Out of the mouths of babes. Maybe because it’s a company town and everyone in Silicon Valley has a family connection to entrepreneurship. Or maybe I just encountered the most entrepreneurial 12 year olds ever assembled under one roof. Or maybe we’re now teaching entrepreneurial thinking in middle schools. Either way I had an astounding [...]
Filed under: Family/Career/Culture, Teaching | 20 Comments »
Utah may be known for many things, but who would have thought that Utah, and particularly Brigham Young University (BYU), would be participating in the transformation of entrepreneurship? I spent last weekend in Utah at BYU as a guest of Professor Nathan Furr, (a former Ph.D. student of our MS&E department at Stanford,) where they are set [...]
Filed under: Business Model versus Business Plan, Teaching, Venture Capital | 8 Comments »
The benefits of customer and agile development and minimum features set are continuous customer feedback, rapid iteration and little wasted code. But over time if developers aren’t careful, code written to find early customers can become unwieldy, difficult to maintain and incapable of scaling. Ironically it becomes the antithesis of agile. And the magnitude of [...]
Filed under: Customer Development, Technology, Venture Capital | 83 Comments »
Over the last 40 years the U.S. has evolved an entrepreneurial ecosystem with two of the most unlikely partners – venture capital investors and technology entrepreneurs. This alliance has led to an explosion of technology innovation, scalable startups and job creation. Tied at the hip, VC’s and entrepreneurs take large risks together. VC’s invest in [...]
Filed under: Venture Capital | 28 Comments »
In November 2010 as part of my interview about entrepreneurs and Customer Development, the Shoshin Project also asked me about my thoughts on investing in innovation. They wanted some words of wisdom for their investment bank and hedge fund customers. This falls into the “Asking someone who was handy versus knowledgeable” category. (I was a [...]
Filed under: Venture Capital | 1 Comment »
In a startup “Good news needs to travel fast, but bad news needs to travel faster.” There’s something about the combination of human nature (rationalization and self deception) and large hierarchical organizations (corporations, military, government, etc.) that actively conspire to hide failure and errors. Institutional cover-up’s are so ingrained that we take them for granted. [...]
Filed under: Big Companies versus Startups: Durant versus Sloan | 27 Comments »
Much like my career, in the last two years this blog has traveled a serendipitous path. I orignally wrote it with four goals in mind: First, to explain to my kids, then just graduating from High School, stories about their dad’s life when he was their age. And with the 30-year statute of limitations now passed, stories about [...]
Filed under: Uncategorized | 5 Comments »
I spent two weeks of December in Chile as a guest of Professor Cristóbal García, Director of EmprendeUC at the Catholic University of Chile, which just signed up a 3-year collaboration partnership with Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program. I did a keynote on innovation hubs at the newly created DoFuture program, spoke at Santiago’s Startup Weekend on Customer and Agile [...]
Filed under: Teaching, Venture Capital | 35 Comments »
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