Here are seven of our favorite lessons:
lunes, 21 de diciembre de 2015
7 Surprising Lessons About Success Learned From Interviewing More Than 65 Millionaires
Over the past two and a half years, we've interviewed 65 millionaire entrepreneurs about building successful businesses. Our conversations with these entrepreneurs revealed many surprising lessons about succeeding in business -- lessons that broke the pattern of what we’re used to hearing about entrepreneurship.
Here are seven of our favorite lessons:
Here are seven of our favorite lessons:
20,000 pounds of thrust through a 3D-printed rocket engine
3D printing officially hit the big leagues when NASA fired up this rocket engine primarily composed of 3D-printed parts.
As Gizmodo’s Jamie Condliffe explained:
In these videos, you can see the team from Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama putting it through its paces. That saw the engine burning fuel at temperatures above 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the fuel pumps supplying liquid hydrogen were as cold as -400 degrees Fahrenheit. With the pump running at 90,000 revolutions per minute, the engine generated over 20,000 pounds of thrust.
As Gizmodo’s Jamie Condliffe explained:
In these videos, you can see the team from Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama putting it through its paces. That saw the engine burning fuel at temperatures above 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit, while the fuel pumps supplying liquid hydrogen were as cold as -400 degrees Fahrenheit. With the pump running at 90,000 revolutions per minute, the engine generated over 20,000 pounds of thrust.
3 Profound Entrepreneurship Lessons You Wish You Knew Sooner
Here’s a look at three essential lessons entrepreneurship will teach you, principles you wish you knew sooner.
When one contemplates entrepreneurship, it is usually a vision of Mark Zuckerberg in a college dormitory, Dell computers being crafted in a residential garage, or another myriad of grandiose creations—made possible by the innovative genius of some of the brightest individuals of our times.
While most startup ideas are just that—“ideas”—that never rise to quite the same caliber as the most renowned inventions of the time (e.g., Facebook, or a Microsoft Windows), there is one overarching theme: A bigger picture.
Lesson #1: It’s not about you—go ‘big’ for everyone.
When one contemplates entrepreneurship, it is usually a vision of Mark Zuckerberg in a college dormitory, Dell computers being crafted in a residential garage, or another myriad of grandiose creations—made possible by the innovative genius of some of the brightest individuals of our times.
While most startup ideas are just that—“ideas”—that never rise to quite the same caliber as the most renowned inventions of the time (e.g., Facebook, or a Microsoft Windows), there is one overarching theme: A bigger picture.
miércoles, 16 de diciembre de 2015
How This Startup Hires the Best of the Best Tech Talent
For companies like Thumbtack, the best time to hire top engineers is while they're still in college. Here's how they do it.
Andrew Lee hasn't graduated from college yet, but he's already a hot commodity for recruiters in the tech sector. The 21-year-old Stanford senior majoring in computer science is not so much hunting for jobs as employers are hunting for him. Or, rather, they're hunting for people like him -- young, promising engineers.
It's now October. Lee graduates in June. He's already interviewing with major public tech companies like Google, Amazon and Twitter, in addition to startups such as local services marketplace Thumbtack, valued at $1.3 billion, where he's spending this particular Friday for interviews and recruitment activities. At the big public companies, there's stability; but at startups, there's a chance to be more involved and make a greater impact, says Lee.
Attracting talent is an increasing challenge for startups in the Bay Area. Ali Behnam, managing partner of recruitment firm Riviera Partners, says competition for engineers is being fed not just by growth among startups and public tech companies, but relatively new interest among non-tech companies in the same talent pool. Banks, credit card companies, manufacturers and other established businesses that once felt comfortable in industries now being disrupted are vying for the interest of young engineers in hopes of catching up to the pace of Silicon Valley.
"There's intense competition for talent. I don't think that there's anybody who would deny that trend," says Behnam. "I mean, we're just seeing the competition increase every year because we're seeing non-tech companies trying to hire as well."
Startups have to take a more aggressive approach to recruitment as they grow, but that doesn't mean they're doing anything out of the ordinary to spark the interest of college seniors. Thumbtack, for example, does all the usual things startups do to find undergrad talent, such as holding hackathons on campuses and taking part in career fairs.
What's new is that the company is making university recruitment a year-round endeavor, says Thumbtack university recruiter Dayna Cano. (The company recruits more experience candidates year-round as well.) Thumbtack focuses efforts on Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT, though the startup will of course consider applications from students at other schools where the company has less of a presence.
The goal is to turn year-round recruitment into an institutionalized, repeatable process, says CEO Marco Zappacosta. The company needs a scalable, systemized approach because its previous ad hoc efforts are no longer sufficient. Thumbtack reports its staff has doubled each year since 2012 and the company hopes to continue this growth. Its San Francisco headquarters now hosts 150 full-time employees. "The biggest difference is just the focus on scale, and that the processes and the methods you put in place when trying to hire a handful don't work when you're trying to hire 30-plus people a quarter," says Zappacosta.
Behnam says recruitment activity is busiest in the fall, around October, and in the spring. For Thumbtack, October is the sweet spot for recruitment activity. A few factors contribute to the primacy of this month: Students are still settling into classes in September, ruling the earlier month out; a lot of college seniors studying engineering decide where they'll work or intern before the time the spring semester starts; and in November and December, many are too busy preparing for exams or with holiday travel to focus on job hunting.
The company decided to go hard on October this year, interviewing up to 10 candidates on site each Friday of that month plus a few during the week. The reason for choosing Fridays is that more students have a break from classes at the end of the week. The startup also changed its "family dinner" night, when employees have the option of inviting family and friends to gather for a home-style meal prepared by the startup's staff chefs, from Wednesdays to Thursdays. Again, the idea was to accommodate student schedules -- Thursday nights are more likely to be free from major assignments.
Dinners and lunch on interview days might include informal "non-evaluative" conversations between prospective new engineers and staff. Visiting Thumbtack when candidates are on site, you would think the startup was applying to hire the college students rather than the students applying for jobs.
Startups begin unknown, so they still have to pitch themselves, explains president and cofounder Jonathan Swanson. "I think for the very best talent there's a lot of competition," he says. One day when the company has a million users, it won't need to rev up recruits with the founding story.
Until then, Thumbtack is doing what it can to establish itself on the radars of engineers like Stanford senior Lee, ultimately offered a job by the company. Lee first encountered Thumbtack at a career fair on campus, and the Friday he visited the startup, he seemed to be very seriously considering it as a place to launch his career upon graduating. The college senior described the perks of working for the unicorn as falling somewhere between those of a scrappy startup and tech megalith.
"It's pretty stable, but it's also very exciting," he said of the company. He may still have time to make his decision: As of earlier this month, most university candidates were still within a decision-making window established by their schools.
Thumbtack has its own approach for recruiting the talent it needs to grow, which can in some ways be replicated. For companies struggling with talent acquisition, Behnam has a few tips:
Broaden the pool of schools. Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cornell, UCLA and University of Waterloo produce the most-hired candidates according to Riviera. Behnam thinks a number of colleges are neglected or under-rated by Silicon Valley, among them Carnegie Mellon, Cal Poly, Johns Hopkins, Georgia Institute of Tech.
Look at older developers. Saying "older" may sound funny, considering the word can simply mean "old enough to drink" in Silicon Valley. The point is, while recent college graduates may have experience with new languages or techniques, experience still matters. Engineers who have been around can mentor recent grads.
Look outside your industry. You don't have to hire developers with experience in exactly what your company does. Uber can hire developers from the world of fintech and it could work out great, says Behnam.
NOTE CREDIT: http://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/how-thumbtack-is-hacking-recruitment.html?cid=sf01001&sr_share=twitter
Andrew Lee hasn't graduated from college yet, but he's already a hot commodity for recruiters in the tech sector. The 21-year-old Stanford senior majoring in computer science is not so much hunting for jobs as employers are hunting for him. Or, rather, they're hunting for people like him -- young, promising engineers.
It's now October. Lee graduates in June. He's already interviewing with major public tech companies like Google, Amazon and Twitter, in addition to startups such as local services marketplace Thumbtack, valued at $1.3 billion, where he's spending this particular Friday for interviews and recruitment activities. At the big public companies, there's stability; but at startups, there's a chance to be more involved and make a greater impact, says Lee.
Attracting talent is an increasing challenge for startups in the Bay Area. Ali Behnam, managing partner of recruitment firm Riviera Partners, says competition for engineers is being fed not just by growth among startups and public tech companies, but relatively new interest among non-tech companies in the same talent pool. Banks, credit card companies, manufacturers and other established businesses that once felt comfortable in industries now being disrupted are vying for the interest of young engineers in hopes of catching up to the pace of Silicon Valley.
"There's intense competition for talent. I don't think that there's anybody who would deny that trend," says Behnam. "I mean, we're just seeing the competition increase every year because we're seeing non-tech companies trying to hire as well."
Startups have to take a more aggressive approach to recruitment as they grow, but that doesn't mean they're doing anything out of the ordinary to spark the interest of college seniors. Thumbtack, for example, does all the usual things startups do to find undergrad talent, such as holding hackathons on campuses and taking part in career fairs.
What's new is that the company is making university recruitment a year-round endeavor, says Thumbtack university recruiter Dayna Cano. (The company recruits more experience candidates year-round as well.) Thumbtack focuses efforts on Stanford, UC Berkeley and MIT, though the startup will of course consider applications from students at other schools where the company has less of a presence.
The goal is to turn year-round recruitment into an institutionalized, repeatable process, says CEO Marco Zappacosta. The company needs a scalable, systemized approach because its previous ad hoc efforts are no longer sufficient. Thumbtack reports its staff has doubled each year since 2012 and the company hopes to continue this growth. Its San Francisco headquarters now hosts 150 full-time employees. "The biggest difference is just the focus on scale, and that the processes and the methods you put in place when trying to hire a handful don't work when you're trying to hire 30-plus people a quarter," says Zappacosta.
Behnam says recruitment activity is busiest in the fall, around October, and in the spring. For Thumbtack, October is the sweet spot for recruitment activity. A few factors contribute to the primacy of this month: Students are still settling into classes in September, ruling the earlier month out; a lot of college seniors studying engineering decide where they'll work or intern before the time the spring semester starts; and in November and December, many are too busy preparing for exams or with holiday travel to focus on job hunting.
The company decided to go hard on October this year, interviewing up to 10 candidates on site each Friday of that month plus a few during the week. The reason for choosing Fridays is that more students have a break from classes at the end of the week. The startup also changed its "family dinner" night, when employees have the option of inviting family and friends to gather for a home-style meal prepared by the startup's staff chefs, from Wednesdays to Thursdays. Again, the idea was to accommodate student schedules -- Thursday nights are more likely to be free from major assignments.
