Grade A Entrepreneurs

Guy Kawasaki is a voracious reader. Not only because he wants to remain a great schmoozer (one of the reasons why he tells us to “read voraciously”), but mostly also because he adores books, loves to write, and looks at other writers as sounding boards, sources of inspiration, or thought-provoking agents. His latest book, a must-read, Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition, mentions multiple books either directly or through the authors that he interviews. Here is a list of these books:

Berkun, Scott:   The Myths of Innovation (O’Reilly Media, Inc. 2008); The Art of Project Management (Theory in Practice (O’Reilly)) (O’Reilly Media, Inc. 2005). See Reality Check: Chapter 27: The Myths of Innovation.

Bornstein, David:  How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition (Oxford University Press, updated 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 91: Social Entrepreneurship.

Branch, Shelly & Callaway, Sue: What Would Jackie Do?: An Inspired Guide to Distinctive Living (Gotham, 2006). See Reality Check: Chapter 63: Ten Questions “With” Jackie Onassis.

Christensen, Clayton: The Innovator’s Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book that Will Change the Way You Do Business (Collins Business Essentials) (Harvard Business School Press, 1997). See Reality Check: Chapter 17: The Zen of Business Plans.

Cialdini, Robert: Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion (Collins Business Essentials)(Allyn & Bacon, 2000); with Noah Goldstein & Steve J. Martin: Yes!: 50 Scientifically Proven Ways to Be Persuasive (Free Press, 2008). See Reality Check: Chapter 53: The Psychology of Influencing People.

DePaola, Tomie: The Knight and the Dragon (Putnam Juvenile, 1980). See Reality Check: Chapter 66: The Art of Driving Your Competition Crazy.

Dweck, Carol: Mindset: The New Psychology of Success (Random House, 2006). See Reality Check: Chapter 76: The Effort Effect of Carol Dweck.

Feinberg, Mortimer: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things: Lessons from the New Science of Behavioral Economics (Fireside, 1995). See Reality Check: Chapter 83: Why Smart People Do Dumb Things.

Gladwell, Malcolm: The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference (Back Bay Books, 2002). See Reality Check: Chapter 28: The Sticking Point.

Heath, Chip & Dan:  Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die (Random House, 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 28: The Sticking Point.

Kidder, Tracy: The Soul Of A New Machine (first published in 1981- Back Bay Books, 2000). See Reality Check: 

LaBarre, Polly & Taylor, William: Mavericks at Work: Why the Most Original Minds in Business Win (Free Press, 2008). See Reality Check: Chapter 81: Mavericks in the Workplace.

Lakoff, George:  Don’t Think of an Elephant: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate–The Essential Guide for Progressives (Chelsea Green, 2004). See Reality Check: Chapter 35: Frame or Be Framed.

Livingston, Jessica: Founders at Work: Stories of Startups’ Early Days (Apress, 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 1: Flounders (sic) at Work.

Marcum, David & Smith, Steven: egonomics: What Makes Ego Our Greatest Asset (or Most Expensive Liability).  (Fireside, 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 86: Are You an Egomaniac.

May, Matthew:  The Elegant Solution: Toyota’s Formula for Mastering Innovation (Free Press, 2006). See Reality Check: Chapter 26: The Seven Sins of Solutions.

Prosen, Bob: Kiss Theory Good Bye: Five Proven Ways to Get Extraordinary Results in Any Company (Gold Pen Publishing, 2006). See Reality Check: Chapter 18:The Art of Financial Projections.

Raynor, Michael:   The Strategy Paradox: Why committing to success leads to failure (and what to do about it) (Broadway Book, 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 16: The Paradox of Strategy: How Apple Blew It and Microsoft Got Lucky.

Reynolds, Garr:  Presentation Zen: Simple Ideas on Presentation Design and Delivery (Voices That Matter) (New Riders Press, 2008). See Reality Check: Chapter 45: The Zen of Presentations.

Rezac, Darcy:  The Frog and Prince: Secrets of Positive Networking To Change Your Life (Frog and Prince Networking Company, 2003). See Reality Check: Chapter 57: The Art of Schmoozing.

RoAne, Susan:  How to Work a Room, Revised Edition: Your Essential Guide to Savvy Socializing (Collins Living; Revised edition, 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 57: The Art of Schmoozing.

Rogers, Everett: Diffusion of Innovations, 5th Edition (Free Press, 2003). See Reality Check: Chapter 27: The Myths of Innovation.

Sutton, Bob: The No Asshole Rule: Building a Civilized Workplace and Surviving One That Isn’t (Business Plus, 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 87: The No Asshole Rule.

Trunk, Penelope: Brazen Careerist: The New Rules for Success (Business Plus, 2007). See Reality Check: Chapter 71: Career Guidance for This Century.

White, Jerry: I Will Not Be Broken: Five Steps to Overcoming a Life Crisis (St. Martin’s Press, 2008). See Reality Check: Chapter 93: The Art of Surviving.

