better crystal ball it’s the other way around, we think the entrepreneurs know more, especially about their specific domain than we do. So we like to listen a lot and be sponge and try and gather information from our network which is quite extensive, we have an outstanding network of friends and associates over the years that have become loyal, trust worthy sources of information and deal flow. So we get deal flow from a lot of places and we cultivate that, we go and speak at conferences and we go to start up competitions and we are judges and we try and give back to the community in that way, that’s it.Why the specific areas? Israel was a personal passion of mine early on and I had that zionist dream to try and help build the country from nothing; deserts and swamps to something that could be respectful and help the rest of the world with maybe technological output in an export way. So, I took maybe extra risks there that wouldn’t have been seen as natural or logical for a business person. It’s paid off handsomely, I mean they have done all that they have said they would do and more. I mean the output of Israel per capita is higher I think than anywhere in the world, maybeâ€"even including or close to Silicon Valley. So in terms of that it’s astonishing. Canada and Germany are places I feel comfortable in, we have good relationship with some of our investors, I lived in Canada, if you know that I lived for several years in Canada, because of Bronfman. So there’s that tied. The technical talent in both countries is really high, the ethics are very high, the level of business knowledge is very strong and they are both strong economies. Canada obviously tied very much to North America, Germany is the center of Europe, so all of those things work well. Now that’s it.We see the world as, and this may be offensive to some people, a bit of a hub and spokes. The US is the big.., and North America is the big early adopter market, especially the unified currency, unified language, relatively unified market and has the biggest group of early adopter, and it has the biggest group of major strategic partners for distribution, and it has largest group of later stage venture capitalists for onward funding. So for those three reasons, if it’s a company starting in Canada or a company starting in Germany or a company starting in Israel, if they have any degree of goal to get into the North American market and launch as a global company, we feel like we can really add a lot of value.For example, we would not think we can add a huge amount of value, in Germany for a German company that would be arrogant on our part. The same Canada, in Canada. No, that’s not where we would have the most value and in Israel, there is no market in Israel, it’s way too small. So we are inbound to the US in that respect. Now that said, the world has changed dramatically in the last 10 years with the advent of mobile as a platform and the advent of social media networks and just the cloud infrastructure. So all that makes it much easier to reach far flung markets. And if I can give an example of a German company, where we’re very happy to be investors, Credit Tech is doing phenomenally well doing consumer lending from a base in Hamburg, but not in Germany. They are lending in Poland and Russia, in Spain, Czech Republic, Mexico, Dominican Republic, Peru, etc., far flung places from Germany. And this is because everything is done on mobile phones; they have no offices anywhere in any of these countries. All of it is done through machine learning with giant algorithms that can grab data through APIs that were never available even 5 years ago. So all this is to say that the world is becoming easier to become Global as an investor and as an entrepreneur and we are taking advantage of that because we’ve seen that we can work with global teams on distributed basis. And that the rising middle class in the middle tier of counties is quite a surge, it’s going to continue for the next 10, 20, 30 years and another 500 million people will move up into middle class and they have every right and need to have services that meet th eir needs and we can hope to bring them some of those services. So that’s a slightly different model from the US centric model of the classic enterprise businesses where we’d bring stuff in from let’s say Israel or Canada and sell it in North America. Now this is the additional model which we find fruitful where we can start anywhere and address mobile markets of a vast numbers of consumers as well.Martin: Okay, great. David, what types of companies are you looking for when you want to invest your money?David: Great. We like to be an investor very early so we are almost always investing either pre- product or pre-revenue, or at the down or revenue and so it’s what we consider typically the seed stage and A, series A are the main entry points. We typically are the first institutional investor we are very glad to invest with other angels, other VCs, other strategic partners, but we are typically the first venture capital fund in. And we like to lead those rounds, we’re not d ogmatic, we don’t have to we can collate etc., but we tend to that a lot. I think that’s probably because a lot of the larger firms that we have known historically that were our peers have gotten so big that they really prefer to come at the A,B, and C rounds, whereas we prefer to come in the seed and the A, so there is a nice division of labor. We do the, what I call the hard work early on and they can come in with the big dollars later and help with assets and distribution and so on. And then there is the Angel community, that’s a very community for us to work with. We like to work with angels because the find the deals first, entrepreneurs usually go to their friends first and then they would perhaps come to an institution after they have tried it out a little bit with another angel or taken a little bit of