Dinners and lunch on interview days might include informal "non-evaluative" conversations between prospective new engineers and staff. Visiting Thumbtack when candidates are on site, you would think the startup was applying to hire the college students rather than the students applying for jobs.
Startups begin unknown, so they still have to pitch themselves, explains president and cofounder Jonathan Swanson. "I think for the very best talent there's a lot of competition," he says. One day when the company has a million users, it won't need to rev up recruits with the founding story.
Until then, Thumbtack is doing what it can to establish itself on the radars of engineers like Stanford senior Lee, ultimately offered a job by the company. Lee first encountered Thumbtack at a career fair on campus, and the Friday he visited the startup, he seemed to be very seriously considering it as a place to launch his career upon graduating. The college senior described the perks of working for the unicorn as falling somewhere between those of a scrappy startup and tech megalith.
"It's pretty stable, but it's also very exciting," he said of the company. He may still have time to make his decision: As of earlier this month, most university candidates were still within a decision-making window established by their schools.
Thumbtack has its own approach for recruiting the talent it needs to grow, which can in some ways be replicated. For companies struggling with talent acquisition, Behnam has a few tips:
Broaden the pool of schools. Stanford, UC Berkeley, Cornell, UCLA and University of Waterloo produce the most-hired candidates according to Riviera. Behnam thinks a number of colleges are neglected or under-rated by Silicon Valley, among them Carnegie Mellon, Cal Poly, Johns Hopkins, Georgia Institute of Tech.
Look at older developers. Saying "older" may sound funny, considering the word can simply mean "old enough to drink" in Silicon Valley. The point is, while recent college graduates may have experience with new languages or techniques, experience still matters. Engineers who have been around can mentor recent grads.
Look outside your industry. You don't have to hire developers with experience in exactly what your company does. Uber can hire developers from the world of fintech and it could work out great, says Behnam.
NOTE CREDIT: http://www.inc.com/tess-townsend/how-thumbtack-is-hacking-recruitment.html?cid=sf01001&sr_share=twitter
martes, 15 de diciembre de 2015
The Best Definition of Innovation
For years I’ve studied use and abuse of the word innovation. Mostly it’s used as a filler word, without meaningful intent. I’ve complained about this for years, which naturally leads to people asking me to stop whining and offer a definition.
I generally recommend people don’t use the word. It’s rarely helpful. At best it’s something people should say about you or your work, not something you say about yourself. Instead dedicate yourself to solving problems since that’s what most people who earn the title innovator were trying to do.
But if you must use it, here is the best definition: Innovation is significant positive change.
This is a high bar, and it should be. To call every little change you make in your work an innovation belittles the possible scale of progress. Innovation is also best thought of as an outcome, not an action (see Innovation vs. Invention).
What does significant mean? I’d start with the invention of the light bulb, constitutional governments, wireless radio and the Internet. Perhaps you could say significant is a 30% or more improvement in something, like the speed of an engine or the power of a battery. If you know the history of your profession you know the big positive changes people made over the last 50 years, giving you perspective on the scale of brilliance you need to have to be worthy of that word.
But if you use word lightly, or frequently, you show hubris in the present and ignorance of the past. Sayings like “we innovate every day”, “chief innovator” or “innovation pipeline” are inflations. They’re popular, but misguided. Calling a thing an innovation doesn’t make it so. It’s just a word and words are free to be abused. If you think about it, it’s easy to separate mere improvements from something worthy of grander praise.
The best thing to ask anyone who uses the word innovation is: what do you mean when you say that?
Most of the time people have no idea what they mean. Or they mean they’re doing something they do most days. And once they admit this, that’s when you offer the definition above.
NOTE CREDIT: http://scottberkun.com/2013/the-best-definition-of-innovation/
I generally recommend people don’t use the word. It’s rarely helpful. At best it’s something people should say about you or your work, not something you say about yourself. Instead dedicate yourself to solving problems since that’s what most people who earn the title innovator were trying to do.
But if you must use it, here is the best definition: Innovation is significant positive change.
This is a high bar, and it should be. To call every little change you make in your work an innovation belittles the possible scale of progress. Innovation is also best thought of as an outcome, not an action (see Innovation vs. Invention).
What does significant mean? I’d start with the invention of the light bulb, constitutional governments, wireless radio and the Internet. Perhaps you could say significant is a 30% or more improvement in something, like the speed of an engine or the power of a battery. If you know the history of your profession you know the big positive changes people made over the last 50 years, giving you perspective on the scale of brilliance you need to have to be worthy of that word.
But if you use word lightly, or frequently, you show hubris in the present and ignorance of the past. Sayings like “we innovate every day”, “chief innovator” or “innovation pipeline” are inflations. They’re popular, but misguided. Calling a thing an innovation doesn’t make it so. It’s just a word and words are free to be abused. If you think about it, it’s easy to separate mere improvements from something worthy of grander praise.
The best thing to ask anyone who uses the word innovation is: what do you mean when you say that?
Most of the time people have no idea what they mean. Or they mean they’re doing something they do most days. And once they admit this, that’s when you offer the definition above.
NOTE CREDIT: http://scottberkun.com/2013/the-best-definition-of-innovation/
lunes, 14 de diciembre de 2015
The Careers of the Founders
How did the greatest entrepreneurs start out? What were their biggest successes? What failures did they have to overcome along the way? We’ve charted the careers of 33 inspirational company founders, from the man behind Heinz beans to the woman behind Ultimo bras, to show that there’s more than one path to success.
It's All In The Terms: What To Prioritize In Angel Term Sheets
An essential part of angel investing is setting and agreeing to the terms of the deal. Many angels recognize the importance of deal terms, but often wonder which components of the term sheet to prioritize. I’ll reveal the answer, but first some background about term sheets.
A term sheet outlines everyone’s intent for a deal. It is typically provided by the angel with help from their attorney. For this article I worked with angel investor Katherine O’Neill and attorneys, Ben Straughan, Partner, and Jim Carroll, Counsel, for the Perkins Coie Emerging Companies & Venture Capital practice. They also shared their insights in a recent Angel Capital Association webinar, The Key Points of Term Sheets.
A well written term sheet is critical because it leads to a great contract and creates investor-entrepreneur alignment needed for a positive relationship because it delivers the returns everyone wants, assuming the company is successful. O’Neill, executive director of Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network, underscores this point: “This is the time you have the greatest opportunity to really control the main factors that allow you to make a good exit.”
So what deal terms are most important to angel investors? Tapping their years of experience, Carroll and Straughan suggest five critical terms for a series seed preferred investment (otherwise known as a priced angel round):
Pricing: This represents the value of the company and helps determine how much of the company you will own. It is important to get the valuation of the company right in the beginning, which can be an art with startups and early-stage companies with few assets and short track records to build on.
Participation Rights: These define an angel’s right to invest in future funding rounds, often providing the angel with a better chance of a good return. “Angels should focus on participation rights,” Straughan said. “It allows you to double down by continuing your right to invest in future rounds.”
Board and Information Rights: These rights outline whether you (or someone from the investing organization) will be on the board of directors or be an observer at company board meetings. They also determine the information you will receive from the company and how often you will receive it. For example by explicitly asking for quarterly financial statements and annual budgets, everyone can keep their eye on the ball on the status of the business while ensuring the company doesn’t have onerous requirements (because these are documents that a company needs to produce anyway). Related to these, I like the idea of shareholders having the right to vote or at least have veto rights on key strategic issues such as selling or liquidating the company or developing entirely new lines of business.
Liquidation Preference: If the company is sold, these preferences define what preferred shareholders are paid e.g. X times the original purchase price before any other assets are paid common stockholders. 1X liquidation is normal for angels.
Redemption Rights: These rights can help angels to achieve liquidity by selling their shares back to the company if management wants to continue running the company but investors want out.
Although these five components provide an excellent guideline for what to prioritize, term sheets can quickly get more complex, and most include many other terms which are also important.
Most experts recommend that angels start with a standard term sheet to help simplify the process and to reduce legal fees. I’ve provided sample term sheet examples in this article and there are a wealth of other online resources. These are a few of my favorites:
Angel Resource Institute – Their term sheet resource center includes both example documents and helpful insights. They also offer workshops on understanding term sheets.
FundingPost Venture Capital Glossary – This is a glossary of financial terms for angels and entrepreneurs to understand.
NOTE CREDIT: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mariannehudson/2015/12/11/its-all-in-the-terms-what-to-prioritize-in-angel-term-sheets/2/
A term sheet outlines everyone’s intent for a deal. It is typically provided by the angel with help from their attorney. For this article I worked with angel investor Katherine O’Neill and attorneys, Ben Straughan, Partner, and Jim Carroll, Counsel, for the Perkins Coie Emerging Companies & Venture Capital practice. They also shared their insights in a recent Angel Capital Association webinar, The Key Points of Term Sheets.
A well written term sheet is critical because it leads to a great contract and creates investor-entrepreneur alignment needed for a positive relationship because it delivers the returns everyone wants, assuming the company is successful. O’Neill, executive director of Jumpstart New Jersey Angel Network, underscores this point: “This is the time you have the greatest opportunity to really control the main factors that allow you to make a good exit.”
So what deal terms are most important to angel investors? Tapping their years of experience, Carroll and Straughan suggest five critical terms for a series seed preferred investment (otherwise known as a priced angel round):
Pricing: This represents the value of the company and helps determine how much of the company you will own. It is important to get the valuation of the company right in the beginning, which can be an art with startups and early-stage companies with few assets and short track records to build on.
Participation Rights: These define an angel’s right to invest in future funding rounds, often providing the angel with a better chance of a good return. “Angels should focus on participation rights,” Straughan said. “It allows you to double down by continuing your right to invest in future rounds.”
Board and Information Rights: These rights outline whether you (or someone from the investing organization) will be on the board of directors or be an observer at company board meetings. They also determine the information you will receive from the company and how often you will receive it. For example by explicitly asking for quarterly financial statements and annual budgets, everyone can keep their eye on the ball on the status of the business while ensuring the company doesn’t have onerous requirements (because these are documents that a company needs to produce anyway). Related to these, I like the idea of shareholders having the right to vote or at least have veto rights on key strategic issues such as selling or liquidating the company or developing entirely new lines of business.
Liquidation Preference: If the company is sold, these preferences define what preferred shareholders are paid e.g. X times the original purchase price before any other assets are paid common stockholders. 1X liquidation is normal for angels.
Redemption Rights: These rights can help angels to achieve liquidity by selling their shares back to the company if management wants to continue running the company but investors want out.