Wozniak, Steve & Smith, Gina: iWoz: Computer Geek to Cult Icon: How I Invented the Personal Computer, Co-Founded Apple, and Had Fun Doing It (W. W. Norton, 2006). See Reality Check: Chapter 31: The Purest Form of Engineering: Woz.

Zimbardo, Philip G.: The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil (Random House, 2008). See Reality Check: Chapter 79: Work as a Prison.

As if this list were not long enough, let me remind you of another major author mentioned by Guy: Peter Drucker (1909-2005). You can read virtually all his books. He is the father of the modern enterprise. For an overview of his works: The Essential Drucker: The Best of Sixty Years of Peter Drucker’s Essential Writings on Management (Collins Business Essentials)

Also: Guy gave a list of his ten favorite books in 2006: http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2006/04/my_ten_favorite.html

Personal remark: As is customary in his books, Guy always adds a quote under the title of each chapter. He has a knack for selecting them, most of the times from great authors. You may really enjoy one of them, Ambrose Bierce. You can read The Devil’s Dictionary, a hilarious interpretation of common English terms, which is available at: http://www.gutenberg.org/etext/972  

My quote of the day: “Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book does not shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place?” Franz Kafka (Letter to Oskar Pollak, January 27, 1904).

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

We hear about Michigan’s disastrous car industry daily… Let’s not forget, though, that there are other windows on the mishigami, the great lake: phenomenal entrepreneurs determined to transform challenges into opportunities. One of the most prominent is Roger Newton.

From success to back to goal one, i.e. improving the lives of peoples

Born in New Jersey, Roger Newton came to Ann Arbor in 1981 to work as a senior scientist at Parke-Davis, a subsidiary of Warner-Lambert, where he joined the atherosclerosis team and co-discovered, after fifteen years of hard work and struggles, the drug that was to be trademarked as Lipitor, and was approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in December 1996. Before Pfizer merged with Parke-Davis/Warner-Lambert, Roger left the company to start Esperion Therapeutics with Charles Bisgaier, Michael Pape, and Tom Rea in July 1998 to focus on HDL therapy, a company that he sold to Pfizer six years later for a staggering $1.3 billion. However, in January 2007, Pfizer’s restructuring, after the development of the torcetrapib/Lipitor combination was terminated, caused the layoff of 2,100 Pfizer colleagues working in Ann Arbor over several months and eliminated the Esperion side of the business. Roger Newton was also on the list for the guillotine. Was this a problem for him? Looking at things from the outside, you might think that this was actually an opportunity for him to retire, enjoy his money and run his foundation. Well, this is not what happened. Why? The entrepreneurial drive is a complex mix of creative insatiability, good HDL, and the indomitable desire to make the world an always better place. There is certainly also something akin to a righter of wrongs’ fiber in this community-oriented and charismatic man: “When there are so many talented ex-Pfizer people and state of the art facilities around, you can’t throw in the towel: reenlisting for success is the way to go”, he says. Is there a better goal than the one of improving the lives of people, anyway?

“The will to believe” makes things happen over again

After 50 weeks of negotiations, Pfizer divested former Esperion assets and sold them back to Roger including the Esperion name. Four venture capital firms including Alta Partners, Domain Associates, Aisling Capital, and Arboretum Ventures enabled the restart of Esperion Therapeutics, in which Pfizer also retains a financial interest! Simultaneously, and quite extraordinarily, the original Esperion Therapeutics facility in Plymouth, MI, renovated by Pfizer in 2006, is now morphing into a life science business incubator. Yes, you get it right… There has been less than two years between Pfizer’s announcement of the shutdown of its Ann Arbor plant, and the two-pronged biotech rebirth of Ann Arbor.

The second incarnation of Esperion Therapeutics has only eight employees, but has the goal of creating a portfolio of small molecule and biopharmaceutical product candidates which beneficially affect patients with atherosclerosis due to abnormal blood cholesterol levels.

The incubator, called the Michigan Life Science and Innovation Center, is a 60,000 square-foot facility with state of the art offices, vivarium, and laboratories. Although Esperion is currently the only company located there, it is expected over the next few months that an additional eight to ten startups will be become their close neighbors.

For Roger, entrepreneurship is both a lifestyle and a cause to which he was able to rally the local authorities, the Michigan Economic Development Corp., and the Ann Arbor Spark Foundation, a subsidiary of the Ann Arbor’s economic development group, Spark, that will run the incubator. If “it takes a village to raise a child,” it clearly takes a community’s dedication to its own future to bootstrap itself out of a bad situation. This success is “the vision of many people,” Roger says.

Notice to entrepreneurs and VCs from other parts of the country: Ann Arbor and its surroundings may be an area that you want to discover: a vibrant town, a beautiful landscape, a great university and lot of IQ floating in the air.

Was it easy? No. Would Roger do this differently? Probably not.

