But if Facebookers are anything like their predecessors at PayPal and Google, their new toys won’t distract them for long. They’ll eventually fan out across Silicon Valley and found their own startups, or start investing in their friends’ companies, or both.
“You are going to make hundreds of millionaires and see a lot of new startup activity, because these kids are going to start companies on their own,” says Vivek Wadhwa, a scholar of entrepreneurship with appointments at Stanford, Duke, Emory, and Singularity University. “It’s going to be a big boom for Silicon Valley.”
Now, if you only looked at the record to date, you wouldn’t get the impression that Facebook’s alumni are especially prolific—and you’d be forgiven for wondering if they have any interests outside of social networking, collaboration tools, and Web infrastructure technologies. With help from CB Insights, which has been preparing its own study of the “Facebook Mafia,” I did a search for companies founded by Facebook alumni, and turned up fewer than a dozen examples:
Asana (Web-based task management) – Dustin Moskovitz, Justin Rosenstein
Cloudera (Apache Hadoop distributions) – Jeff Hammerbacher
Cove (collaboration, acquired by Dropbox) – Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi
Daily Strength (online support groups) – Doug Hirsch
Jumo (social networking for non-profits, merged with GOOD) – Chris Hughes
MemSQL (database management software) – Eric Frenkiel
Path (social networking and media sharing) – Dave Morin
Peixe Urbano (Brazilian local commerce site) – Julio Vasconcellos
Quora (question answering) – Adam D’Angelo, Charlie Cheever
Storm8 (mobile games) – Perry Tam, William Siu
Trialpay (targeted advertising) – Eddie Lim
Can Facebook’s New Millionaires Save the World? | Xconomy
In fact, I think many programs distract would-be entrepreneurs on what they should be doing – following their passion and making something worthwhile. I’m not saying that entrepreneurs don’t need help. We all need help. But too many programs are using the wrong approach by trying to “teach” entrepreneurs. I (strongly) believe that entrepreneurs can’t be taught. They’re categorically ADD, they “think differently”, and they can’t stand still. They prefer action to passively absorbing. They know that life isn’t about mid-terms and finals – its a daily grind with constant tests. They’re a fire, ready, aim breed.
But everyone keeps trying to “teach them”. From government programs & college and university courses to online education, videos, and books. They don’t work.
The reason mentorship works is because its based on experience. And it only works when its based on experience, in the form of “when you did x how did it turn out and why? How would you do it if you did it again”. It follows the adage “if I knew then what I know now”. It’s borrowed experience. And that’s how entrepreneurs learn, through doing.
Scott Annan sounds like a kindred soul, a brother from a different mother.
In your life, you’ve probably had a setback or two. When you stumble, it’s tempting the throw in the towel and accept defeat. There’s always an attractive excuse waiting eagerly, hoping you’ll take the easy way out. But the most successful people forge ahead. They realize that mistakes are simply data, providing new information to adjust your approach going forward.
I can certainly relate 100% and then some!
March has brought an apocalyptic movement to the online world; Google is modifying its algorithms to regulate SEO to a purely foundational stance. Sites that are heavily optimized and backed by purchased, bulk backlinks will soon find themselves penalized at best - and de-indexed at worst.
As an alternative, sites featuring quality content - like the kind Centerline Digital creates - now have a better opportunity to show up on the search engine result pages (SERPS).
What this means for brands is that they will need to become producers of their own content. This is something that early adapters like IBM, Coca Cola and Old Spice have already begun doing, and we’re guessing it’s a trend that will continue picking up steam.
Great video on Coca Cola Content 2020 Plan.
Phil Libin remembers the moment he left childhood behind. It was nearly four years ago, when the funding for his Internet start-up fell through. He was 35.
It had all been so much fun until then. But at 3 a.m., out of cash and having waited in vain for a venture capitalist or angel or CEO or anyone at all to return his increasingly desperate calls, Libin knew that he would have to pull the plug on Evernote, a software application that helps people remember things. “I realized I was going to have to wake up tomorrow and lay off everyone in the company,” he says.