Although these five components provide an excellent guideline for what to prioritize, term sheets can quickly get more complex, and most include many other terms which are also important.
Most experts recommend that angels start with a standard term sheet to help simplify the process and to reduce legal fees. I’ve provided sample term sheet examples in this article and there are a wealth of other online resources. These are a few of my favorites:
Angel Resource Institute – Their term sheet resource center includes both example documents and helpful insights. They also offer workshops on understanding term sheets.
FundingPost Venture Capital Glossary – This is a glossary of financial terms for angels and entrepreneurs to understand.
NOTE CREDIT: http://www.forbes.com/sites/mariannehudson/2015/12/11/its-all-in-the-terms-what-to-prioritize-in-angel-term-sheets/2/
The education of Brian Chesky
Brian Chesky is drawing intently on a napkin. We’re sitting in the President’s Room at Airbnb’s airy, ultra-chic headquarters in the SoMa neighborhood of San Francisco. Other meeting spaces in the historic building, which the company moved to in 2013, are designed to replicate an Airbnb rental in Fiji or the war room from the movie Dr. Strangelove. With its wood-paneled walls, leather club chairs, and a model of a ship on the coffee table, the President’s Room retains the feel of the original executive quarters from 1917, when the building was built to house a battery factory. After a moment of serious sketching, Chesky holds up the napkin to show me his picture: It’s a boat. And, it must be said, for a graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design it’s a rudimentary-looking vessel. But the quality of the drawing is not the point. I’ve just asked Chesky how his management style has evolved, and the boat is his answer.
“If you think about it, Airbnb is like a giant ship,” he says, holding up the napkin. “And as CEO I’m the captain of the ship. But I really have two jobs: The first job is, I have to worry about everything below the waterline; anything that can sink the ship.” He points to the scribbled line of waves that cuts the boat in half, and below that, two holes with water rushing in.
“Beyond that,” he continues, “I have to focus on two to three areas that I’m deeply passionate about—that aren’t below the waterline but that I focus on because I can add unique value, I’m truly passionate about them, and they can truly transform the company if they go well.” The three areas he’s picked: product, brand, and culture. “I’m pretty hands-on with those three,” he says. “And with the others I really try to empower leaders and get involved only when there are holes below the waterline.”
It’s a high-level, strategic way of thinking about management, something that sounds more out of the playbook of Jim Collins or Peter Drucker than a 33-year-old first-time CEO. And in fact there is an outside source for this bit of wisdom, but it’s not what you might expect. Chesky learned the boat theory from George Tenet, the director of the CIA from 1997 to 2004 and now a managing director at the investment bank Allen & Company. Chesky was introduced to Tenet a few years ago and asked to set up a meeting.
It may seem odd for Chesky, the CEO of the company that, along with ride-sharing giant Uber, has become the poster child for the so-called sharing economy, to seek advice from the man who signed off on the intelligence that led to the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq. But Tenet is just one of a long list of leaders Chesky has sought out since co-founding the home-rental website—some inside the box and some very far outside it. Others he’s reached out to for lessons include Berkshire Hathaway’s BRK.A -0.89% Warren Buffett and Disney DIS -2.46% CEO Bob Iger; a long list of tech luminaries that includes Apple’s APPL 0.00% Jony Ive, LinkedIn’s LNKD -0.64% Jeff Weiner, and Salesforce.com’s CRM -3.68% Marc Benioff; and a separate group he’s taken posthumous lessons from, including Steve Jobs, Walt Disney, George Bernard Shaw, and Dwight D. Eisenhower. “It’s kind of like the old Robert McNamara saying,” says Chesky, referencing a comment about nuclear weapons by the controversial 1960s U.S. defense secretary to explain his own voracious pursuit of management knowledge. “There’s no learning curve for people who are in war or in startups.”
It wasn’t so long ago that the preparation for running a company of that size came only one way: by working one’s way up through the ranks, demonstrating “leadership potential,” and then embarking on a years-long process of being moved through a series of CEO-in-waiting posts. But the current tech-industry climate has turned that thinking on its head. Young people with a single, powerful business idea are thrown into CEO positions by default and not by training, and it happens very, very quickly. And while no unicorn is without investors and other advisers offering plenty of opinions and advice, the CEO is largely on his own, steering the ship—and occasionally drawing it on a napkin.
Chesky, who in 2008 had never heard of an angel investor or read TechCrunch, knows this better than anyone. “It’s not natural for someone like myself to be at art school, to then be unemployed, and then five or six years later have this,” he says. “Nothing really prepares you for that.”
His solution, then, has been to hack leadership by going far and wide in search of best practices. So far, that approach seems to be working for Chesky, thanks in part to the fact that he has a temperament well-suited to the quest for mastery, as we’ll see. But the story of Chesky’s evolution as an executive also offers a window into the way the new economy has turned conventional CEO-ing upside down—and may offer a new playbook for leadership development.
Ask anyone who knows Chesky what he’s like, and he will say one of a few things: Intense. Focused. Really, really, really curious. As soon as we sit down to talk for this article—the first in-depth profile of Chesky himself, rather than the company—he starts quizzing me about the process. He’s surprised that he is actually the subject of an entire story. He wants to know how the day is going. I list the half-dozen executives I’ve already interviewed. “Wow, this feels like a 360-degree performance review,” he says. “The only difference is the whole world will read it.” He presses on: “What are the themes? Or do they come later?”
By now, the story of Airbnb’s origin is lore in Silicon Valley and beyond: In October 2007, Chesky and Joe Gebbia, two unemployed RISD graduates, were broke and staring at their rent due date. So they came up with the idea to pull some of Gebbia’s air mattresses out of the closet and sell sleeping space in their apartment to attendees of a sold-out design trade show. They called it the Air Bed and Breakfast. (The “continental breakfast” consisted of untoasted Pop-Tarts.) Three people bunked with them that weekend, and the idea got some attention on design blogs. A few months later their engineer friend Nathan Blecharczyk joined Chesky and Gebbia as the third co-founder, and in August 2008 the site debuted as Airbedandbreakfast.com, an online platform for people to rent out space in their homes. Chesky gravitated naturally to the role of leader, with Gebbia focused on design and Blecharczyk on technology.
Many experts and Silicon Valley luminaries were highly skeptical of the Airbnb concept at first. But the idea took hold, and the following spring the founders were accepted into the prestigious startup incubator Y Combinator, run by venture capitalist Paul Graham. They soon shortened the name to Airbnb and expanded from offering shared spaces to properties including entire homes and apartments, castles, boats, and tree houses. In November 2010 the trio got their first round of VC funding. Today Airbnb has roughly 2,000 employees operating out of 21 offices worldwide, and offers its service in 34,000 cities.
Ask Chesky what he didn’t know about management in the early days, and he barely knows where to start. “It’s kind of like, what did I know?” he says. But he had no choice but to plunge in; the company couldn’t wait for him. Chesky says he learned two ways: first by trial and error (“it’s the old adage about jumping off a cliff and assembling the airplane on the way down”), and second by teaching himself how to go deep on subjects fast—specifically, by using a process he calls “going to the source.”
Rather than trying to learn every single aspect of a particular topic, Chesky found that it was more efficient to spend his time researching and identifying the single best source in that area, then going straight to that person. “If you pick the right source, you can fast-forward,” he says. It’s an approach that has served him again and again.
Chesky and his co-founders’ first “sources” were their earliest advisers, tech entrepreneur Michael Seibel and Y Combinator’s Graham. Reading was also an early part of the regimen. For Chesky, a source may come in the form of a biography of a business hero such as Steve Jobs or Walt Disney. His primary book source on management technique is Andy Grove’s High Output Management. To learn the ins and outs of hospitality, he went to the Cornell Hospitality Quarterly, a scholarly journal published by the Cornell University School of Hotel Administration.
As the company became more prominent, so did Chesky’s sources. Soon came meetings with Facebook’s FB -3.24% Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s AMZN -3.37% Jeff Bezos, and eBay EBAY -2.12% CEO John Donahoe. He went to Bob Iger and Marc Benioff to ask how they push their executive teams to do more. From Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg he picked up tips about efficiency in scaling internationally.
A key aspect of Chesky’s sourcing theory is what he calls “synthesizing divergent ideas”—basically, going to unexpected sources for insight. To learn how to become an elite recruiter, for example, Chesky might skip talking to an HR exec and instead seek out a sports agent, whose business lives and dies by attracting talent.
Similarly, Chesky reached out to Tenet not for tips on global security, but for corporate culture: How do you create an open and transparent atmosphere when you’re in the business of secrets? From their conversation, he took away the importance of “walking the park,” Walt Disney’s theory of being a visible manager. Tenet told Chesky he would eat lunch in the cafeteria every day and sit at a different seat. Chesky says Tenet also taught him the importance of sending handwritten notes to employees. The former CIA chief told him that some of the most meaningful moments in his job were when he’d see a card he wrote an employee years ago still tacked on to his or her wall. And, of course, he gave Chesky the boat theory.
One of Chesky’s biggest source triumphs was his audience with Buffett. A little over a year ago, Chesky reached out and asked if he could travel to Omaha to have lunch, in part to talk about how Airbnb might help expand the number of rooms available in town during Berkshire’s annual meeting weekend. The discussion ended up lasting 4½ hours. Chesky’s biggest takeaway: the value of not getting caught up in the noise. “He’s literally in the center of Omaha,” Chesky says. “There’s no TVs anywhere. He spends all day reading. He takes maybe one meeting a day, and he thinks so deeply.” The experience made such an impact on Chesky that he went to the airport, and, afraid he would forget the conversation, immediately wrote a 3,600-word report and sent it to his team. For his part, Buffett says he sensed in Chesky a genuine passion for building his company: “I think he would be doing what he’s doing if he didn’t get paid a dime for it.” Buffett’s take on Airbnb? “I wish I’d thought of it.”
Communicating the various pieces of wisdom he picks up as he learns them is a key part of Chesky’s management style. Earlier this year he started a “Sunday night series,” a weekly all-company email summarizing a principle or lesson he’d learned. A recent three-part series focused on—fittingly—how to learn.
Chesky has been obsessive about his pursuits since childhood. “From a very young age, you could see that he didn’t just dabble in something,” says his mother, Deb Chesky. Brian grew up in Niskayuna, N.Y., outside Albany, the son of two social workers. (His sister Allison, five years his junior, is a fashion editor at Real Simple, which is owned by Fortune’s parent, Time Inc.) Chesky’s first passion was hockey. After he got a full set of gear for Christmas one year, he insisted on sleeping in it—pads, skates, stick, and helmet. Later a hobby of drawing and redesigning Nike sneakers grew into a passion for art. He would disappear to the local museum for hours to draw replicas of the paintings.