The Silicon Valley mythology tends to pedestal people who get it all at 35 (without really distinguishing between the real agents of success and the cohort of after-the-fact-heroized guys/gals who were only accessories to that success and just lucky to be there at the right time). Such mythology can be fantastically stimulating, but also terribly inhibiting. If you dream to change the world, you may also want to look at it as a life-long project and realize that the distance between milestones may not always be that of a young goat’s leap. As a reminder, here are some markers you may want to reflect upon:

Official public validation of Roger’s endeavors: in 1996 at the age of 46. For a scientist, this is success by itself, but at the same time, Roger’s professional career was not in great shape. At Parke-Davis, he had ended up being marginalized; his research team had been disbanded and he had lost most of his influence. He could have indulged in self-pity. Instead, he created his first startup, the first version of Esperion. He was 48.

Huge financial success: in 2004 at the age of 54. For most people, this is it. For real entrepreneurs, personal wealth is not the point. Therefore when Pfizer shut down Esperion, Roger felt as naked and dispossessed as everybody else, and his entrepreneurial drive was rekindled. He could have decided to bask in the honor system that rewards successful people; yet, aged 58, he is ready to play again.

As all great leaders, Roger takes the blame onto himself when things go wrong, but shares the credit with others for positive outcomes, his wife, his children, his friends, and his colleagues and partners. 

One of his favorite books? A book that recounts how bettering one’s life is to continuously move oneself out of one’s comfort zone and be able “to walk naked into the land of uncertainty,” Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within (Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series), by University of Michigan business professor Robert Quinn. It is obvious that Roger has taken Professor Quinn’s words to heart!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Additional reading: 

Deep Change: Discovering the Leader Within (Jossey-Bass Business & Management Series)

 The Medicine Man, by Candace Stuart: http://www.dbusiness.com/DBusiness/November-2008/The-Medicine-Man/

Various articles: http://www.mlive.com/mbusinessreview/stories/index.ssf?/mbusinessreview/se/stories/20050106_executive.html

Google results: 139,000,000 for “patent; “46,100,000 for “intellectual property.” However, the significance level of these numbers may not be much higher than that of a googol in math.

When you are a startup, where do you start as far as IP is concerned? One simple, or “simpler” item on your priority list should be to get your “domain name,” which includes the generic & country code top-level domain names, and as many variations/spelling mistakes as you can think of. You may spend significant money, but if your business is successful, you do not want to have to negotiate with too many forgers and impostors. If the concept of your business evolves as you get deeper into your project, do not hesitate to add more domain names. 

What about the great ideas of trademarks that cross your mind during the design/concept/sketching phase? You may want to protect a few of them. Don’t rush, though. Early illuminations often hide the horizon or prematurely freeze the intricate thought processes that foster creativity – and in the end, trademarks are not just catch phrases that you think are cool, they are part of your overall branding strategy, which itself is part of your overall business strategy. 

This leads me to a great conversation I recently had with David Jakopin, an Intellectual Property attorney at Pillsbury. David has been involved in IP matters (ranging from litigation to strategic IP counseling) for twenty years. His non-jargonic way to talk has something to do with his background in Electrical Engineering and his Middle-Western “show me” style.

•  “What do you do when a startup comes to you for a patent?,” I asked him.
•  ” I ask them to first tell me about their business and their real priorities,” he responded.

David Jakopin

While quite a few patent attorneys would jump at the opportunity to get your business the minute you tell them that you want to patent your technology, David Jakopin recommends that you take your breath and consider this:

1. What is your purpose when you want to file a patent and how does it help your business?
2. Patent is one thing, but have you thought of your overall IP strategy? Is trying to protect your IP with patents a meaningful business strategy, or are trade secrets or copyrights a better way to proceed?

1- What is your purpose when you want to file a patent and how does it help your business?

“In a way, you can make almost everything patentable,” David says, “but is that where your real value is? What if your real value is in your ability to execute? Where do you fit in the overall industry landscape? The approach vastly differs depending on whether you are on a greenfield (yet, make sure that you are not deluding yourself) or in a crowded environment. When you are on a greenfield, patents can be a business priority. If you are in a crowded environment, you may want to consider your overall business plan. The question you must ask yourself is: Do I want to spend a lot of time and money getting a narrow patent? I tend to advise entrepreneurs to put their time and money in places they know are viable. Do you want to spend $15-20K on a patent application that may never issue into a patent, or do you prefer to give the engineers who create your product a symbolic salary? It’s unethical to encourage people to file a whole bunch of patent applications, spend a lot of money and let them discover three or four years down the road that the patent applications were rejected if you believe they don’t stand a very good chance of issuing as patents in the first place – unless the client understands the true landscape. When you file a patent, there is always the risk that it could be rejected, especially in crowded fields, so it’s important to look at this within your overall business strategy.” In the end, filing patents, strong, moderately strong, or even weaker must be part of a well-thought out business plan.

2- Patent is one thing, but have you thought of your overall IP strategy? Is protecting your IP with patents a meaningful business strategy?

“Patents are not on the whole thing,” David warns. “What you may want to protect are your inventions, know-how and ideas in general. You may want to think of a global IP strategy using several means that include patents, trade secrets, copyrights and trademarks.  You have a product strategy, a sales and marketing strategy or a financial strategy, you should also have an overall IP strategy even if you are in a crowded field. Then, multiple other aspects come into play.” David gave a few well-known reasons for this: Patents, copyrights, trade secrets and trademarks may increase the valuation of a company several years later down the road.

