The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘mind’

Researchers would be wasting their time, and their patrons’ money, scanning my brain.

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Brains, brains, scanning brains

The convergence of sport and technology ! I don’t know, I think it’s cool. So, here’s another

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Adidas Finale Madrid: This is the fancy ball that will be used at the Champions League final

You guys, I’m freaking out about how cool these things could be.

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Inverted, ocean-bound “seascrapers”: aqua-communes for the future?

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote, “I’ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.”

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I’ve got news for you: you’ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren’t born, they’re made. And they aren’t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed 549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn’t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn’t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business — just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simons (Def Jam founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn’t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were “extremely interested” in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes?  Education — but not the college they graduate from. In a different study of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn’t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at “teachable moments” — when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn’t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.  That’s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth “scale” businesses. These new firms, especially the “scale” firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups.  After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs.  This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with “scalable ideas” can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don’t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path — which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, “Venture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition”. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population – a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

Editor’s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa.

About three weeks ago, eBay’s electronic payments daughter PayPal suddenly started blocking personal payments going in or coming out of accounts from Indian customers, resulting in a flood of online complaints from the latter that ranged from accusations of racism to sheer amateurism.

Last week, rumors that PayPal was actually forced into halting personal payments by Reserve Bank Of India (RBI) because they did not comply with all relevant regulatory requirements, were confirmed. Last night, PayPal posted a status update on its corporate blog, saying that they anticipate to resume part of its service, namely bank withdrawal abilities, as of Wednesday, March 3rd.

From the blog post:

We have been diligently working with the RBI and our business partners to resume Indian bank withdrawals for the thousands of Indian businesses who use PayPal to sell their goods or services in the global marketplace.

I’m pleased to tell you that the RBI has now allowed us to resume bank withdrawals for settlements for exports of goods and services. We are currently making changes to comply with Indian regulations for settlements for exports of goods and services, and we anticipate that as of Wednesday, March 3rd, we will be able to resume the bank withdrawal service.

As part of the changes, Indian customers will be required to fill out a new field dubbed ‘Export Code’ when they request a withdrawal (here’s how to get one). This information is apparently required under current Indian laws in order to identify the nature of cross-border merchant transactions. PayPal will share specific instructions on how users can move money into bank accounts on Monday, March 1st.

But Reserve Bank Of India has informed the eBay company that it requires specific approvals to allow personal inward remittances to India, which it currently does not have. In other words: PayPal is still forced by law to effectively suspend personal payments going into the accounts of its Indian customers for the foreseeable future, unless they are exporters.

We’ll provide an update when that changes.

Twones started life as a FriendFeed-type service that aggregated various music services into a single stream, which we dubbed a social music feed when we first caught wind of it.

Problem was, the startup says, since users generally couldn’t play the music on their site and were constantly being directed to third-party websites and apps for streaming, people never really got that FriendFeed experience that would compel them to come back.

The Dutch company figured they needed to do something else, and the result of their overhauled strategy will be going live in alpha mode this morning. The short version: it’s Delicious-type bookmarking meets StumbleUpon-type discovery for online music.

The service will be going live within the next few hours, but here’s what I gathered from the demo they gave me last night.

Essentially, Twones will now focus on what it refers to as the “Music Bar”, a browser add-on / bookmarklet that lets users bookmark music that is being streamed on other websites or MP3 blogs and discover music others have bookmarked in a fun way. The Music Bar will debut as a Firefox extension, but Chrome and Internet Explorer versions are near completion, I’m told.

When installed, you can use Twones to bookmark music on thousands of supported websites, manage your virtual collection in a sidebar that looks a lot like Delicious, and share music with others in Twones or on services like Twitter and Facebook. In addition, any music you stream can be scrobbled to Last.fm so you can keep track of it there.

Finally, there’s an ‘Explore’ button that basically lets people jump to any random track that is in Twones’ database – no need to install the Music Bar even for that. This can be a great way to discover new music, but arguably there is a need for some kind of controller that lets you explore tracks within a certain genre, at least.

The problem with Twones is that, since it revolves almost entirely around music that’s being shared online elsewhere, you’re never quite sure if the songs you’re so carefully bookmarking are going to be there tomorrow, because the source could be gone for whatever reason. The startup says it’s working on ways to downsize that issue.

Twones aims to make money from advertising, affiliate revenues, maybe a premium version down the line, and/or as an analytics service for online music sharing (kind of what Bit.ly does for general links today). They haven’t really figured out which path to take right now, but the startup says the $500k seed funding it raised earlier is enough to buy them time to do so, as they are very ‘cost efficient’ in the sense that there’s no need to store a gigantic amount of music on their servers, seal license deals or run a complex content distribution network.

All in all, I could see myself using Twones for sure, but it feels more like a feature than a solid business to me. We’ll see if the next iterations of the service will make me change my mind.

Citrix Online has announced the acquisition of Paglo Labs. The deal was completed in early 2010 and no financial terms have been disclosed. Paglo’s entire team has joined Citrix Online; Paglo CEO Brian de Haaff is now senior product director, IT Services for Citrix Online. The deal was announced concurrently with the launch of GoToManage, a new Citrix Online Product based on Paglo’s software.

Citrix Online is a market leader in SaaS web-based technical solutions. Its GoToAssist software allows customers to interact directly with a clients computer, resolving issues remotely. Paglo Labs is a leader in IT Management SaaS. Customers are able to monitor, analyze and manage their devices, networks, server, logs and more.

GoToManage combines the abilities of both platforms. It offers remote surveillance, control and support of IT infrastructure. Citrix plans on leveraging its existing relationships with businesses to enter the SaaS-based IT management market. Brett Caine, general manager of Citrix Online notes:

“As a trusted partner to SMBs, we are well positioned to capitalize on the huge market potential in IT management with our signature and proven ‘simpler is better’ approach to Web-based services. We’re confident that GoToManage will be enthusiastically embraced by our customers and the market at large.”

It’s the start of yet another lazy Saturday, so let’s make things a little more interesting with a side dish of outrage . A 15-year-old student in Pennsylvania has accused his high school of spying on him using a school-supplied MacBook. The school had accused the boy “inappropriate behavior” that it found him engaged in via the built-in Webcam

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Outrage: School accused of using laptop to take photos of student at his home without his knowledge

Not a big deal but I just wanted to write a bit about replacing parts on your valuable and delicate electronics. Friends, I’m here to tell you that while it’s hard, it’s not impossible to fix things yourself

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What I did today: Nintendo DS case replacement

Considering just how similar the new HTC Desire is to the not-quite-as-new Google Nexus One (read: very, very similar), I wasn’t expecting to walk away from my hands on session with my mind too blown. I mean, it’s essentially just a Nexus One with HTC’s Sense UI and an optical trackpad, right?

Right - and that’s exactly why it’s amazing.