His natural leadership potential surfaced at RISD, where he served as the captain of the hockey team and was eventually selected to be the commencement speaker at his graduation. Chesky threw himself into the task, studying every commencement speech he could find; to make the experience less intimidating, the night before his address he stood at the podium and watched as the staff set up 6,000 chairs one by one. “Who does that?” muses Deb Chesky.
After graduation, Chesky’s friend and classmate Gebbia told him that he had a premonition they were going to launch a business together. “I said, ‘Before you get on the plane, there’s something I need to tell you,’ ” says Gebbia. “ ‘We’re going to start a company one day, and they’re going to write a book about it.’ ” Chesky first moved to L.A. to become an industrial designer, but soon decided to join Gebbia in San Francisco. Eventually, they ran short of rent money, and inspiration struck.
The biggest leadership lesson for Chesky so far came from the company’s most significant crisis to date. It started when a San Francisco host’s home was burglarized and ransacked by renters in June 2011. The company initially put forth a lackluster response from Chesky, but the host—a woman known as “EJ”—rebutted in a blog post his claims that the company had done everything it could to help her. Then Airbnb went silent, and the story got louder.
Inside Airbnb everyone had a different opinion on how to handle it. Some argued that taking responsibility would just open the door to more complaints; others said to put the truth out there; still others said the company should stay totally quiet. The situation dragged on for weeks. “I finally had this really dark moment and I got to the point where I wouldn’t say I stopped caring, but my priorities completely changed,” says Chesky. “And I basically said I should stop managing for the outcome and just manage to the principle.” He needed to apologize, Chesky felt, even if it might hurt the company.
Chesky composed a strongly worded letter accepting responsibility. “Over the last four weeks, we have really screwed things up,” he wrote. He not only said he was sorry but also announced that the company would be implementing a $50,000 guarantee. “All of this was against advice,” Chesky says. “People were like, ‘We need to discuss this, we need to do testing,’ and I said, ‘No, we’re doing this.’ ” He did have a key assist from one major source. Marc Andreessen, co-founder of VC firm Andreessen Horowitz and an investor in Airbnb, added a zero to the amount of the guarantee, which Chesky had first set at $5,000.
Chesky’s primary takeaway from the experience was to stop making decisions by consensus. “A consensus decision in a moment of crisis is very often going to be the middle of the road, and they’re usually the worst decisions,” he says. “Usually in a crisis you have to go left or right.”
For his team, it was a defining moment in their confidence in him as a leader. “That’s when I really saw what Brian was made of,” says Joe Zadeh, head of product management. “That was the turning point where I had 100% confidence in this company’s leadership and was ready to take any challenge the world threw at us.”
Despite its rapid growth, Airbnb has endured plenty of challenges. The service runs afoul of local laws and regulations in many cities in which it operates. In its hometown of San Francisco, until recently, all short-term residential rentals without a permit were banned. Landlords, co-op boards, and urban neighbors are often hostile.
New York, which passed a bill in 2010 saying that owners or tenants can’t legally rent their apartment out for less than 30 days unless they’re living in the same space, has been a particularly tough battleground. The attacks on Airbnb got so bad in 2013 that Chesky went on a charm tour, meeting with dozens of politicians, hoteliers, real estate moguls, and influential members of the press. The tenor of the conversation in New York changed after the tour, but the city hasn’t budged on the law. Other markets, though, have been opening up: A new law in San Francisco legalizing short-term rentals went into effect in February. Nashville, Philadelphia, and San Jose have announced similar legislation, as have London and France. “I think we’re moving away from the divisive era into the more mainstream era,” Chesky says.
Airbnb is often seen as a competitor to the major hotel chains. Chesky challenges that view and insists that hotels have continued to thrive even as Airbnb has grown. He says that these days Airbnb has a “pretty healthy relationship” with the likes of Marriott, Hilton HLT -1.31% , and Starwood HOT -1.41% . In 2013, Chesky recruited Chip Conley, founder of the Joie de Vivre hotel chain and a respected figure in the industry, to focus on hospitality. Conley says executives from four of the six biggest hotel chains have come to the Airbnb headquarters for a day of “immersion.”
But the more Airbnb grows, the more it has the capacity to take business from hotels. Last year the company launched Instant Book, a new category of listings that don’t require approval from the host and allow for immediate, hotel-like booking. Now Airbnb is making a push into business travel, including a partnership with travel management company Concur that has seen Airbnb land some 150 corporate accounts so far. It’s likely that the mainstream era will be just as competitive as the one Airbnb is leaving behind.
It’s a Wednesday in early February, and Chesky is standing on a stage at Pier 48 in San Francisco. This is One Airbnb, the company’s weeklong annual all-hands confab, and more than 1,800 employees are packed into the venue for Chesky’s keynote address. He talks about the importance of being “crazy”—of not “editing your imagination,” not listening to the voices that say something’s not possible. Safety questions, legal challenges, competitors—none of those things can destroy Airbnb. “The thing that will destroy Airbnb,” he says to thunderous applause, “is if we stop being crazy.”
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Chesky is particularly obsessive when it comes to culture. In 2012, he asked another key source—the iconoclastic investor Peter Thiel—for the best advice he could offer. Thiel’s immediate answer: “Don’t fuck up the culture.” Thiel said it was almost inevitable that the culture would go awry once a company reached a certain size. So Chesky doubled down on his focus. “If you break the culture, you break the machine that creates your products,” he wrote shortly thereafter in a missive to employees. He welcomes new hires each week with an hour-long Q&A session in which he encourages them to be bold and to be “crazy.” His passion for his product occasionally verges on evangelism, such as when he tells employees they are there to “design the future world we want to live in.”
After years of his own executive education, Chesky has collected a cabinet full of philosophies, opinions, truisms—and a healthy dose of jargon. Chesky talks a lot about “up-leveling,” or pushing himself and others to think bigger. That’s not to be confused with “skip-leveling”—the process of talking to people at all levels of the organization. Chesky is also fond of discussing “step changes,” or single moves that have a great effect.
But Chesky is quick to acknowledge that he still has weak points. He takes too long to hire executives, he says, and also too long to acknowledge when things aren’t working out. Another skill he’s still perfecting: the art of listening. Chesky says that when he was 6 years old his parents had his hearing tested. “They thought I had a hearing problem,” he says. “Apparently I just had a listening problem.” Chesky is working on it, but says that he has so much energy and is so “action-oriented” that it can appear that he isn’t listening when he is. Investor Graham says Chesky’s approach may not be out of the Harvard Business School playbook, but it’s effective. “He’s sort of missing all the stuff they teach at HBS,” says Graham. “But he’s the kind of leader who leads people to do things that he himself believes in.”
In Andreessen’s view, Chesky’s biggest challenge is the sheer amount of information he has to process while growing such a fast-moving organization. “Some people lean into that,” says Andreessen. “Brian loves it. One of the things that makes him distinctive is he’s up for the challenge.” Andreessen says he views him as “one of the best new CEOs since Mark Zuckerberg.”
This has been something of a breakout year for Chesky. In April, he was on the Time 100, and his presence at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner (seated at Fortune’s table) made headlines as a symbol of Silicon Valley’s growing presence in Washington. In May, President Obama appointed Chesky a presidential ambassador for global entrepreneurship.
Chesky and girlfriend Elissa Patel at the Time 100 in April.
Photograph by Taylor Hill—Getty Images
Even as his profile rises, however, Chesky has been working on a new project: finding balance. He has learned that if he is going to stay in his job for the long run, he must develop techniques to “refill the reservoir.” The key source in that effort is Elissa Patel, his girlfriend of two years (they met on Tinder), who recently left photo app Frontback to start her own venture. They do yoga together every Thursday morning. And since Chesky’s apartment is still listed on Airbnb—yes, you can Airbnb the CEO’s pad—the occasional guest joins in. He and Elissa often do “staycations,” booking an Airbnb in a different neighborhood just to experience it.
Looking to the future, Chesky says that not a single one of Airbnb’s investors has pressured him to take the company public anytime soon. But he’s well aware of the expectation that an IPO will happen eventually. And he does offer a little hint on timing. “If we decided we wanted to go public, we’d want to give ourselves a couple years to really prepare, to have that runway,” he explains. “I always thought of it as a two-year project. And we won’t start thinking of that for at least a year, and maybe two years.”
That should give him plenty of time to get his sources lined up.
NOTE CREDIT: http://fortune.com/brian-chesky-airbnb/
viernes, 11 de diciembre de 2015
5 Really Good Reasons Why You Should Start a Business in 2016
That advice comes from the personal finance site GOBankingRates. The site's editors asked best-selling author and career coach Josh Felber for his best finance tips for the coming year. His top piece of advice was that "2016 is the year to break free from mediocrity and society's 'norms.' Now is the time to quit your 9-to-5 job and become an entrepreneur."
Why now? Here are some of the best reasons. You can see Felber's full reasoning here.
1. You'll have an easier time getting a small-business loan.
Approval rates for small-business loans are at their highest levels in about five years. Wells Fargo, for instance, lent more than $22 billion to small businesses between January 2014 and March 2015. In particular, online lending to small businesses is expected to increase in 2016.
2. There's never been a better time for crowdfunding.
With new SEC rules allowing for crowdfunded companies to repay contributions with equity (as opposed to just goods and services), seeking funds through Kickstarter, Indiegogo, or any of the many other crowdfunding sites is an even more appealing option than it used to be. Admittedly, the field of companies seeking funds is, well, crowded. But if you have a good product or service, you can learn how to make it stand out.3. Then there's VC funding.
It seems like in 2015, everyone was fretting about the startup funding bubble and when it might burst. Well, it hasn't burst for the moment. In case you missed it, "bubble" is another way of saying that it's easier for startup companies to get angel and venture capital funding than it has been in many years.If you're thinking of starting the kind of innovation-driven, rapid-growth company that makes sense for VC funding, now is a great time, and the sooner the better. Even if you don't like the exit strategy requirement that you eventually either sell to another company or go public, there are now some funders who are willing to take a long-term stake in the companies they fund, meaning those companies can stay independent and private indefinitely. If you haven't looked at your venture funding options in a while, you should.
4. Small business is the new black.
We're in the middle of an era where small businesses are valued over large ones in politics, popular culture, and in the public imagination. In a recent survey, customers said they favored small businesses because they liked supporting the local economy and getting more personalized service than is possible with a large corporation. Not only that, about 60 percent said they would actually pay more to buy from a small business. That's a great market opportunity if ever there was one.5. You'll be happier.