“Lots of startups can end up in a quandary,” David says. ” Patents will not cause a company to be successful initially; it is quality of execution on many fronts that results in success, when the company does take off, it’s better to have protected what could have been protected. When you start to sell your product, by statute in the US, you get one year to get your application filed for anything that is patentable within your product, but you do not have this one-year grace period for other countries. In the rest of the world, you need your application to already be on file. Filing a provisional patent can help, but can also give a false sense of security. The Patent Office considers you have made the invention only at the time you file the utility patent application. All the provisional is (although it is better than nothing at all) is a timestamp on whatever is disclosed at the time of the provisional. So if you filed your provisional a year ago and added a lot since then and have disclosed what you’ve added since the provisional, your utility will need to differ from the provisional (something that litigators will jump on), and international patent protection won’t be available for the additions since you disclosed them before filing any patent application.”

Bootstrapping your IP Strategy?

I asked David if he thought entrepreneurs can “bootstrap” part of their IP strategy. His response was “yes” and he even advises entrepreneurs who want to file provisional patents by themselves to make the extra effort of creating a few claims and go for a utility patent. The additional filing fees are not such a big deal (a few hundred dollars), and you can proceed in a way that minimizes legal fees. However, if it makes sense for your business to build a comprehensive IP strategy (and if you are – even moderately – funded), I advise that you talk to an attorney. For example, are you in the best position to decide by yourself or with your team what should be “patented” versus what should be kept as a “trade-secret,” or what should be copyrighted and how? I am not so sure! And if you leverage, as you should, the huge amount of open source code that is out there, you really want to know what you are doing – and not end up spending endless sleepless nights figuring out how to respond to the tons of questions that a corporation willing to buy your product or acquire your company will undoubtedly ask from you. If anything, a good IP attorney will help you instill good practices from the start.

I like David’s down-to-earth approach and his balanced perspective as he talked to a company I am familiar with. “I work in a law firm that offers a wide range of services,” he explains, “and I try to see how the IP strategy fits into the entity they are creating to make money. I am not over emphasizing the importance of patents to an extent that would just be a skewed viewpoint.” 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Web site: http://www.pillsburylaw.com/david.jakopin

Some of you asked me about Notifixio.us – which I installed about two weeks ago.

This is a product created by young French entrepreneur, Julien Genestoux. He has a double master in business (French business school – ESSEC 2006) and Computer Sciences (Illinois Institute of Technology), has already created one successful company (Jobetudiant.net ) and started Notifixio.us in the US a few months ago.

By placing Notifixio.us on your site/blog, you offer your visitors the ability to be alerted in real time on any thing new happening of your site. They click on the Notifixio.us widget, subscribe and select the channel through which they want to be alerted. So far, the channels that are implemented include email, text messaging, Jabber, Google Talk, AIM, Live Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, ICQ. The list of potential available channels is most likely to grow as the Notifixio.us platform offers an API enabling external developers to create custom channels (Julien told me that the iPhone app. is coming, as well as some Desktop Air Clients and a “digest channel” sending an email once a day with all the notifications you received).

When visitors subscribe, they are able to filter the type of notifications they want to receive based on a variety of criteria including keywords, languages, and later: authors, geo-localisation, time, etc.  or any metadata available within the selected content.

The benefits of using Notifixio.us are clear:

In addition to being able to choose different channels depending on the information source, users free themselves from their crowded RSS readers!  The real-time factor is as well very important, as it encourages real-time interaction with a site. People leave fewer comments on older stories, even they are only one week old.

For content providers, the advantage over RSS feeds is obvious. Current feed mechanisms duplicate the content created by content producers and basically deprive them from visits to their site, which, I believe, can be detrimental to their business (loss of ad revenues or discarded copyrights, for example).

A few similar products have popped up lately. All of them are new and I suppose that they will evolve over the next few months. Although I did not go into the details of each of them, I am under the impression that Notifixio.us may be built from the start with one of the largest features set in terms of usability, channels, filters, extensibility as well as openness for external developers – and it seems to have the most effective subscription approach for both users and content producers (such as the widget you see on this blog). 

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Julien’s site: http://notifixio.us

How bad is it for startups seeking financing? This is the title of a post by Jeremy Liew on November 24^th[1]. Well, it’s bad and as usual, Jeremy Liew says it pretty much like it is:

1. Angel financing had dried;
2. A slowing economy has reduced near term revenue growth expectations;
3. Venture Capitalists are focusing on their portfolio companies.