money and that’s fine with us.Now within the realms, let’s go domains, we like things that are capital efficient traditionally. So that has led us towards software, it has led us away from energy production or clean tech, other than software kind of things or the biotech side, the wet lab related or things with a lot of FDA approval. Those are difficult for us invest in or material science, it’s traditionally been difficult because they’re capital intensive and they’re in the realms of either long regularity approval or large rollouts for scale up and that has not been where we canplan. So traditionally it has been software where we find our niche. And I think that is also changing, we are on the cusp of the new world in synthetic biology and the internet of things and new types of hardware that are astonishingly light and small and flexible that we are starting to see, that are been created on kickstarter and indiegogo, and so on. So we are looking at some of those with interest, haven’t done them yet, but we are open to it.Martin: Okay. What are the properties of a great team, if you could imagine the properties of a team, what would it be?David: First you it said the right word, team. It’s rare, it’s possible but it’s rare that we find a single entrepreneur. Usually one person needs a complement, either in live as a spouse or as an entrepreneurial group but there are 4 or 5 roles that are key, and so we look generally for somebody who really understands how product market fit and that can be a CEO with a sales background or it can be a CEO with a product background, or it can be a technology person with an understanding of where the world needs to go, or what a new platform will mean in terms of opportunity or in the security space, what a new platform means in terms of treat and hence opportunity. So those are the areas and by the way I should make more precise; we’ve tended to focus about 70% on B2B, the business to business, the enterprise focus. And partly the reason we do that is because most of us come from those background, the other is that we have a great network, we have a specific CIO council , chief information officer council, a chief marketing officer council and a group of CISO, chief security officers from fortune 500 and similar companies and those folks answer the question that follows, if we build this, will you buy it? And they are very good at helping us separate the wheat from the chaff and focusing us on areas of their concern, so that has been very helpful, it’s been helpful to the companies we’ve invested in because if they answer ‘yes we will buy this’ they often become the source and the locus and the focus of the first paid customers, the first proof of concepts that the company has.Martin: Are you asking the CIOs, in their due diligence process, pre-investment?David: Yes, often, not always. Often, but certainly, once we’ve made the investment we go to them a lot for help but we often make this question during due diligence. Again part of it is because we don’t think we always know the answer to everything, we wanna look around and get advice . And I think that’sâ€" you know you didn’t ask this question yet but I want to make another distinction, our model at Venture Capital is not that we know better and we’re going to tell you as an employee, CEO, how to work for us and do things better. Ours is a little bit more, ‘You’re the race car driver and we’re the pit crew or maybe the manager’. So we’re going to give you some coaching of course and try to stop you from crashing around the track, but we’re going to change your oil, fill your gas, maybe bring the crowd into the bleachers and maybe give you some guidance from watching you go around the track many times and say, we’ve seen this kind of patterns before, here’s what we learnt from it, maybe that can help you.So I think that model is appropriate especially at the early stage. I mean these people are working incredible hours, they are highly motivated, they are very smart and I just want to be very careful that we’re not trying to squash that c reativity or say that we know better. And if I may, I think that’s why start-ups break off from bigger companies; the innovation just can’t happen in the structure of a big entity for a variety of reasons. One is the equity motivation but the other is that more informal sense of ‘We, a small team, that are empowered, can do something great and novel’. Whereas in a big structural organization you’re offending a rival, there is politics, there are procedures that just get in the way of that gorilla flexibility and speed and nimbleness that one needs as an entrepreneur.STARTUP ECOSYSTEMMartin: David, let’s talk about how you perceive the eco system, the startup eco system. Can you tell us in what type of areas, countries, industries, ticket sizes do you perceive there are some kind of under or over allocation of capital and what is driving that?David: Okay, here we are in 2014 and these questions have to be answered very specifically to a time we’re sitting and where we i nvest. We invest at the early stage and I think it’s never been a better time to be an early stage, it’s never been a better time to be an early stage entrepreneur. And you might say well, right before the bubble of 2000â€"during the early part of the bubble of 99’,2000, that was a great time, you might say, ‘Not really, that was fake, this is much more real.’ We stand on the shoulders of giants, the people who built the cloud, the internet, mobile networks, social networks, machine learning and things like that, are really making our lives a lot easier, whether an entrepreneur or whether funding entrepreneurs as a venture firm. So it’s a great time to be investing in that regards. The world is blossoming in terms of GDP per capita even though in the developed countries like Germany, US, Japan, etc., it’s been a really bad recession and recovery has been weak almost everywhere. The rest of the world has been doing a lot better. And I think probably because the really b ad economic systems of communism and socialism in China and India are kind of getting taken away. They are just getting rid of the bad stuff and once you, like a brick on aâ€"as a weight, if you take the brick off and you let the natural resources of entrepreneurship thrive, you get GDP growth and you get people who move from poverty to middle class, which I think what we should all wish for.So that is making is have big new markets to reach and it’s making the entrepreneurial journey realistic for people in many, many new countries. So the fact that we operate outside of Silicon Valley has also been great for us. We have, I think a much outsized presence in Israel and then in Germany if I may say so, then our size would be compared to here, in the States. We are a small firm in the states and I think we are prominent, well known in our niche, but in Israel we are very prominent and in Germany probably more than we deserve because we are so unusual in doing this.So now let’s go back to the ecosystem. The US venture capital industry has become what I would call bimodal, like a donut. The middle has eroded away, the early stage is doing very well, the late stage is doing very well. But in a recession, or in an interest rate spike, or in some macro collision, I’d be more worried about being in the later stage. People buying late stage pieces of very expensive, high flying companies, because the evaluations can pop very down here, if we are down at the very bottom level of these early stage companies and if we allocate enough money for follow on for say 2,3,4,5 year period, over life of our funds, we can survive through a down turn. And our returns might be lower, but everyone’s returns would be lower. But the volatility is much less at the early stage when their companies are well supported compared to the volatility of exits and the time frame that’s required of late stage investors so, I’d rather be frankly jumping out of a first floor than jumping out of a 47th floor, God forbidMartin: And if you look at specific industries like if you were looking at hardware, social networks, advertising, etc., what industries do you think are more overvalued?David: Okay, we’ve taken a slightly different approach. Our approach has basically been that if you take 3 centuries of economic history, what were the big game changers? The 19th century was really about automation or infusion technology, that was really automation and agriculture, transportation and mining. 20th century manufacturing became highly automated and very efficient. Now what is the 21st century about? we would argue it’s the service economy and probably with now the internet of things and synthetic biology is also going to have a renaissance in the later part of the 21st century in actually manufacturing in a new way. But for now, the service economy dominates Europe, the Europe mainly and the US. 60%, 70%, 80% of our GDP and our employment more enforces in the service economy so strictly an example would be financial services. What are financial services? It’s services to people run on computers and communication networks using some kind of processing to crunch numbers and a way of communicating information out. Now, the communications and computational infrastructure plus storage in the past 10 years has rocketed to more efficiency and past 20, and past 30 years. Most banks, most insurance companies are running on systems that are 10, 20, 30 years old. So the new entrance can come in with almost a green field advantage in terms of much more efficiency and now the world is again opened to new platforms of mobile, we can reach consumers for the first time that could really never be reached except through traditional expensive branches. So we are deconstructing, disrupting and innovating the whole area of financial services across probably 18 or 20 companies in our little portfolio. And it’s amazing to see our little Davids go up against the G oliaths, but they are doing very well, I am seeing incredible growth. And sometimes it not that just that we are going to disrupt and destroy the big but we’re going to offer something new that they could never do at scale, it just wouldn’t work and that is very exciting. And so if I would say it again I would simplify and say the services economy is both capital efficient for us to go after, it’s expanding, it’s very inefficient still and it has a lot of room for innovation. So, those are the keys so far we are interested in. I would say further on in the horizon, very interested by new hardware modality, internet things again and thenâ€"the intersection we call synthetic biology but that’s where essentially computation meets the human and the biological for the new developments, not done in a lab but really done on a computer almost as in CAD CAM does for engineering, makes sense?Martin: What other service industries can you identify that are right for disruption and big enough?David: Sure, sure. Travel is a huge industry, very inefficient and ready for disruption, insurance, banking, lending, real estate, education. Health care is complicated but we think there are a lot of opportunities of disruption there making it much more efficient and better, we have a couple of opportunities on our table right now in that round. And the thing about the medical science itself, it’s more about delivery and access and payment, that’s where I find the infrastructure to be lacking dramatically. Security is not exactly a vertical domain it’s more horizontal but with every new platform, the bad guys find opportunities to poke holes and so the good guys have to come and build solutions and so we see security as the new platforms arise becoming great area for us we’ve had a number of great exit’s there and new investments that are very promising, so those are a few areas