Or at least statistics suggest you will be. Recent research finds a significantly higher number of self-employed people get positive self-worth from their jobs than those who work for someone else. As GOBankingRates notes, research shows even entrepreneurs with startups are happier than those with jobs, and once their entrepreneurial companies become established, they're happier still. If you're still working for someone else, it's time you found out whether working for yourself would give you as much pleasure as it does for other entrepreneurs.6. There will never be a better time.
Starting a business is something like having a child: If you wait for the perfect moment, you'll wind up waiting forever. Too many people fall deep into the habit of working for someone else, and the longer you do it, the harder that habit is to break, Felber says.NOTE CREDIT: http://www.inc.com/minda-zetlin/5-really-good-reasons-why-you-should-start-a-business-in-2016-.html?cid=sf01001&sr_share=twitter
jueves, 10 de diciembre de 2015
10 Promising Franchises for Ambitious Entrepreneurs
There are multiple ways people become millionaires. Some launch a successful startup. Others are a whiz with stocks. But, one of the most common yet overlooked ways is to become a franchise owner.
If you’re not sure what a franchise is here is a pretty good explanation: “a franchisee pays an initial fee and ongoing royalties to a franchisor; in return, the franchisee gains the use of a trademark, ongoing support from the franchisor, and the right to use the franchisor’s system of doing business and sell its products or services.”
I’ve been in the startup world for the past eight years, slaving away at my different startups. It’s hard because you never know if money will start coming in the door after all your hard efforts. I’ve had my ups and downs along the way. The main benefit of becoming a franchise owner is that you can launch a proven, brand-name business without starting from scratch. Imagine that! The market research, brand, product, and built-in customer base is already there for you. This isn’t saying you can’t fail, but the odds are a lot more in your favor.
If that has your attention, you should look into in investing in the following 10 franchises that aren’t only quality brands, but also guaranteed to make you a millionaire in 5 years.
1. Anytime Fitness
Founded in 2001, the 24-hour fitness club quickly began franchising in 2002. Today, Anytime Fitness has approximately 2,869 global locations. This recession-proof franchise has been rapidly growing. Entrepreneur has named it one of the top 20 franchises for the last five years. Total Investment will range $62.9K – $417.9K. Credibly states that average annual sales are between $254,700-$585,800.
2. Mosquito Squad
Pest control doesn’t always seem like sexiest of franchises. But it’s an opportunity to tap into a necessary market at a relatively low cost with a total investment is between $15,850 – $69,625. Mosquito Squad is looking to expand globally and has a 66.8 percent average gross profit margin.
3. Jimmy John’s
If you’re looking to get involved in the sandwich part of the food industry, you may may be tempted to open a Subway franchise. Jimmy John’s, which opened in 1983, is a sounder option. For starters, the quality of the gourmet sandwiches beats Subway everyday. Also, the initial investment of between $323K – $544K is fairly reasonable for such a large brand. Finally, according to Jimmy John’s, the franchise has an average annual gross sales of $1,367,810 and an average net profit from operations of $270,355 – 299,015.
4. Unishippers
This Salt Lake City-based company creates custom shipping and logistics solutions for businesses. The cost to own an Unishippers franchise is an affordable $61,000, among the cheapest franchise costs. The company is looking to franchise across the country. With annual revenue of over $425 million, there is a real possibility to become a millionaire here.
5. BrightStar
Home healthcare is an appealing industry when you consider that 10,000 people turn 65 each day. By 2030, one person in five will be 65 or older. BrightStar is a home care/senior care franchise opportunity for the investment level $0-150,000. BrightStar claims that the average franchise location revenues for 2014 were $1,421,257.
6. Mellow Mushroom
Americans love pizza, which is why Pizza Hut is one of the most popular franchise decisions. However, Mellow Mushroom is a little-known pizza shop that’s full of soul. The pizzeria first opened in 1974. The total investment to open and operate this franchise ranges from $926,500 to $3.1 million, but there is a chance that you can exceed more than $3 million in sales.
7. Weed Man
Weed Man is the leading franchised lawn care provider in North America – although it’s only been in the States since 1995. The company has been operational since 1970 and began offering franchise opportunities in 1976. Weed Man USA currently has 445 territories in the US with more than $140 million in system sales. Lawn care providers typically have repeat customers, making this an appealing and overlooked franchise. If located in the top 25 percent of US locations, average gross could be more than $1 million per year. Total investment to get started is $68.5K – $85.5K.
8. Supercuts
After opening its first shop in California in 1975, Supercuts now has nearly 2,500 locations in the US, Canada and UK. Total investment for a franchise is between $113.9K – $233.8K with annual average revenue at approximately $262,000. Supercuts was selected as the fifth best franchise in Entrepreneur’s 2015 Top Franchise 500.
9. MaidPro
Established in Boston in 1991, MaidPro is one of the best franchises for an initial investment under $150,000. With more 150 locations across the US and Canada, the housecleaning service has relatively low royalty costs and recurring customers which can lead you on your way to becoming a millionaire.
10. Camp Bow Wow
Founded in 2000, Camp Bow Wow provides grooming, training, daycare and boarding for your furry, four-legged family member. The company has since grown to 180 franchises locations that are home to more than 2.7 million dog visits per year! The total investment for Camp Bow Wow can be pricey, it’s between $356.6K – $1M, but with Americans spending over $61 billion on their pets, there’s definitely a chance to make a hefty profit.
NOTE CREDIT: http://fortune.com/2015/12/08/promising-franchises/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE
Where does big data stop and big brother start?
An interesting new book I have come across details the extent that Russian authorities go to in cracking down on online dissent. It also touches on many of the issues that frequently come up when we discuss the “dark side” of big data.According to Andrei Soldatov and Irina Borogan’s book, The Red Web, the methods used by the Russian police and Federal Protective Service (FSB) make the surveillance of the U.S. National Security Agency and the UK’s Government Communications Headquarters look friendly by comparison.
The FSB is often referred to as the successor organization to the Soviet-era KGB, and Soldatov and Borogan’s book explains that many of FSB techniques and strategies have evolved from those developed by its notorious predecessor.
According to the authors, it is just one of a list of organizations – including the tax authorities, border and customs services, and branches of the military – that have the right to eavesdrop on the conversation of any Russian citizen at any time, without having to give an explanation or justification for their actions.
Soldatov and Borogan claim that, in recent years, information gathered in this way has been used to prosecute and imprison countless political and social activists, sometimes following trials held behind closed doors for reasons of “state security.”
This hits at the heart of one of the foremost concerns about how data will be used in the future. With the rate that data collection and analytic technologies are evolving and expanding, it isn’t too big a stretch of the imagination to say that it soon will be possible to know anything about anyone, at any time. The question is, can anyone be trusted with this sort of power – particularly those who can limit our freedoms by jailing or sometimes even killing us if they perceive us to be acting against their interests?
In the West, we may feel relatively comfortable that we have legal frameworks in place that protect our human rights – we have the right for a trial in public, before a jury of peers, for example. But are these rights as solid as they seem? In the last decade, the UK has enacted legislation that allows those charged under the terrorism act effectively to be tried in secret.
On top of that, the extent to which our governments are willing to spy on us has been laid bare by the revelations of Edward Snowden. Snowden, ironically, has chosen Russia to make his home in as he tries to evade prosecution in the United States for what many people believe were whistleblowing acts in the public interest, rather than crimes.
In The Red Web, the authors outline how in 1995, Russian authorities passed a law allowing telecommunications to be monitored. The following year saw the SORM system (an acronym for the system’s Russian name, which translates to “System for Operative Investigative Activities”) become operational. The system enabled the state to tap telephone conversations, secretly and at will.
The following years saw the rapid rise in popularity of the Internet as a means of public communication, and SORM-2 was deployed in 1998 to allow surveillance of this emerging technology.
In 2000, surveillance laws were updated to state that authorities no longer needed to provide an explanation to ISP and telecom companies before demanding personal data. Also, the number of government branches that could access the data was expanded from just the FSB to include police, tax authorities, border and immigration services, military branches, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs.
The system was given its latest major update in 2014, when it became SORM-3. This update was created specifically to give the system the ability to monitor social media. Further legislative changes also came into force, obliging operators of those services to allow their users’ activity to be monitored.
Soldatov and Borogan’s book goes into detail about the extent to which Putin’s regime, while publicly denouncing the Internet as a “CIA project,” is adept at manipulating it for its own ends. Paid trolls are used to plaster pro-Putin propaganda on the websites and social media of western news outlets, and bloggers with over 3,000 subscribers are forced to register with the government so their views can be monitored.
It is certainly an eye-opening read, and I would recommend it to anyone who is interested in the way digital technology and the big data we are endlessly generating could be used to restrict our civil rights. This certainly should be cause for concern considering the vast amounts of data that will be collected soon.
Take cars for example. By 2020, over a quarter of a billion vehicles will be connected to the Internet. Many will come fitted with sensors that record absolutely everything that is going on around them – both as video and as structured digital data using radar-like technology to build up a 3D model of their surroundings. Additionally, there’s facial recognition technology. It doesn’t seem too paranoid, to me, to assume that one day a government (or, indeed, a very large commercial organization) will be able to piece this data together and determine exactly where anyone is, at any point in time.
In the light of Snowden’s revelations, concerns have been raised from both the political left and right that government monitoring of citizens in the west, too, goes far beyond what anyone has ever signed up for.
Our increasingly digital and connected world undoubtedly brings many benefits – but there are pitfalls that we must be vigilant about, too. As we have seen in both the United States and Europe, governments are willing and able to deceive us about the extent of their surveillance. I believe that we need a much more comprehensive discussion about where big data stops and big brother starts.
Bernard Marr is a bestselling author, keynote speaker, strategic performance consultant, and analytics, KPI, and big data guru. He helps companies to better manage, measure, report, and analyze performance. His leading-edge work with major companies, organizations, and governments across the globe makes him an acclaimed and award-winning keynote speaker, researcher, consultant, and teacher.
NOTE CREDIT: http://data-informed.com/where-does-big-data-stop-and-big-brother-start/
What Every Business Can Learn From AirBnb
MPW Insider is an online community where the biggest names in business and beyond answer timely career and leadership questions. Today’s answer for: What’s your New Year’s resolution? is written by Kathy Bloomgarden, CEO of Ruder Finn.
As we close the chapter on a great 2015, I’m focused on continuing to build an even more dynamic 2016. As a leader, to me this means getting ahead of market trends and pushing myself and my employees to pursue new ideas. And perhaps more importantly, building the right culture that will allow your business to achieve its goals. This past year I learned a lot from listening to the startup community and multinational leaders, which have shaped my resolutions:
Look ahead
A new year is a good time to reflect on the challenges, explore opportunities, and restrategize. Working closely with leaders of the tech world has taught me to always keep an eye on where the market is headed and move forward with urgency. Business models are changing in just about every industry, so we can’t afford to be stuck in past business models that are no longer effective. We can’t be afraid to be the first to stick our neck out and try something new; it’s often in those breakthrough moments that true innovation is born.