Jeremy Liew ends his piece on a more positive note: there will be “better times ahead.” When? I would not bet that it is any time soon. So, brace for the worst (you can only be pleasantly surprised, after all), and bootstrap! If you have already secured a first round of financing, consider putting on the bootstrapper’s boots and live as if no second round was to come in the near future. So, here is my two cents piece of advice for today:

Build the leanest possible organization

If you are an early startup with little to no money (your credit card and the charitable contribution of your loved ones), get people to work for equity. Given that not everybody can live on love, fresh air and savings, find a bunch of friends or friends or friends who have a day job and are committed to working with you from 6:00 PM to 10 PM during the week and most of the weekend. These 30-40 hours are about half the number of hours that an employee must put on in a startup. My friend Bernard Gallet, one of the most brilliant programmers (and CTO of several companies) I had in my career, also reminds you that you should not discard what companies such as Rent-A-Coder or Elance offer for a reasonable fee if you have a small budget. Do not expect them to design your product, of course, but they can be a useful resource for specific capabilities that do not require access to the entire source code, interfaces or utilities. Also leverage the huge amount of open source available out there! The end result is that if you really believe in your project (and make others believe in it), you will be just fine. Make sure, though, that your employees’ partners (or your own partner) embrace this lifestyle. Otherwise, you are in for counterproductive tensions and conflicts that can be deadly for startups.

No matter how tiny the team may be, operate as a full-fledged company with regular coordination meetings and a pervasive sense of accountability: Have a real board of advisors, a real board of directors, a bookkeeper one or two hours per month (lots of startups tend to neglect this aspect because there is not much to compute, which is a bad idea), and a corporate attorney (you do not need much either, but be always clean and many good firms differ payments for young startups). Also, immediately buy all relevant domain names and trademarks even if your headquarters are your basement.

Remark: If you are a funded young company, even if you have a decent cash runway (I recommend six months at all times with virtually no new sales), also live the lean life, even if you believe that the company is not threatened. In fact, it is a perfect time to resume a pre-funding spirit (most of what I say above and below applies), refocus energies and remove people you feel are not busy 150% of the time. If your runway is less than six months, reduce your headcount and your expenses so that you remain constantly at this security level. I neglected to do this in one of the companies where I was the CEO and I did regret it. The risk that you will be overwhelmed by customers’ demands is extremely low.

The landscape is likely to worsen. The companies that will win are the ones that will outlast their competitors, not the ones that believe that they must “grab market shares” as if there were no tomorrow (such frantic mindset can be a sure method to jeopardize tomorrows actually).

Generate revenue

It has become customary to create an early product, show “some” traction and then look for money to move the company forward. What if you simply delayed your exhausting quest for VCs or angels and spent your time actively generating some revenue? Finding money to fund actual growth, even when it is modest, is easier than looking for money to fund ideas or prototypes.

You may scratch your head because this is not the strategy you envisioned. Think twice. For example, if you planned to create a base of millions of users considering that there are “metrics” other than cold, hard cash, be open to an about-face. Why not forget, at least temporarily, about the alternative metrics or potential buyers interested in acquiring rolling eye-balls or targeted bustling social networks? Acquirers are also impacted by the recession and will be less prone to buying you for zillions. Their most reasonable strategy will be to let your assets smoothly wind up into their hands for peanuts. Remember, in a bad economy, the whole point is to last constructively. So make money!

Stop thinking of business models that do not yield immediate revenue. The most prosaic modus operandi for start-ups or young companies is to be opportunistic – call this a “multi-pronged business model” if you want to sound less of an earthling. True, some VCs may look at this approach somewhat warily, but not all of them. VCs who have created companies before the Internet bubble will respect you, be interested in seeing how you fare under tough circumstances, like your sense of survival, and might be open to assist you faster than you think (if you want them to do so). So how do you make “opportunistic” revenues? Here below is a reminder of the two simplest methods for you to discuss with your labor camp’s pals:

• If you are a traditional software company, scale down the number of features planned for the first release and sell consulting services associated with the alpha/beta version of your scaled-down product. It’s a good deal for everybody. Your customers get something adapted to their needs, and you learn from them what they actually need (which may be slightly different from your initial grand vision). You will also come to the conclusion that your product should be more user-customizable than what it is currently. Become a “product company” only when you feel you have reached a reasonable level of sales predictability. For complex pieces of software, selling training is also a very good way to generate cash. Stay away from the big deals that take forever to negotiate (unless you are paid for consulting services during the same time). Remember, you want cash now.

• If you are a webware company, try to set your sight below the B2C castles in the clouds and look at the landscape with your feet on the ground. Most innovative B2C webwares can also be positioned as B2B2C products and, thus, have a stronger reach and value within a B2B2C architecture. Look at it this way: 1) You don’t have the money to “buy” users; 2) virality is not always miraculously fast if you are not a celebrity and 3) ad-generated revenue are notoriously slow to come because of 1) and 2). So if your product is of interest to users going to your site, it should also of interest to users going to other sites that already have users. In short, if your product is useful, you will find customers. You may even find customers who will pay you for consulting services to help them design (technically and strategically) an optimal integration of your widget within their environment.

• In both cases, also look at niches – roughly speaking, at markets that seem unglamorous, may only be a few hundred millions dollars opportunity or even much less, and are allegedly of no interest to VCs (which is not necessarily true). The reality is that there are customers there that could need you and your ideas even in tough economic times (and possibly because of the recession). You will be able to refine your product away from the noise, later consider other “niches” and get larger when you feel that you have the financial stamina to scale – then, VCs will believe you when you tell them that your platform transparently spans multiple industry domains).