Exhausted and demoralized, he was reaching for the light switch when his e-mail dinged. A momentary blast of hope—but no, just a message from a fan, something he had been getting more and more of lately. This one was from some guy in Sweden, a fellow software entrepreneur, and it was the usual “Evernote has changed my life” sort of thing. Libin almost missed the last line: “If you ever need any money let me know.”
Feeling more awake, Libin typed back: “It just so happens we could use some cash. How much did you have in mind?”
The answer came right back: “Would half a million dollars be enough?”
Alas, the entrepreneurial flame is easier to put out than to light or relight. Governments across the world are determined to promote high-growth companies and the other accoutrements of an entrepreneurial society: can it be long before Kim Jong Un announces a North Korean venture-capital fund? But a collection of policymakers and academics assembled in Liverpool by the Kauffman Foundation, which promotes enterprise, all made it clear that this is easier said than done.
Policymakers have proved inept at promoting enterprise. For one thing, politicians focus on short-term election cycles and tend to junk their predecessors’ policies, good or bad. But there are also two bigger reasons. The first is that policymakers confuse promoting enterprise with promoting small businesses, regional development or job growth. In fact, serious entrepreneurs want to create big businesses, not multiply small ones. They don’t give a fig about regional development. And they habitually disrupt established patterns of employment rather than simply creating new jobs on top of the old.
The second is that policymakers are obsessed by Silicon Valley. The Russians claim to have built a clone of it near Moscow. Latvia aspires to create its own venture-capital industry. Universities everywhere are building high-tech “incubators”. Yet there is little evidence that the model is transferable. Most incubators are a bit like roach motels: would-be entrepreneurs check in but never leave. The venture-capital industry is in trouble in Silicon Valley itself, given the high rate of failure of start-ups, and is unlikely to flourish in Latvia. Rohit Shukla of the Larta Institute in California says policymakers should stop obsessing about clusters (which are usually the product of accident, not planning) and embrace global networks instead. The rise of the internet, the growing importance of emerging markets and the proliferation of networking organisations like the Indus Entrepreneurs (TiE, a group with members across 14 countries), all make it easier to link talent with opportunity around the world.
if indeed Northeast Ohio has a true entrepreneurial economy (which I beg to differ with the same as I do with the existence of a so called “entrepreneurial ecosystem”) “Cleveland-Style” economic development and Ohio politics, which are in bed together, will destroy it.
Now, says Leonard A. Schlesinger, president of entrepreneurial mecca Babson College and former COO of Limited Brands, “people don’t fail. They pivot.” If the original business concept isn’t working, the entrepreneur tweaks it, until he or she gets it right—or realizes it was all wrong in the first place and tries something else.
In Just Start!, a new book Schlesinger coauthored, he looks at how serial entrepreneurs who built businesses with revenues ranging from $200 million to the billions—actually behaved when starting a business. And, contrary to the popular image of entrepreneurs as swashbucklers who routinely take crazy risks, many turned out to be pretty careful and analytical. “What surprised me, quite honestly, is the fundamental difference between the myths we structure for entrepreneurs and the reality,” he says.
The first thing serial entrepreneurs do when starting a business, the authors found, is to take a small, “smart step” toward something they desire to achieve. Next, they stop and reflect on what that action accomplished. Finally, they decide if they still want to move forward, given what they have deemed to be their “acceptable loss”—or, as Schlesinger put it recently— “how excited you are about an idea against what you have in time and money.” With each step they take, they go through the process again until they either bail out, shift in another direction or succeed. Of course, they act quickly. Moseying through the steps doesn’t work in a fast-paced, global economy.
Fun article. My vote for CEO goes to Jason Fried and for Company his 37signals. One of the great entrepreneurial thinkers and leaders of our time. His ideas will last the test of time long after we’re gone. For supporting cast, 37signals partner David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails. Ruby has made a new class of responsive applications available that take less time and money to develop.
