Just be driven

I am suggesting some interesting Fortune links that I would like to share with startup entrepreneurs that make the bulk of my reader base.

Innovate like Edison

If you're reading this with the help of an electric light, it's worth pausing to remember that it was Edison's remarkable innovation that made it possible. Edison's landmark success with the incandescent light bulb and his development of an entirely new system for distributing and monitoring electric power changed the world forever. It is fitting that the light bulb is now a universal metaphor for a bright idea. Read more here.

Can entrepreneurship be taught?

Taking an entrepreneurship class isn't likely to turn a student with no business smarts into an opportunity-spotting, moneymaking genius. Yet plenty of anecdotal evidence suggests that the classes can speed the learning curve for those with the right stuff. On the most fundamental level, the programs can teach students basic skills, such as managing financials or writing a business plan, forcing them to impose a structure and deadlines on dreams that they might never achieve otherwise.

Or do you think it has to be in your DNA…? Find out here.

School of hard knocks

Meeting great entrepreneurs is one of the advantages of attending an entrepreneurship program. Students at the University of St. Thomas, for instance, recently had a chance to soak up some hard-won lessons from Microsoft's Bill Gates and Richard Schulze, founder of electronics retailer Best Buy, at a session moderated by Christopher Puto, dean of the St. Thomas College of Business, and venture capitalist Ann Winblad, co-founder of Hummer Winblad.

Here's the link to that chat.

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"They've got other fish to fry"

That’s what Omar Hamoui, founder CEO of Admob, - a mobile Ad network that allows independent mobile websites to run Ads on their sites - said when he was asked why haven’t Google focused on an Adsense like stuff for mobile.

The Admob advantage for Advertisers is that you can target the audience and device you want, offers flexibility to select where your ad will run, you don’t need to have a mobile page (you can create quick and easy mobile landing pages) and the benefits of advanced reporting and analytics.

For the publishers, while it allows you to monetize your mobile traffic, you have full control over the ads displayed and of complete reportage of published inventory and revenue streams.

Here’s a nice interview that K@W had with Omar Hamoui of AdMob.

Don’t ever confuse it with internet Ads since Mobile Web is a silo of its own. In fact, that’s a challenge. Admob would love it if it could find an ad network to fill their inventory with existing online advertising. They simply can’t because those ads would link to web pages that wouldn’t render on the mobile device.

But I am sure they must be working at it…

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Real estate for the price of coffee

San Francisco's modern-day bedouins are typically armed with laptops and cell phones, paying for their office space and Internet access by buying coffee and muffins.

A new breed of worker, fueled by caffeine and using the tools of modern technology, is flourishing in the coffeehouses of San Francisco. Roaming from cafe to cafe and borrowing a name from the nomadic Arabs who wandered freely in the desert, they've come to be known as "bedouins." [ed: the term appears in a 2006 Charter Street post, which is also a nice meditation on the benefits of "going Bedouin"]

The move toward mobile self employment is also part of what author Daniel Pink identified when he wrote "Free Agent Nation" in 2001.

Pink calls it "Karl Marx's revenge, where individuals own the means of production. And they can take the means of production and hop from coffee shop to coffee shop."

If you could split the Web workers into two main camps, you could say that one camp plugs in at Starbucks, while the other chooses independent neighborhood cafes. The two have vastly different ethics.

Starbucks offers a more corporate culture, and is a popular place for business meetings. Executives who travel a lot often prefer Starbucks, knowing they can find many branches in whatever city they go to. They also pay for the Wi-Fi, through Starbucks' partnership with T-Mobile.

Yet many of the scrappier startups, particularly those who have not taken funding from venture capitalists, prefer the ethos of the independent cafes, where the music is a little louder and the Wi-Fi is free.

May be, throwback of sorts. Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote some of their best work in Parisian cafes. And in San Francisco, writers and poets of the Beat generation, such as Jack Kerouac and Lawrence Ferlinghetti, wrote in the cafes of North Beach.

Fixed loyalty to corporations is morphing into a new independent model of working. In a free-agent world, people serve their work ideals and personal needs, rather than a specific company. Without oversimplifying the so-called demise of loyalty, we can see a mutually informed contract between those with talent and those with opportunities for work, a contract that balances collective and individual interests. Free agency hawks itself by spelling out its perks, giving tips on how to juggle the challenges, and promoting it as a path more respectful of the family, as well as the human spirit.

You can read the full article at SF Chronicle here. [ Hat Tip : Ben Casnocha ]

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Primer for India VC practice

When you scroll down this blog, you’ll find several posts which suggests what customizations Indian VCs could bring about in their setups / mindsets, on the basis of the feedback I got from several startup entrepreneurs.

Wake up and smell your coffee. This is India, not your father's economy.