Millenials may have been an important factor in the election of Barak Obama. As indicated by the Tufts University’s Center for Information and Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), ‘this year’s youth turnout rivals or exceeds the youth turnout rate of 52% in 1992, which is the highest turnout rate since 1972 (55.4%) For more details, see http://www.civicyouth.org. As we get closer to Inauguration day, though, references to the Kennedy era are most likely to feed the Cable news comments. Two young presidents. Two families at the White House, and possibly a similar vision of civic duties best expressed by Kennedy’s words in his 1961 inaugural address: ” Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

As harmoniously as eras may blend and blur in our collective memory, getting a good feel of what it was to be 20 or so in Greenwich Village in the early sixties may turn to be a quite fascinating journey in time. For that, you may want to read the memoirs of Suze Rotolo, A Freewheelin’ Time, published earlier this year.

A Freewheelin’ Time: A Memoir of Greenwich Village in the Sixties. On the cover: Suze Rotolo with Bob Dylan. This is a variation of the cover for The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Bob Dylan’s second studio album (May 1963, Columbia Records).

The “red diaper” daughter of Italian “communists” who suffered from the McCarthy Era, Suze Rotolo, born in Queens, New York, was 17 when she met Bob Dylan, then 20, at the end of July 1961 at Riverside Church in upper Manhattan and soon became his girl friend. The book reads like the love story of young people in Greenwich Village in the early sixties: “During our time together things became very complicated because much happened to him so fast. We had a good time, but also a hard time, as a young couple in love.” Their existence intertwines with the lives of dozens of friends, musicians and artists, who also work at achieving greatness one way or the other. The book is an informal gallery of portraits and offers casual and pointed insights on a generation “who had permission to drink alcohol and die at war at eighteen, but had no voting voice until the age of twenty-one.” The McCarthy era was still very much present. Abortion was a highly risky choice (she had one in 1963). Unmarried couples were living “in sin.” Girls were more like “props” than fully-fledged human beings. They all fought against segregation and questioned the travel ban to Cuba (Suze was among the students who went there to test the ban).

She broke with Bob Dylan, yet continued to live in New York and remained well-known within the circles of mainstreet-cultures-to-be subcultures. Nonetheless, her humbleness is striking: after all, she did inspire quite a few of Bob Dylan’s songs! As she recounts her life more than forty years later, she has the carefree manner of young storytellers. Sure, they all were going to be stars or legends, but first and foremost, they live their lives. I like the truthful casualness of her tone. This book is no book of history (far less boring). It is not, either, just another pompous hagiographic narrative about after-the-fact heroized artists written by a scholar (far less boring also).

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

Post scriptum:

Thanks to Janet Kerr (above) for telling me about this book. Janet is a friend of Suze Rotolo. When they met, she was the girlfriend of John Herald, lead singer and guitarist of the The Greenbriar Boys and a pal of Bob Dylan. She was/is a musician (she played the autoharp), worked all sorts of odd jobs as most of the Greenwich villagers did and traveled a lot. She later became the General Manager of Pierre Dinand Design in New York (Pierre Dinand was one of the greatest, if not the greatest, perfume bottle designers of the second part of the 20th century and created Yves Saint Laurent’s Rive gauche and Opium, Azzaro pour homme, Calvin Klein’s Eternity for men and Obsession, to name a very few). She was one of the very first persons I met when I came to New York in the early 1980’s – and I was lucky to be introduced by her to the bustling life of the TriBeCa and Lower East Side.

Denise Caruso is famous, and definitely an industry icon – or rather a multi-industries icon. Yet, do we always know “well-known” people? No. The fact is that as we work ourselves like crazy, we often don’t have enough energy left to scope out the extent or the depth of the dedication that our friends put into their own work. This is what I fully realized when I read Denise’s stunning book Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet, which won a silver medal at the 2007 Independent Publishers Book Awards for science writing. The title reveals unambiguously what it is about, and if you want some sobering, hair-raising first-hand understanding of our existential slippery slopes, read this book: it’s a great science-fiction-turned-into-our-reality-autopsy essay that many entrepreneurs in life-science (and in technology altogether) may want to leverage as a springboard for creative brainstorming.

Intervention: Confronting the Real Risks of Genetic Engineering and Life on a Biotech Planet

When Denise told me, in early 2000, that she was building a non-profit foundation called The Hybrid Vigor Institute, I wasn’t quite sure what to make of it. Although we were starting to see welts on the Internet hot air balloon, it was not easy to get the reason behind such a sharp turn from someone who had carved for herself a big name as a technology journalist, columnist, and analyst – at Infoworld, Electronics, Macintosh Today, The New York Times for five years and, more occasionally, multiple other publications ranging from WIRED to the Wall Street Journal. It is only a year later, in 2001, that this move became consistent with who she was/is – and by the same token, this is also when I fully grasped the scope of what she had done in 1999 and many years before. She was telling me that her consultancy for the Pew Charitable Trusts (which focused on the development of standards and practices to improve credibility on the Internet) had morphed into the Consumer Web Watch, funded by Pew, the Knight-Ridder Foundation and George Soros’ Open Society Institute. When she had created that consultancy in 1999, I had simply looked at it as a logical sequel to her fantastic bi-weekly column for the Monday Information Industries section of The New York Times, which she had with great foresight named “Digital Commerce.” Now I was getting the picture.