that look good for us.Martin: Great.ADVICE TO ENTREPRENEURSMartin: David, you’ve see n so many entrepreneurs over the last more than 10 years, what advice would you give one of your friends who’s asking you for advice when he wants to start a company?David: Sure. I’m going first to go back to the last question and say I left out things like E-commerce and marketing, advertising, all those again all those very strong. E-commerce is the fastest growing part of retail and within e-commerce, international e-commerce is the fastest growing part of e-commerce. So those areas with payments or marketing automation or supporting the customers or finding customers, all those are super areas that we can grow into the future.Now if an entrepreneur comes to me or my colleagues at Blumberg Capital and ask for advice on what to do.First I want to ask if they have the mentality to be an entrepreneur, it’s not for everybody, it’s a very lonely thing to do, it’s very tough, the odds are against you. And yet, in your heart you knowâ€"or in your brain, combination of brain an d heart, you should know that ‘I have what it takes, I’m going to give it my best.’ And if you have that persistence and that strength of character to try and forge ahead after being told no, no, no dozens of times and then you finally hear a yes, then I say okay, first thing is know yourself.The second thing is how do you solve the world’s problems? Who are your fellow man and woman who you can you deliver something better? One of my favorite economist is Thomas Sole at Stanford and he said, ‘What is the definition of Profit? Profit is simply a recognition by others of the value you deliver to other people’. That’s a beautiful concept and unfortunately, capitalism has quite of a negative perception, many quarters of the establishment and Hollywood and literary world, the art world and so on and I think it’s very underserved. I think capitalization is the greatest force for liberation of poor people into let’s say a more reasonable middle class lifestyle. It’s ev er been in the history of the world. Remember until 1800 it didn’t really exist everyone is either a king or a surf, but another way owner or a slave, that’s what the world was until 1800 there was almost nothing else. And it’s only because of capitalism, it’s only because of moving capital around to entrepreneurs frankly from investors that you got innovation and that spiral going.So, you know, that’s a little side argument for capitalism. For entrepreneurs I think again, it’s never been a better time. So know yourself, find what you can do to help somebody else in the world with a better product, a better service. Find a team that can support you, leverage you, add to what you have as an individual and then think it through, poke it and test it, test your assumptions and don’t come to us right away until you’ve done some testing with real customers or with people who know the industry. And you’re going to get a lot of no’s and you’ll get some false signals an d there will be a lot of noise but in that noise look for the real signal and then we want to hear from you first.Martin: So when is the best time to make contact you? Is it really like when somebody is looking for funding or is it like 6 or 12 months before?David: I like to hear from people before they’re looking for funding because that gives us an advantage of being the first on the block to see it but also because we can learn the basic ideas in one meeting or encounter. We might ask them some tough questions and they’ll go back and think about it and comeback the second time better prepared and have more complete presentations.Here are the odds, we see about 5000 business plans a year and we go and invest in maybe 10 or 15, our current fund size, so it’s a very tough needle to the thread. We’re not the only game in town, there are other sources of capital, and we make mistakes as well, we don’t have perfect vision. But I would say, do your homework, it’s always easi er to raise money if you have real customers or real traction of some kind, they don’t even have to be paying customers. We’ve invested in many companies that we’re basing on the freemium model where they start with the free group that proves the value of proposition, improve the product, then we find what people are willing to pay for it. Ultimately, someone has to be willing to pay for something to make it work, makes sense?Martin: Totally. David thank you very much for your time.David: My pleasure.Martin: Next time you are thinking about starting a company and looking for funding maybe you should talk to David or his assistance and get some advice. Thanks.David: Thank you very much.Martin: Great, thank you very much David.

Analysis Of Mirror By Sylvia Plath - 1414 Words

resses her childhood depression and her anger towards men, in â€Å"Mirror† when she reflects her adulthood depression and sorrow, and in her poem â€Å"Lady Lazarus† when she explains her attempts and success at suicide and why she made those choices. When Plath’s father died, she did not know how to feel. When he passed away, Plath exclaims â€Å"...we moved inland. Whereon those nine first years of my life sealed themselves off like a ship in a bottle† (Materer). When Plath lived down by the sea, she just thought about her father and she did not really know how to feel as a young child. She was angry at him and at the fact that nobody understood the way she was feeling. Not even her own mother could figure it out. Since she moved to the sea when†¦show more content†¦This man in particular she is talking about is Ted Hughes. She was angry at him for cheating on her, and after that, it made her view of men very different. She always imagined the â€Å"...destruction of those who first gave and then shattered herself: men† (Giles). For the rest of her life, she viewed men as the cruel people in society that she would never be able to trust again. Sylvia