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I was in fact thinking of putting up a summary post as a one point referencer for VCs looking at India to do business when I chanced upon this superb K@W interview with Netcore CEO Rajesh Jain.

[ Excerpts ]

[Rajesh Jain] “I believe we need a new approach to venture capital in India. There is a very limited legacy, so it's not going to evolve the way the U.S. did or even perhaps the way China did. In India there are lots of gaps across multiple value chains. Sometimes a service fails to take off because some parts along the value chain are not appropriately digitized. What ought to happen is a large amount of investment across building out an ecosystem of companies. Instead of waiting for an entrepreneur to come up with a business plan, venture capitalists need to be much more proactive. They should say, "The capital is available, now let's find a CEO for this business and back that person with funding. Let's start multiple companies based on what we have seen in other countries, and what we think the opportunities are in India."

This is a very different, inside-out approach, where you end up flipping the model around. That requires much more work. It will not work if the core venture capital team lives abroad and just comes to India once in a while. We need people on the ground who understand the realities of India today, who understand how the technology is evolving, and who can make bets on what the future is going to be.

Sometimes the VCs tend to behave more like private equity firms by investing in companies that don't need the capital, or which are pre-IPO companies. For example, the investment by Kleiner Perkins into Naukri.com [a job-search web site] was a pre-IPO investment. There was really nothing "venture" about it. Westbridge's investment in Times Internet was of the same type. Those things need to change. You need to really get in there, work with people and focus on building out the ecosystem. Most of these things don't exist, and that's the great green-field opportunity across this space. How can education be done differently with digital technologies? How can health care be done differently? We need to look at different industry verticals and think about how to transform them given the presence of broadband, of computers, of mobile [devices], of software sitting on the network. We need to rethink how business gets done. I think that is the real opportunity.

Knowledge@Wharton: What are the principal risks?

Jain: This is a "build-it-and-they-will-come" approach. If you build it and they don't come, that's a problem. If you are too early, you lose. If you are too late, you lose. The risk is that you may be too early or too late. But that's what all the great successes in the entrepreneurial world have faced. You need luck on your side also to make it work. Basically as an entrepreneur, you have to live in the future. You have to imagine what is going to happen. You have to create the future and make others come to it.

I recommend it as a must read for all VCs who are seriously looking at India to do business.

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It's the cool app that matters, stupid...!

God probably wouldn't mind if He looked like Steve Jobs.

I just can’t stop wondering at the way Apple’s ( and with it Steve Jobs’ too ) fortunes swing. It hit the roof with Mac in the 80’s and then it slid underground for quite a while when Microsoft took centre stage. As Microsoft was looking invincible, Apple upped the ante with its iPod – a mega hit. And while it stayed hit, now at California Electronic Show (CES), Steve Jobs eclipsed Bill Gates by pulling yet another rabbit – the iPhone. Going by the immediate upward propulsion in Apple’s stock price, the rave reviews are not entirely stage managed.

None could’ve ever given the college dropout, whose biological parents gave him up for adoption, such a chance. Jobs has presided over four major game-changing product launches: the Apple II, the Macintosh, the iPod, and the iPhone; five if you count the release of Pixar's Toy Story, which I'm inclined to. He's like Willy Wonka and Harry Potter rolled up into one.

Jobs’s zealousness about product development— and enforcing his personal vision—remains as relentless as ever. He keeps Apple’s management structure unusually flat for a 20,000-person company, so he can see what’s happening at ground level. There is just one committee in the whole of Apple, to establish prices. I can’t think of a comparable company that does no—zero—market research with its customers. Ironically, Jobs's personal style could not be more at odds with the brand he has created. If the motto for Apple's consumers is “think different,” the motto for Apple employees is “think like Steve."

Apple’s arrogance can inspire resentment, which is one reason for some of the glee over Jobs's stock options woes: taking pleasure in seeing a special person knocked down a peg is a great American pastime.

Apple’s iPhone breaks two basic axioms of consumer technology. One, when you take an application and put it on a phone, that application must be reduced to a crippled and annoying version of itself. Two, when you take two devices --such as an iPod and a phone -- and squish them into one, both devices must necessarily become lamer versions of themselves. The iPhone is a phone, an iPod, and a mini-Internet computer all at once, and contrary to Newton -- who knew a thing or two about apples -- they all occupy the same space at the same time, but without taking a hit in performance. In a way iPhone is the wrong name for it. It's a handheld computing platform that just happens to contain a phone.

The only bitter after-taste can come in the form of an adverse outcome of a Cisco lawsuit against the trademark iPhone ( which it only recently applied to a Linksys VoIP phone set ). Anyone unglued about the name of this product is seriously logic impaired. It doesn't even matter in the slightest.

But then who cares what this is called ? Apple could call it the Apple Phone. It could call it "French Canadian Genitalia" or even "the Hebrew Profanity" and still sell it…

It’s the cool app that matters, stupid.

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