As I recount this, I feel the silliness we usually feel when we suddenly realize that we have, if not missed, then at least not clearly formulated for ourselves a key characteristic of someone to whom we are close. It took me over ten years to see a common-thread-and-thrust through various initiatives that I had branded as “typical Denise.” Her insatiable thirst to know as well as her rare ability to systematically debunk BS as she used to interview entrepreneurs or industry luminaries were more than challenging them to get the truth out of them. She wanted to know what they were really doing: if/how they were really changing the world and if/how they had a clear assessment of if/how they might impact that world – or if they were only in to serve their personal or business-centric interests. All of a sudden, her sabbatical from her New York Times column in 1997 to serve as a visiting scholar at Interval Research in Palo Alto (a think tank run by David Liddle) as well as multiple academic/research positions that she took, made sense to me. She wanted to know more and better all the time.

Denise lives her life as a die-hard advocate for always more knowledge, regardless on what the technology domain is about – just as she was an early advocate of the First Amendment rights online in 1995. Her all-out advocacy style is as far removed as possible from preachy and moralistic considerations or calls for vaporous reasonableness. Yes, new technologies pose ethical and sometimes life threats. We can’t simply “abstain” as a remedy to unwanted proliferation. We can act. Denise has the pull-no-punches- approach of people who truly love technologies and question technologies all the more passionately as they are more convinced that they are also the means to address the shortcomings that inventions often generate.

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

PS- To end on a completely different note, she is not even remotely related to one of the most famous Italian tenors of all times, Enrico Caruso. 

For more details about The Hybrid Vigor Institute: http://hybridvigor.org/

For a general overview of Denise’s biography: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denise_Caruso

Peter Yared? I met him… arghh… almost twenty years ago. He was a 4D developer during his time at IDS. I lost track of him while he was Prograph and later at JRad Technologies, an enterprise Java tools company that he founded in 1995 and was acquired by NetDynamics where he stayed – until the company was in turn acquired by Sun. There, he occupied a number of positions (CTO, Application Sever Division, Researcher at SunLabs, CTO at Liberty). We reconnected through a common VC friend who had asked him to take a look at the platform of a company I was running. Our paths soon crossed again in a cryptic world for techno-freaks: he was in the “grid” genre and I was in the native implementation of XML Schemas. Maybe we always happened to do a number of cool, hair-raising stuffs at the same time after all – while webifying on separate tracks for over a decade.

His new venture is pretty neat – iWidgets. A great name too. The product enables publishers (even you and me, but also and much better for Peter’s company, large corporations) to distribute content to social networks. Yep, if you want to share that you are a fan of characters on CBS programming with your friends within your Facebook, MySpace or your iGoogle, you can. Or more generally speaking, if you want to add a third dimension to your two-dimensional Web space, iWidgets is the way to go. Think of it as a way to create stories inside stories and traverse viral channels.

iWidgets navigates in the same waters as two other companies, MuseStorm and Sprout, hotter ones, though. iWidgets is more than just cute “ready-to-use” stuff; it is also a development environment – I hate to use this expression these days, as it seems to imply that it is difficult, although it isn’t at all.  iWidgets allows you to create, customize and fully configure widgets to display content, text or media, the way you want (with the right look and feel within any given environment).  In short, you create native widgets, not strange in-laws slated to mar the family picture.

Peter is a “serial entrepreneur.” Sure, I agree with Guy Kawasaki in Reality Check that the label “serial entrepreneur” is double-edged. Yet, some of them are able to ward off the risks of self-serialization: when they do not hesitate to jump into new domains, are able to learn fast because talent is not so much to already know, as the ability to know what you don’t know, get up to speed quickly – and stumble upon the thing that not too have figured out. This creative adaptability may actually be Peter’s most permanent feature; he was born in Switzerland from a Lebanese Maronite father and a Jewish mother from Brooklyn, also lived in Turkey, Austria (speaks German), England. Incidentally he speaks French much better than what he says he does (this was his native tongue), and to end with his personal journey, he is anchored in San Francisco for good!

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

http://www.iwidgets.com/

Reality Check: The Irreverent Guide to Outsmarting, Outmanaging, and Outmarketing Your Competition

Non-profit organizations (NPO) are all the more fascinating as they must be, if not “profitable,” at least capable of operating on budget and offer some form of moral earnings and satisfaction to their patrons. Just as any business, they must show real numbers in order to justify their existence and the continued involvement of donors (think of them as angels or VCs with a passion.)