plath’s adulthood depression started off very small, but as time went along, it just got worse and worse. Before Hughes and Plath separated later on in her life, she was depressed by publisher rejections, which caused low productivity in her writing (Materer). She could not write because she did not know where to go and she did not know who she was as a person. At the start of her depression and the beginning of the poem â€Å"Mirror† â€Å"A woman bends over me,/ searching my reaches for what she really is† (Plath, â€Å"Mirror† 174). In this poem, the women in the mirror is Plath at a confused time of her life. Over time, the woman in â€Å"Mirror† grew more and more upset and she visited the lake more often. She was hoping to see a glimmer of hope to make her life happy and full again. However, in the end she was super sad with who she has become and how her life was turning out. Each time she visitedShow MoreRelatedAnalysis Of The Mirror By Sylvia Plath1215 Words   |  5 PagesThe mirror is a two-stanza captivating and a highly personalized poem that was authored by Sylvia Plath in the 1960s as an exploration of the uncertain self. A mirror explains its existence and the owners’ existence that is growing with the mirror witnessing. Moreover, the mirror is artistically endowed with human traits and can tell the monotony it endures facing the wall most of the times; a wall which has become part of it, â€Å"I have looked at it so long, I think it is part of my heart† [Plath lineRead MoreAnalysis Of `` Mirror `` By Sylvia Plath1231 Words   |  5 Pages â₠¬Å"Mirror† by Sylvia Plath is a short lyric poem written with no rhyme scheme as it is written in free verse. However, the poem has a nice flow to it, as the words fluctuate gracefully through each line. Plath heavily uses imagery and symbolism in this lyric poem as this can be observed in the first stanza. In addition to the types of literary devices Plath uses continually throughout her poem, she also has set her poem in two locations. In the first verse, the setting is in a bathroom,Read MoreMirror by Sylvia Plath, Analysis875 Words   |  4 PagesThe use of Personification and Metaphor in ‘Mirror’ In the Poem ‘Mirror’ by Sylvia Plath, there is a continuing theme of change. In the beginning the changes are simple, like the acts of day turning to night, but at the end we see the life changes of a woman in particular. Through the use of metaphor and personification in the poem, Plath creates images of water, reflections, and colors as having human characteristics to emphasize the strong theme of change throughout the poem. From the beginningRead MoreAnalysis Of Mirror By Sylvia Plath823 Words   |  4 Pagespoem â€Å"Mirror† by Sylvia Plath describes an uneasy relationship between an aging woman and a mirror through a dark and emotional mood and a sad and melancholy tone increasing as the poem progresses. the theme of this poem is truth and lies, the woman is torn between whats real and whats not real. The poem is written in first person from the point of view of a mirror and personification is used continuously and effectively throughout the text. Through personification Plath gives the Mirror lifeRead MoreAnalysis Of `` Mirror `` By Sylvia Plath And `` The Yellow Wallpaper ``1193 Words   |  5 Pagesreading a different kind of literature works. Different literature stories have struck a responsive chord in readers’ hearts. Two of literature works â€Å" Mirror † by Sylvia Plath and short story â€Å" The Yellow Wallpaper† by Charlotte Perkins Gilman both shows femaleà ¢â‚¬â„¢s oppressive living in patriarchal society and control by men. In the poemâ€Å" Mirror†, in the 20 century, the society influence women should care about how they look and they feel sad about getting old. Even in the poem did not existRead MoreA Reflection in Sylvia Plaths Mirror1013 Words   |  5 PagesA Reflection in Sylvia Plath’s Mirror Amanda L. Wilson Eng:125 Introduction to Literature Professor Lyndsey Lefebvre November 18, 2013 A Reflection in Sylvia Plath’s Mirror Sylvia Plath’s poem Mirror (1963) is evocative, provocative, and expressive. According to Clugston (2010) these are important components of poetry. Sylvia Plath’s first line is a projection of the mirror providing its introduction saying, â€Å"I am silver and exact†(Plath, 1963, line 1). The mirror is the protagonist whoRead MoreAnalysis of Sylvia Plaths Mirror1281 Words   |  6 Pagesï » ¿Analysis of Sylvia Plath’s â€Å"Mirror† Sylvia Plath is known as the poet of confession. Her life is strongly connected to her works. She uses poetry as a way to confess her feelings, to express and release her pain in life. â€Å"Mirror† is one of her most famous poems. Sylvia Plath wrote the poem in 1961, just two years before her actual suicide. After suffering a miscarriage, she realized that she was pregnant again. She and her husband moved to a small town and their marriage began going worse. TheRead MoreSymbolism In The Bell Jar1548 Words   |  7 PagesSylvia Plath uses many literary devices to convey her purpose in The Bell Jar such as symbolism. The Bell Jar itself is used as symbolic representation of the emotional state Esther is in. The glass jar distorts her image of the world as she feels trapped under the glass. It represents mental illness , a confining jar that descends over her mind and doesn’t allow her to live and think freely. Symbols and images of life and death pervade The Bell Jar. E sther experiences psychological distress whichRead MoreOutline Structure For Literary Analysis : Daffodils By Ted Hughes960 Words   |  4 PagesOutline Structure for Literary Analysis Essay I. An Enemy or a Friend: â€Å"Daffodils† by Ted Hughes II. Paragraph 1: Introduction A.)This poem is focused all about daffodil flowers which i believe is a resemblance of his wife Sylvia Plath. B. The author of the poem is Ted Hughes .The poem is based around how years Hughes and his children would sell the daffodils to make a living but never realized how much they were taking the daffodil for grant. C. The title of the poem is â€Å"Daffodils.† F. The mainRead MoreThe Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath1211 Words   |  5 PagesSylvia Plath Research Paper Title The Bell Jar place[s] [the] turbulent months[of an adolescent’s life] in[to] mature perspective (Hall, 30). In The Bell Jar, Sylvia Plath uses parallelism, stream of consciousness, the motif of renewal and rebirth, symbolism of the boundary-driven entrapped mentally ill, and auto-biographical details to epitomize the mental downfall of protagonist, Esther Greenwood. Plath also explores the idea of how grave these timeless and poignant issues can affect a fragile