Live the AirBnB way
I attended the Fortune Global Forum this year and sat in on a discussion with AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky. He discussed how being a little “crazy” is important to AirBnB’s culture. As Albert Einstein used to say, “Why is it that I get all my best ideas while shaving?” Creativity can spark at any moment; it’s important to keep a hold on those great ideas that come on a morning run, walking through the park, or a long plane ride. Stepping away from your traditional work environment can do great things for your imagination and creativity. Find ways to be bold in your thinking and allow yourself to be inspired in unexpected places.
Foster a community built on passion
When I look to 2016, I strongly believe that we’re at an incredible inflection point in our business environment where disruption and new technologies are allowing us to re-think everything. We’re breaking down “normal” and fostering an environment in which truly anything is possible. I want to focus my leadership team on continuing to foster a culture of passion and breakthrough creativity, In 2016, let’s work to create the kind of future we all want to live in.
As we close the chapter on a great 2015, I’m focused on continuing to build an even more dynamic 2016. As a leader, to me this means getting ahead of market trends and pushing myself and my employees to pursue new ideas. And perhaps more importantly, building the right culture that will allow your business to achieve its goals. This past year I learned a lot from listening to the startup community and multinational leaders, which have shaped my resolutions:
Look ahead
A new year is a good time to reflect on the challenges, explore opportunities, and restrategize. Working closely with leaders of the tech world has taught me to always keep an eye on where the market is headed and move forward with urgency. Business models are changing in just about every industry, so we can’t afford to be stuck in past business models that are no longer effective. We can’t be afraid to be the first to stick our neck out and try something new; it’s often in those breakthrough moments that true innovation is born.
Live the AirBnB way
I attended the Fortune Global Forum this year and sat in on a discussion with AirBnB CEO Brian Chesky. He discussed how being a little “crazy” is important to AirBnB’s culture. As Albert Einstein used to say, “Why is it that I get all my best ideas while shaving?” Creativity can spark at any moment; it’s important to keep a hold on those great ideas that come on a morning run, walking through the park, or a long plane ride. Stepping away from your traditional work environment can do great things for your imagination and creativity. Find ways to be bold in your thinking and allow yourself to be inspired in unexpected places.
Foster a community built on passion
When I look to 2016, I strongly believe that we’re at an incredible inflection point in our business environment where disruption and new technologies are allowing us to re-think everything. We’re breaking down “normal” and fostering an environment in which truly anything is possible. I want to focus my leadership team on continuing to foster a culture of passion and breakthrough creativity, In 2016, let’s work to create the kind of future we all want to live in.
NOTE CREDIT: http://fortune.com/2015/12/09/business-learn-airbnb/?xid=soc_socialflow_twitter_FORTUNE
miércoles, 9 de diciembre de 2015
Se eligieron los ganadores de Naves Federal
El Centro de Entrepreneurship del IAE Business School organizó #IAEmprende.
La edición de Naves Mendoza es organizada por el área de Responsabilidad Social Corporativa de Banco Supervielle dentro de su eje Educación, junto con el Centro de Entrepreneurship IAE Universidad Austral y el apoyo de universidades, Gobierno y distintas instituciones referentes de la provincia. Naves permite a los emprendedores locales conocer otros escenarios y oportunidades, analizar sus proyectos y mejorarlos, generando oportunidades de desarrollo emprendedor en la provincia y posicionando al banco como un promotor del desarrollo local.
En la edición de Naves Mendoza 2015 participaron 15 instituciones convocadas por el banco: Universidad Católica Argentina, Universidad Champagnat, Instituto Tecnológico Universitario, Universidad Juan Agustín Maza, Universidad Aconcagua, Universidad de Mendoza, Cuyo Aval, Incubadora Municipalidad de Godoy Cruz, Incubadora Municipalidad de Maipú, Dirección de Pymes Gobierno de Mendoza, Agencia de inversiones – Gobierno de Mendoza, Federación Económica de Mendoza, Asociación de Diseñadores de Mendoza, Programa Incubadora Universidad Nacional de Cuyo y la Universidad Tecnológica Nacional. La edición Mendoza se desarrolló durante los meses de agosto a octubre con la participación de 180 emprendedores con 70 proyectos, y finalizó con la selección de los tres mejores proyectos para representar a la provincia en Naves Federal.
Naves Federal
En Naves 2015 participaron 250 proyectos a nivel federal y 14 llegaron a la final. En esta edición, los finalistas surgieron de las provincias de Buenos Aires, Salta, Misiones, Tucumán, Córdoba, Santa Fe y Mendoza. A través de seminarios y mentorías, Naves acompaña a los emprendedores para que se entrenen en la habilidad de generar y revisar sistemáticamente el modelo de negocios. El proceso de Naves los relaciona con otros emprendedores y actores del ecosistema emprendedor, brindando las herramientas clave para el éxito de sus emprendimientos.
En el JWEF 2015 hubo 500 participantes y 15 proyectos fueron seleccionados para pasar por el proceso de InnovAction, un programa diseñado para entrenar la capacidad de transformar las ideas en proyectos concretos. Para ello, se centra en dos grupos de habilidades fundamentales: autoconocimiento (liderazgo y trabajo en equipo) y el proceso de diseño centrado en las personas. Durante estos meses se acompañó a los proyectos con mentores y diferentes cursos presenciales y online.
Luego de las presentaciones de Naves y JWEF se llevó a cabo un panel con diferentes emprendedores que pasaron por el programa durante estos 16 años, jueces de la competencia, participantes de JWEF que llegaron a la final de Naves y diferentes actores del ecosistema emprendedor. Ignacio Peña también estuvo presente y disertó sobre “El tsunami de la innovación”. Se cerró el día con un show de Improcrash y un after en el Business Center del Parque Austral.
Entre los ganadores Naves se destacó el proyecto "Biosano", presentado por el equipo de emprendedores mendocinos que lograron el primer puesto en la categoría “Empresa naciente el proyecto”. Biosano busca soluciones ambientalmente compatibles. Es por ello que ha desarrollado un polímero natural biodegradable con gran poder absorbente y floculante, llevando el agua que se desprende de los lodos a Ph neutro, siendo biocompatible con la flora y la fauna. Es un producto 100 % biodegradable, de alta eficiencia, que representa un ahorro promedio del 30 % en costos de operación y mano de obra en la industria petrolera.
Los emprendedores integrantes del proyecto ganador son:
- Mgter. Martín Benito, Master of Science en "eBusiness and ICT for Management" Politécnico di Torino, Italia. Licenciado en Economía, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo (UNC).
- TSP. Cristian Marlia, estudiante avanzado de Ingeniería Química. Técnico Superior en Procesos, Técnico químico industrial, Técnico en petróleos.
- TSP. Matías Villafañe, estudiante avanzado de Ingeniería Química. Técnico Químico Universitario. Ayudante Becario de la Cátedra de Fenómenos de Transporte.
NOTE CREDIT: http://www.losandes.com.ar/article/se-eligieron-los-ganadores-de-naves-federal
HOW TO REINVENT YOURSELF WITH AN ENTREPRENEURIAL MINDSET
Like it or not the modern world forces us to constantly reinvent ourselves. And the reinvention process requires and entreprenuerial mindset.
Somewhere along the way, people became convinced that stasis is safer than movement. Consistency feels comfortable; volatility is frightening. Consciously or not, we attempt to protect ourselves against life’s volatility by cultivating routine in our lives.
But, in this ever-changing world, we are constantly forced to reinvent ourselves.
And this reinvention process by very nature requires an entrepreneurial mindset.
In many ways, entrepreneurship is about where we place the responsibility for our experience. Although it’s hubris to think that you has complete control of your experience, it’s martyrdom to think that you have none. An entrepreneur is someone deeply engaged in his or her experience of life and willing to do the daily work of transforming it.
The entrepreneur is idealist and pragmatic, sensitive to the world she wishes to see, and conscious of the world as it is. The entrepreneur’s work, then, lies in connecting the two.
Constant reinvention requires:
1.Driving long-term vision
2.Creating platforms for growth
3.Fostering synergistic ecosystems
A sense of purpose takes vision
Vision is what we’re to do with the time that we have. If you look at the central business theses of a few leading companies, we can see that they prioritize not only revenue—though surely that’s essential—but also the purpose of the work that they do. And that purpose is critical to staying a long-term course.
Time is the most scarce resource. When we realize not as an intellectual construct but as an emotional conviction that our time here is finite, we will act purposefully.
Finding the Platforms That Are Already There
If vision is an expression of the soul of a person, platform is its body. We often call these "core competencies," which tend to grow organically. Whether an organization (or an individual) recognizes it in themselves, these competencies are platforms, or assets with business applications.
Platform generation is taking assets that have already been created and finding new ways to use them.
But they can also be tangible things—automobile companies will use the same engine in a range of cars, and, at times, provide engines for other manufacturers, bringing in more capital from a preexisting product. Similarly, if we are going to sustainably grow our organizations, we must reach limbs out into new markets.
In understanding platforms, we appreciate the wealth of possible intersections between our organizations, the world and ourselves.
Fostering Sustainable Ecosystems
James F. Moore was the first to apply the term ecosystem to a business context. He wrote that a business ecosystem was "an economic community supported by a foundation of interacting organizations and individuals." These ecosystems, he wrote, encourage companies to coevolve their capabilities. This comes in several flavors.
Sometimes an ecosystem can sprout up around a product, like the range of cases, headphones and other paraphernalia that surround the mobile devices. As well, a company can sprout whole economic worlds, as was the case of the App Store—and in that case, the App Store itself was a new platform for Apple. Amazon also sprouted ecosystems from new business platforms: Marketplace, from which third party vendors—who in an earlier age would be considered competitors—can offer their wares on Amazon, creating an ecosystem in and of itself.
In a very similar sense, ecosystem thinking has become a cornerstone of web publishing—the broad swathe of unpaid contributors creating content for the Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and other publishing platforms do so in exchange for growing their own individual readership and brand.
Why are ecosystems—and understanding them—crucial to sustainable value creation?
They are the structure that surrounds and supports our businesses. They spread stakeholdership out from the business and into society.
Taken together, constant reinvention process is a combination of inner and outer awareness. We need to know what our timescale is for what we're doing; we need to know how the competencies we've built can extend in new directions; and we need to attend to how our business fits into the larger world. When we do all three, we can be confident, committed and flexible in the value that we create repeatedly.