The Major Factors to the Romam Empire Falling Essay

For more than two thousand years, Rome was a large, powerful, and dominating empire. The ancient kingdom seemed unstoppable, but in just few centuries later, Roman power fell and was obliterated. No one knows exactly how the empires demise came to be and is still debated today but there are some major factors recognized that caused Rome to fall. The land of barbarians were located beyond the western border of Rome along Rhine and Danube rivers and would slowly become a serious threat to Rome and eventually led to the fall of the empire. At first, they posed no danger as they were only German farmers that were nomadic because of their poor agricultural skills. The barbarians could not develop a political structure either so they were†¦show more content†¦In the end, the emperors and rebels died at the hands of their own associates. To gain more security, large provinces were split into smaller regions to minimize military power to any one official so one administrator doesnt have significantly more power than another. As provinces continue to be broken up, the army for each area became so small they could not even protect the locals from raids and criminals. A successful usurper named Constantine changed the composition of the Roman army and crippled the empires central government by abandoning Rome as a capital, along with other emperors, with slow, ineffective communication between the officials and uncertainty at the court which made it hard to operate the government. He tried to avoid conflict and did nothing to solve the difficult situations. The army was also affected as they relied on the state politicians to provide materials, men, and finances for war but the officials could not with the ongoing problems at the government. Wherever the emperors traveled, the army moved along with them and only protected where the rulers were which left other areas defenseless. The once 5,000 soldiers per legion decreased to prevent the rebels gaining a large ar my which continued to force Romes armed force to hire and rely on barbarians to protect the Rhine and Danube frontiers. By the middle of the fourth

Nuclear Power Plants Public Perception of the Risks and Threats Free Essays

The dissertation looks at the way the public perceive the risks and threats offered by nuclear power plants within the UK. A process of content analysis, looking at news articles from The Times and The Telegraph 2012, was used.The public perceptions of nuclear power has always been markedly different to other means of generating electricity, despite the small number of incidents in reactors, with a strong tendency amongst the public, exacerbated by the media, to see such power in a negative way. We will write a custom essay sample on Nuclear Power Plants: Public Perception of the Risks and Threats or any similar topic only for you Order Now The study examines the ways in which the media are able to influence public perception strongly, and in a negative way. The study includes an extensive literature review to contextualise the discussion. The background of nuclear power plants is discussed, looking at how nuclear power was discovered, and the development of functioning power plants. The growth of concern about nuclear power is traced, and the role of the media also examined. In particular, the mechanisms by which the media are able to sway public opinion are considered. The literature review is supported by a number of useful illustrations, graphs and tables. A methodology section justifies the choice of content analysis as a research tool, and considers other ways of investigation which could be, or which have been, used to address the way the public perceive nuclear power. Content analysis offers a way to look at public perceptions by analysing relevant texts in which those perceptions are expressed or shaped. It looks for particular concepts occurring in these texts, and assesses the extent to which each occurs. The relationship between key terms is also assessed. It has been used similarly in other studies looking at this area, for example Perko, Turcanu and Geenen (2012). The method chosen is justified against other possible ways of gauging public opinion, for example through surveys or time series analyses.Many previous studies have collected quantitative data, underlining the need for qualitative analyses such as the one presented here. Using content analysis, the study uncovers a number of features of media discussions of nuclear power. The results section looks, in turn, at the number of nuclear related articles, the main claims made by these articles, the position taken by the author and whether any evidence to support the claims is given, and if so what that evidence is. The study finds that the media does influence the public perception of nuclear power, and that they are biased in the way they present nuclear power to the public. It also finds mixed positive and negative portrayals of nuclear power. Finally recommendations for future research are made. Dissertation Details: Order Number: 3962 Title: NUCLEAR POWER PLANT: PUBLIC PERCEPTION TO THE RISK AND THREAT Project Type: Dissertation. Academic Level: Masters. Work done so far: 10,000 words Purchase Details: The abstract you just read is for a pre-written project. These projects are plagiarism free and of a 2.1. (B) quality. Click here for more information on our pre-written essays and dissertations for sale. These projects were written to match a client’s specific requirements, and may need to be tweaked to match yours. If you’re interested in one of these titles, kindly contact us, so we may send you a sample. Kindly include the name of the essay and order number in your email. Once you have paid, it would be taken off this page and never re-sold. You would also be sent a plagiarism report. Click here to Buy this Dissertation How to cite Nuclear Power Plants: Public Perception of the Risks and Threats, Essay examples

Personal Management

Question: Choose any existing company in the service-related business (i.e. retail, hotel, restaurant, airline or tourism) industry in Singapore. Imagine that you have been appointed as the Human Resource (HR) Manager of your chosen company. Your boss has asked you to prepare a report recommending job design, job description (including specification), recruitment and selection strategies that can be adopted by the company to fulfil its staffing needs in view of HR strategies. The company wants to create an engaging and motivating work force in order to have a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Answer: Introduction The recruitment strategy for Conrad Centennial has been designed in the report. Conrad Centennial is a leading 5 star luxury hotel in Singapore. It is an award winning luxurious hotel in Singapore (Singapore, 2015). The recruitment strategy for the position of marketing manager and CEO has been discussed. Singapore is a highly developed economy in Asia Pacific. Globalization forces like high mobility of labor, capital investments have posed new challenges for the economy. It has affected the macro and micro environment of the country. The HR manager of Conrad Centennial has formulated the recruitment strategy on the basis of the socio-economic and political condition of the country. The new regulations of labor and the hotel industry have played a major role in formulating the strategy of recruitment. The hotel industry in Singapore has adopted a range of HR policies. The human resource of the organization has contribution on the bottom line. The HR strategies have been implemented to minimize the labor turnover via recruitment, selection and induction process (Cheng Brown, 1998). Job design Conrad Centennial will fill up the position of CEO and marketing manager. The job design is formulated for the position of CEO and Hotel manager. Job description for the position of CEO Responsible for management of the operations of the Hotel (Production, Maintenance, Quality , Innovation, Finance and IT , supply chain and sustainability) Industry Hotel Functional area Top Management Role CEO Report to Board of Directors Experience 20-25 years Desired profile of the candidate Educational qualification UG Any stream and PG ( MBA in marketing /operations/hospitality). Hotel management degree will be preferred. Summary of Job The individual will be responsible for providing leadership to the company at the forefront of the industry. He will be responsible for the development of a strategic plan for the growth of the revenue and profitability of the company. He will be responsible for providing a staregic direction to the business. Skills required The individual must be strategically oriented. Must possess leadership qualities, collaboration and interpersonal skills. He will be responsible for motivating the employees and assist them in decision making. He will be responsible for the promotion of the products and services to capture greater share of the market. The individual should possess in depth knowledge of the hotel business and know how to generate high volume of sales by using the techniques of marketing. Must possess immense knowledge of the core business areas of marketing, finance , IT and human resource. Job description for the position of Hotel Manager A hotel manager must be aware of everyone in the management team. Reports to the Senior Hotel Manager Objective of the job To deliver customer service in a friendly manner to create a warm and welcoming atmosphere for all the guests in the hotel. The hotel manager will be responsible for supervising, training and motivating the team. The key aim of the hotel manager will be retention of the existing customers and attracting new customers. Educational qualification The individual must possess a management degree from a reputed organization in Singapore. The person must have 5 years of working experience in the hotel industry. Main responsibility The individual will responsible for delivering excellent customer service ensuring that the guests receive comfort and safety. He must be able to deal with all the enquiries in a professional and courteous manner. He must assist the team in dealing with the complaints in a professional manner. He must manage the administration of all the reservations, cancelations which should be in line with the policy of the company. He must have the capacity to implement effective strategies of marketing in order to maximize the occupancy level. Recruitment strategy for Singapore Major changes have been seen in the labor policies in Singapore. The dependency ratio on foreign labor has been reduced. From 1 July, 2015, the service sector will have a dependency ratio of 40%. Since 2015, the unemployment rate of Singapore is the lowest. There is strong competition for labor for which the hotel industry faces difficulties in the recruitment and the retention of the employees especially in the hotel jobs (Mom.gov.sg, 2015); (BBC News, 2015). There is various negative perceptions about the hospitality industry. This has affected the recruitment and the selection process. The