The Emperor Has No Clothes: Socrates Deconstructs Singularity University
Singularity University is not about the singularity and is not even a university. It is not about abundance and is not an exponential organization.
Then what is Singularity University about?!
Those are the claims I made and the questions I asked, and tried to address, during my recent presentation at a local meetup organized by Singularity University in the Netherlands. Check it out and judge for yourself.
Update: About a day and a half after this was originally published, I got a call from SU President Rob Nail and was told I made some good points as well as some bad ones, without specifying which ones are which. We agreed to begin a process where I get enlightened about my mistakes. I am always happy to do that. It may take some time but stay tuned for more. Until I see the evidence, however, my argument stands as is.
Then what is Singularity University about?!
Those are the claims I made and the questions I asked, and tried to address, during my recent presentation at a local meetup organized by Singularity University in the Netherlands. Check it out and judge for yourself.
Update: About a day and a half after this was originally published, I got a call from SU President Rob Nail and was told I made some good points as well as some bad ones, without specifying which ones are which. We agreed to begin a process where I get enlightened about my mistakes. I am always happy to do that. It may take some time but stay tuned for more. Until I see the evidence, however, my argument stands as is.
I will slice SU in a variety of ways. Some good and some bad. Some large and some small. Some will make sense and some may not. And some my be just totally wrong. In fact, I very much hope that they are totally wrong.
I will attempt to deconstruct Singularity University’s name, business model, strategic context, mission statement and accomplishments, organizational structure and their global plan.
Singularity University’s Business Model in 5 words:
Create scarcity to sell abundance
…And charge an arm and a leg for it…
Some may call this a paradox. Others can call this hypocrisy. So it is up to you really what you want to call it.
Let me explain further and to do that I need the 3 most seminal books related to Singularity University: the Singularity is Near, Abundance and Exponential Organizations. [4th SU book everyone should read is Future Crimes]
Let’s see how SU fits within the space that each of those postulates:
OK, the Singularity is Near but clearly not near enough for its own titular organization to be actually about the singularity. So, again, as Salim Ismail often says SU is not about the singularity. The question is why is it not?! What is more important than that?! If an organization where Ray Kurzweil is a chancellor, where students get a free copy of The Singularity is Near, and which has the word singularity in its name, is not really about the singularity then what organization ought to be about the singularity? And why name it Singularity in the first place? That’s like saying that chocolate fudge is not about the chocolate?
But let’s not forget. Singularity University is neither about the singularity nor a university. So that’s like saying chocolate fudge is neither about the chocolate nor about the fudge. How much sense does this make to you? I mean what is it about for gods sake?! And if it really is not about the chocolate, and not about the fudge, then, why are we calling it chocolate fudge in the first place?!
OK, enough about the singularity you may say. If it is not about the singularity, it must be about abundance, right?
Remember the business model: Create Scarcity to Sell Abundance
Well, let me give 2 examples: talk about just the most recent 2 examples – David Roberts’ OCE Discovery presentation and the most recent phone call about starting SU chapters in Canada and elsewhere…
In short, in the birthplace of abundance, scarcity rules. And it is even worse because it is not the real natural scarcity one may find but it is one that is manufactured on purpose. We have those lecture videos in abundance. We have keynotes in abundance and as Chiara and the other girl admitted we have all kinds and lots of other SU videos. But not for distribution. Now, to me that sounds more like one of the big music labels from 15 years ago. Or some of the 100-year-old book publishers. But it surely doesn’t sound like the abundance mindset of an exponential organization.
So keep in mind the business model I said: Create Scarcity to Sell Abundance
But the point here is that, despite Peter Diamandis‘ brilliant book on Abundance, Singularity University clearly does not take it seriously because it has both a scarcity mindset AND a scarcity business model.
Let’s talk about the 3rd seminal book that I believe everyone must read – Exponential Organizations:
The question is simple – is Singularity University an exponential organization?
Well, let me answer it this way: To this day I have not met one faculty member or GSP student of any year who has told me that they thought SU is an ExO. In fact, in my recent interview with Salim even he said that Singularity University is not.
So the question is how long can you sell others on the idea of ExO’s if you are clearly not one?
I already touched on the name and the books, and the discrepancy thereof. Let me talk about Singularity University’s Mission Statement now i.e. its Massively Transformative Purpose:
Positively Impacting 1 billion people within 10 years
..and, we are not even close to the 125-250 million people we should be at if it is an ExO and follows its own goal’s stated timeline.
Let’s further judge Singularity University on its own record and according to its own goal to “educate, inspire and empower leaders to apply exponential technologies to address humanity’s grand challenges”
Has it been successful?! You may say “Yes” I will say “Not so fast!”
7 years after its beginning, as far as Grand Challenges are concerned I personally fail to see a single grand challenge where Singularity University has directly been able to make a measurable difference, let alone “solving” it.
In addition, when it comes to the “educate, inspire and empower” mandate SU has had some notable success but I would like to suggest that when one takes into consideration the Singularity University resources – its location, trillion dollar network, revenue stream, human resources, sponsorship and so on – it does not have a very good ROI. [Other than in publicity.]
For example, Khan Academy and Wikipedia both have better ROI as far as “educate, inspire and empower” are concerned, with much less hype too. And they are both actually exponential organizations.
If there is one area where SU has been undoubtedly successful it is to feed its own growth, raise and/or charge more money, to hire more people and spread the hype of its own legend. What is worse, I will argue that SU is already starting to show diminishing returns to scale – i.e. as Singularity University grows each unit invested in it will bring about fewer and fewer units of the desired outcome, while the previous two examples arguably still show accelerating returns per units invested. And that is one of the major differences between an exponential and classic organization.
Here are some other problems with Singularity University i.e. major obstacles to achieving its own mission statement – some are tactical and some are strategic:
Tactical: Singularity University’s current model does not scale
In my view SU is not an exponential organization; it does not scale. The business model of bringing people to a location and educating them is a thousand years old. Flying over and doing customer specific seminars is better but is still only a marginal improvement on that. So, in short, the tactical problem is that Singularity University has embraced a closed garden, classic scarcity educational model.
So perhaps the biggest break-through will come in a tactically new business model and structure which scales well – just like the Khan Academy, Udacity, Courcera etc, are all scalable and structurally new in a way that SU is not. Now, I am not saying Singularity University should necessarily become Khan Academy, but I am saying that it cannot claim to be a 21st century organisation, and hope to scale up its impact, if it is embracing an old model and structure – as it currently is. So, instead of embracing what has existed for a millennia, SU must be brave in innovating and embracing a new type of institutional structure and business model.
For example, currently SU is a closed garden – i.e. the only way that people can learn any useful material is to join one of the paid programs and attend Singularity University. In this sense, SU is actually very much behind the curve of even “old fashioned” universities that have the courage to put their courses on-line for free. SU so far has been lacking any such courage which means it is even further behind than old-school universities: What’s the use of improving your curriculum every 3 months if only a tiny number of people paying big money will actually see it?! Is that the way to make exponential change?!
For example, I am hearing from a number of people that some faculty at SU are afraid to publish the gold mine of hundreds of videos that SU has been sitting on for years because they are afraid nobody will actually attend the paid programs afterwords. Now, do MIT, Stanford and Harvard not have the same problem?! Then why are they fearlessly publishing many of their own courses for free?! Why Tesla can open-source all of their amazing innovation and SU cannot?! What organization is more likely to go exponential?! Whose ideas are more likely to spread?
In short, if SU wants to change the world it has to be the living example of an exponential organization that is clearly changing the world. The longer the gap between its preaching and its own self persists the more its credibility is going to diminish.
Other tactical flaws:
Singularity University is elitist and top down – it seeks to make change from the top down via “leaders” rather than the bottom up via, for example, networks. [It is also convenient for SU that usually leaders can pay while masses of people cannot]
Singularity University has financial incentives not to change: both personally – where key SU people likely have a personal and/or financial stake at SU, but also institutionally – where SU takes a cut from incubated businesses, which is fine if its main mandate is to produce businesses and to make money. But as long as this is not its mandate then this mechanism is not optimal.
Singularity University has a paid model of education – i.e. it aims to educate but only those who have money to pay for it. And if you don’t then SU provides no help whatsoever.
Singularity University has a single model of implementation aimed at accomplishing its goal – have an idea, start a company, create a product or service to sell – so that SU can have their 5%, and you will change the world. Well, if the Internet, the WWW or Wikipedia were created in SU they would have failed miserably because none of them fits that simplistic Silicon valley monetization model. And it is hard to argue they did change the world and maybe they did it because luckily those entities didn’t embrace the SU model. This single model, however, also leads to a lack of structural diversity of the SU projects because they have to fit the one and only mold proposed as opposed to following a more natural evolution-type of an approach which leads to diverse outcomes.
Singularity University is centralized, bureaucratic and hierarchical and is becoming even more so. Naveen Jain himself told me a couple of years ago that SU is becoming such a bureaucracy that is impossible to get anything done.
Strategic Flaws: Embracing an old socio-economic paradigm.
Singularity University is not looking at creating a new socio-economic paradigm but instead takes the easy road of seeking the most comfortable way to fit in the current one.
Salim often says during his presentations that “SU is not a university and is not really about the singularity”.
I covered the first point already and gave examples of how in some ways even traditional universities are more courageous, more current and even more impact-full than SU currently dares to be. Others such as Udacity and Khan Academy are clearly more scalable. So if Singularity University is not a university then why is it running what is more-or-less an old university model?!
During exponential finance many speakers gave examples of shortsightedness and inability to focus on the longer term so why is Singularity University only focusing on the 5 to 15 years from now – at the most? Why do we not focus at least a little bit on the potential ways of how our current socio-economic capitalist paradigm is likely to change the closer we get to the singularity?!
To me capitalism is by far the best that we have so far but it is not different from other economic systems – it was born during the industrial revolution and is rather likely to die in our lifetime – before or around the singularity. This is what evolution is all about – nothing stays forever, nothing is ever perfect but is always changing and evolving. Thus it only makes sense that capitalism as we know it will also have to at least change or potentially even go extinct.
I am not saying Singularity University should not make money or not embrace capitalist models. It absolutely should. But it should not be limited only to those. And it seems to me that currently SU is a classically structured organization with a corporate model focused on selling, making money, spreading the Silicon Valley capitalist gospel and riding the exponential wave as much as possible rather than being the living example of creative innovation – be it structurally – as a new kind of institution, or strategically – as one focused on fundamentally different strategic goals than anyone else.