hospitality industry suffers from negative perception of long working hours and low rate of wage. The new implemented government regulation on foreign labor has been a major problem for the country. Thus it is favorable to hire Singaporeans than the foreign laborers. But it is difficult to get good candidates for the position of CEO and manager due to tough competition from the other hotel industries. Since it is difficult to hire suitable employees for the post of CEO and hotel manager, Conrad will offer competitive salaries to the employees. The competitive salary package must be according to the standards of the top five star hotels in Singapore. Competitive compensation is a feasible strategy for the retention and attracting the talents. The recruitment at Conrad is done by using the employer branding methods. Employer branding can be defined as the process of in which the external organizational image an identity is portrayed specifically a main element of the organizational culture. After the competitive salary has been offered to the employees, the culture of the organization will be second important focus of the employees. Thus Conrad shows strong culture of the organization to maximize its value (Economywatch.com, 2015). The recruitment process at Conrad is divided into four stages. They are HR planning, responsibility of the organization, strategic recruitment and decisions and methods of recruitment. Competitive salaries will be offered to the existing CEO and hotel manager of five star hotels in Singapore. Conrad will not outsource its recruitment (Singapore Business Review, 2015); (CNBC, 2013). Selection strategy for Singapore Conrad will use a strict selection strategy for recruiting for the position of CEO and hotel manager. The candidates have to pass through multitude of criteria before the final selection. The initial screening will be on the basis of the educational qualification, experience. After the base line requirements have been fulfilled, there will be various rounds of interview, water confidence test and psychometric test. The final interview round will be taken by the top HR manager of the organization. During the selection process there will be stringent rules regarding the appearance and behavior of the candidate. Negotiation regarding the right pay package will be a criteria for the selection of the candidate. Implementation of the strategies The strategies for recruiting the right candidate for the post of CEO and hotel manager are outlined below The recruitment will be conducted for the post CEO and Hotel manager. For the success of the recruitment process, the staffing resources will be identified at first. The number and type of employees attending the interview will be analyzed. On the basis of the analysis, the suitable candidates will be called for the interview. The differences between the anticipated demand and the forecasted supply of the candidates will be identified. The value of the company in the market will be used as an effective strategy to recruit qualified candidates for the position of CEO and manager. At first the applications of the candidates will be shortlisted on the basis of the educational qualifications and experience. The shortlisted candidates will have to undergo a psychometric test (Osborne, 2014). The test will help to analyze the EQ, IQ and personality of the candidate. The suitable candidate will be chosen. In the next phase, the candidate has to go through two rounds of interview. There will be a telephonic round of interview and the final round of interview will be the face to interview with the senior HR manager. The senior HR manager will conduct the interview and test the capability of the candidate to match up to the expectations of the organization. Conclusion The hospitality industry in Singapore is highly complex. It is affected by the stringent policies of the Government and the economic conditions of the country. The hotels have to constantly search for ways to maintain the competitive advantage. Hotel industry is a labor intensive sector. It has to develop the human resource as their core competent area to retain the right talent for the organization. The strategic human resource management will be successful if they can select the right candidate for maintaining the operations of the hotel. The CEO and the hotel manager are two highly esteemed positions. They carry the baggage of huge responsibility. They must possess the personality to preserve the culture of Conrad. The value of the organization will maximize depending on the strategies taken up by CEO. Since, the hotel industry is a highly competitive sector in Singapore, hiring the right candidate will be a tough job for the organization. In order to hire the right candidate, the organization has to pay competitive pay packages. The pay packages should be similar to the ones that are offered at the other five star hotels. During the process of recruitment, Conrad has to use its brand value to get potential candidates for the interview. References BBC News,. (2015). Singapore introduces new labour laws. Retrieved 31 January 2015. Cheng, A., Brown, A. (1998). HRM strategies and labour turnover in the hotel industry: A comparative study of Australia and Singapore. The International Journal Of Human Resource Management, 9(1), 136-154. doi:10.1080/095851998341233 CNBC,. (2013). Singapore Firms Hit by Foreign Labor Laws. Economywatch.com,. (2015). Singapore Economy | Economy Watch. Retrieved 31 January 2015. Mom.gov.sg,. (2015). Press Release Detail - Ministry of Manpower. Retrieved 31 January 2015. Osborne, H. (2014). Psychometric tests in job interviews: what are they looking for?. the Guardian. Retrieved 31 January 2015. Singapore Business Review,. (2015). Visitor arrivals to grow 7.7% in 2013: DBS. Retrieved 31 January 2015. Singapore, C. (2015). Conrad Singapore. Conradhotels3.hilton.com. Retrieved 31 January 2015.