And so the main implication of all of the above is that Singularity University is not structured to actually address its own mandate. If SU wants to change the world it has to naturally start with itself and be the living embodiment of the change it seeks to spread. And this is much different from being “a benefit corporation” or whatever other legalese non-sense it currently is.
[This point was skipped due to shortage of time:]
The Singularity University Global Plan revolves around 3 elements chapters, salons and competitions.
We have videos but we are not allowed to distribute them. If you want a local speaker it has to be approved by SU headquarters AND you have to apply for licence. Think about this: are exponential organizations those who need to issue a license to have a saloon? Or are they the ones where decentralization rules?
Tightly regulated branding. Everyone in the chapters participates as a volunteer but only past graduates can be chapter leaders. Which, of course means, just like if you are a scientologist for example, that you have to pay to climb the organizational latter. Chapters must be non-profit. But they secure sponsors and run events and competitions. Roman Catholic Church is also non-profit. But all the profit, the control, the power, branding and the credit flows to the center. While all the work is, of course, done by the periphery.
“Bringing Singularity University to this place and bring SU to that place.” So SU has become the mission. Where as I thought that the mission is to improve the life of a billion people and SU is hopefully the best means to achieve that. But that is what happens to all beurocracies – their first rule is self-perpetuation and self-preservation. Roman Catholic Church done the Silicon Valley Way. With scaled franchising and all.
Singularity University is like the Catholic Church – everything material etc flows to the center and is controlled by it. More and more tightly than ever.
It is like SU is saying: The emperor is dead long live the emperor — the gatekeepers are gone so let all old gatekeepers come to SU because we are the gatekeeper of exponential technology and the Gods of disruption. And so again, in essence, it is the same old cry “the Emperor is dead long live the emperor.” My cry here tonight is rather different: “The emperor is dead. SU has no clothes. The hell with the monarchy. Long live the republic.”
At any rate, time is advancing so let me finish here with Peter Diamandis’ brilliant 6 D’s of Exponentials:
Digitalized – it is absolutely not digitized. That’s why a small-time amateur blogger like me can have more traffic on my YouTube channel than Singularity University.
Deceptive – yes it is deceptive, it sells exponential i.e. it sells something it does not have in the first place. How can you sell exponential org if you are not one?
Disruptive – Yes, it is very disruptive but mostly to people’s and organizations’ bank accounts. Started by charging around $100,000 went through $200,000 and, most recently from 1/4 to 1/2 of 1 million dollars per event. Clearly it will reach a billion dollars way before reaching a billion people. And will disrupt the balance of a number of bank accounts no doubt. Started not for profit and now it’s somewhat half way but the reality is that it is totally for profit if you actually watch what’s being done.
Furthermore, how disruptive and exponential can be a few middle-aged people who fly first class and ask for half a million to do a two day event?! Revolutions are made by the young and the poor… I can think of a few people whose middle name is disruption and they don’t fly in first class and don’t make the big money. The people who do are business people. People who disrupt, well they just go around and disrupt… its’ what they do, whether they are getting paid or not.
Dematerialized – Singularity University is geographically clustered, based on in-person learning and funded by an artificial scarcity based business model.
Demonetized – it is the exact opposite of that. It is very monetized and trying to be even more so all the time by raising its prices and creating artificial scarcity.
Democratized or Decentralized – Singularity University is neither. It is a classic top down pyramidal structure. So there is nothing fundamentally new, democratized or decentralized about it.
And so I find it be a great irony of exponentials that 7 years later Singularity University is none of those things either.
Conclusion:
As I said in the beginning of my talk today: The Emperor has No Clothes.
Our emperor has no clothes my friends.
Singularity University is not about the singularity. SU is not a about abundance. SU is not an exponential organization. And the exponential irony is that SU charges enormous amounts of money by going to all kinds of organizations that are none of those things themselves and asks them:
Do you know about the Singularity? Do you know about abundance? Do you know about exponential organizations?
And then tells them that they should listen if they want to survive.
And of course, this is what I just did. And so I do hope that SU has a big fat check for me today – and I am happy with only $100,000 because I am giving them the warning they love and get paid to give to others. Which is simply this:
Disrupt yourself or be disrupted. Lead by example and from the front. Seek to monetize abundance, rather than scarcity. Put the mission before the organization. Live your message. Do these and you will reach your goals. Fail to do so and you will fail as an organization.
So, if Singularity University is not about the singularity, not about abundance and is not an exponential organization then the natural question is, of course:
What is SU all about?!
Well, humor me with this absolutely crazy and totally outlandish hypothesis:
Singularity University is a child of silicon valley. And silicon valley is about one thing: start a business, build it up and sell it. In other words Silicon Valley is about IPO’s. It is about taking companies public. And, the strategic drift that I have been getting based on all the observable changes and what’s been happening for the past few years is that Singularity University follows that mold and is being built up and groomed with the idea to eventually be sold to someone like Google, for example.
So, ultimately, Singularity University is about selling to the highest bidder. Most likely Google.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with that. But that is a fundamentally different purpose than impacting the life of a billion people.
And so where does all of this leave us?!
I honestly have not a clue. But I do know that when the Singularity Hub never called me back to become a staff writer for them that was like winning the lottery because I will not be here tonight if I they had called. Because it would have not occurred to me that I can do it on my own. I also know that while I do love Singularity University SU does not have a monopoly over exponential technology, disruption or the future of humanity. So while it is great to have a strong organization it is even better if we have more than one. We need many, many Singularity Universities. That is why for example when people are sometimes surprised that I allow other tech bloggers and podcasters to post on my blog, link to their sites and quote “steal my audience”, I reply that it is totally awesome. Because I believe in the mission more than I believe in my own organization. Because I believe we need many, many singularity universities, singularity blogs and singularity podcasts. And because I believe in abundance.
And so I plan to keep doing what I do best. Even if, at times, that comes at a high price. And I think that now you may have a better idea as to what that might look like. But in the end of the day I am not here to be right. And I am not here to make money. Unless, of course, Yuri has my $100,000 check somewhere there. I am here to start a conversation. I am here to tell you that our Emperor has no clothes and it is our responsibility to say it loud and clear.
And so, in that sense, I admit that I am here to make a ruckus.
But the rest is up to you.
And so, as always, the question is:
What are YOU going to do?!
Thank you very much for your time!
Giving Up Is the Enemy of Creativity
What determines whether the ideas we generate are truly creative? Recent research of ours finds that one common factor often gets in the way: we tend to undervalue the benefits of persistence.
In a series of experiments we observed that people consistently underestimated the number of ideas they could generate while solving a creative challenge. In one, we brought 24 university students into the laboratory during the week leading up to Thanksgiving and asked them to spend ten minutes coming up with as many ideas of dishes to serve at Thanksgiving dinner as they could. Then we had them predict how many more ideas they could generate if they persisted on the task for an additional ten minutes. After that, they actually persisted for ten minutes.
On average, the students predicted they would be able to generate around 10 new ideas if they persisted. But we found that they were actually able to generate around 15 new ideas.
Several similar follow-up studies we conducted produced the same result. We asked professional comedians to generate punch lines for a sketch comedy scene; adults to generate advertisement slogans for a product; and people to come up with tactics a charity organization could use to increase donations. In each of these experiments, participants significantly underestimated how many ideas they could generate while persisting with the challenge.
In a series of experiments we observed that people consistently underestimated the number of ideas they could generate while solving a creative challenge. In one, we brought 24 university students into the laboratory during the week leading up to Thanksgiving and asked them to spend ten minutes coming up with as many ideas of dishes to serve at Thanksgiving dinner as they could. Then we had them predict how many more ideas they could generate if they persisted on the task for an additional ten minutes. After that, they actually persisted for ten minutes.
On average, the students predicted they would be able to generate around 10 new ideas if they persisted. But we found that they were actually able to generate around 15 new ideas.
Several similar follow-up studies we conducted produced the same result. We asked professional comedians to generate punch lines for a sketch comedy scene; adults to generate advertisement slogans for a product; and people to come up with tactics a charity organization could use to increase donations. In each of these experiments, participants significantly underestimated how many ideas they could generate while persisting with the challenge.
Importantly, after each study we asked a separate group of people to rate the creativity of the participants’ ideas. Across the majority of our studies we found that ideas generated while persisting were, on average, rated to be more creative than ideas generated initially. Not only did participants underestimate their ability to generate ideas while persisting, they underestimated their ability to generate their most creative ideas.
Why do we underestimate the benefits of persistence? It’s because creative challenges feel difficult. People often have the experience of feeling “stuck,” being unsure of how to find a solution, or hitting a wall with one idea and having to start over again.
Trying hard and failing to make progress on a non-creative task, like an advanced physics problem, may appropriately signal that it’s time to stop working. But creative ideas take time. They are often generated after an initial period of thinking deeply about the problem, considering different ways to frame the problem, and exploring different possible solution paths. Consider that Sir James Dyson developed over 5,000 prototypes before he patented his best-selling Dyson vacuum cleaner. Or that Walt Disney animated cartoons for nearly two decades before his first big hit, Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.
But our work shows that when creative challenges start to feel difficult, most people lower their expectations about the performance benefits of perseverance, and consequently, underestimate their own ability to generate ideas.
It’s important to accurately value persistence because our beliefs powerfully regulate our behavior. If you do not recognize that persistence is valuable for creativity, you will be less likely to persist when you face your own creative challenges.
In another study, we asked participants to work on a creative challenge, and we paid them a small sum of money for each idea they generated. Then we told them they could continue generating ideas (and make more money) if they first paid a small fee to go on. We included the fee to simulate how the decision to persist always has an opportunity cost: persisting on one task means having fewer resources to invest in other tasks. Even though nearly all participants were expected to profit from persisting (based on the results of pretesting), only 54% of participants chose to continue, and as we expected, those who chose not to generated fewer creative ideas and made less money.
Our research suggests that workers typically underestimate the benefits of persistence when it comes to being creative. In other words, some workers may have creative potential that goes untapped when they decide not to persevere with a challenge. Based on our research, we offer two recommendations to avoid this:
1.Ignore your first instinct to stop. When working on a tough creative challenge, you will likely face a moment when you feel stuck and can’t come up with any more ideas. You’ll first want to quit and spend your time doing something else. Temporarily ignore this instinct, especially if you’re still in the early stages of the work. Try to generate just a few more ideas, or consider just a few more alternatives. You may find that your next creative idea was closer than you imagined.
2.Remember that creative problems are supposed to feel difficult. Most involve setbacks, failures, and that “stuck” feeling. It’s part of the process. Suppress your instinct to interpret these feelings as a signal that you just aren’t creative or that you’ve run out of good ideas. Reaching your creative potential often takes time, and persistence is critical for seeing a challenge through to the end.
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