The University Musical Society (UMS) in Ann Arbor, MI (which grew from a group of local university and townspeople who gathered together to study Händel’s Messiah in 1879) is one of the oldest multi-disciplinary performing arts presenters in this country and certainly also one of the most energetic, having recently successfully concluded a $25M eight-year fundraising campaign. The amount is impressive by itself, of course, but even more remarkable are a few additional numbers reflective of the vitality of the organization during the campaign. Here are some of them:

• Attendance at UMS performances: 770,973
• Public performances offered: 582
• Total number of new works commissioned during campaign period:  30
• Educational events offered: 1,224
• Number of artists presented: 14,110 (0f which 5,998 were Michigan artists)

 Just as in any company, the key to success of a NPO is the team, and most importantly its leader, in this case Ken Fischer. I simply do not know where to start to describe this man[1]. He became President of the UMS in 1987. He breathes music. Everybody in his family is a musician or deals with music one way or another, including his son, Matt Fischer, now Director, Marketing and Partnerships, of iTunes at Apple. Ken seems to know virtually everybody in the performing arts industry and, although extremely busy, he always finds a way to make himself available to meet new people.  UMS’s inclusion policy is EINO – “Everybody In, Nobody Out” – passed down from Ken’s mentor Patrick Hayes, the legendary impresario of Washington DC.  Also, like all top players, he surrounds himself with other top players, be they employees or the multiple interns that the UMS welcomes every year.

 (Photo David Smith): Ken Fischer with Leonard Bernstein in the conductor’s dressing room at the Ann Arbor Hill Auditorium following the October 29, 1988, Vienna Philharmonic concert. All 4,192 seats were occupied, 550 of them by students who paid $10 each for a ticket. “This was the first concert I heard in Ann Arbor,” Director of Programming Michael Kondziolka, says. “I was 23 years old. That day, I knew I was not to leave this town.” 

As a newly appointed member of the UMS National Council, I was able to see for myself how well this organization is run, and how constructive budget discussions can be when a director of programming (Michael Kondziolka), a director of marketing and communications (Sara Billmann), a development director (Susan McClanahan), an education/audience development director (Claire Rice), a production director (Doug Witney) and an administrative director/CFO (John Kennard) unambiguously share the same goal of sustaining the distinctive quality of an organization as well as the continued and recurring satisfaction of its audience. A lot of VPs of marketing in for-profit companies may want to listen to Sara Billmann’s thorough reflection on the results of an extensive study she co-chaired on the motivations that drive attendance and donations for the performing arts.  She is a former oboist herself, as well as a Stanford MBA, and she gets it. She knows that, contrary to a lot of businesses, the margin of error in live arts is extremely small. And so does clarinetist Michael Kondziolka, who started his business life as the operations manager of a Merrill Lynch subsidiary in Minneapolis. No matter how you slice it, he says, “empty auditoriums show that you are not offering the right product line. This does not mean that you should only present what the public already knows. This means that you must creatively balance the season between performances that are accessible while preparing the audience for more cutting-edge productions.” The team obviously excels in risk modeling and quantification: The UMS is a recognized leadership organization that transforms Ann Arbor into a much sought-after stop for both world-class performers and music loving audiences. 

And when a NPO shows great management and great traction, it attracts not only big donors, but also a large number of smaller ones (more than 3000 individual donors made over 16,000 gifts during the Campaign).  A performing arts NPO is like a non-stop startup. You make revenues from ticket sales, but you constantly need to raise money. The minute you meet Ken Fischer and his team, the chairs of his most recent campaign (Ann and Clayton Wilhite), his Board (currently headed by Carl Herstein), or anyone who has supported the UMS, you want to contribute (and will most likely continue to do so). You are not pouring water in a sieve. You are securely investing in a sustainable enterprise that demonstrates the extraordinary appeal of live performing arts to people of all walks of life, who did not realize they “would like it so much.”

From left to right, Jerusalem Symphony with Leon Botstein, conductor, Robert McDuffie, violin (Nov. 2008); Tenor Lawrence Brownlee who will be accompanied by
Martin Katz, piano (Feb. 2009); Compagnie Marie Chouinard (April 2009). Full calendar of events: http://www.ums.org/s_current_season/default.asp

More about Ken Fischer:

[1] http://www.culturalalliancesemi.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=57&Itemid=0

More about the UMS:

http://www.ums.org/

http://www.ums.org/s_make_a_gift/

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis

I let you decide… 

Anyway, this is the question that popped into my mind when I came across this spread as I was leafing through “Modern Menswear,” a book written by Hywel Davies, and published by Laurence King Publishing Ltd, London, in April.

We all know how challenging life can be for high-tech entrepreneurs, no matter how hard they may try to look like college students claiming they always pass despite their hanging around Formica bars. Now, think of a world where starting a company is way harder than in high-tech, where chances to make it are equal to zero and where you have to look impervious to anguish at all times: the fashion industry.

Hywel Davies showcases 35 of some of the happy few designers who managed to survive – and listen to that one, the “happy few” in this industry means a few hundreds over a twenty year span, not several thousands every five years.

So, here are three of the (probably multiple) reasons why you may want to take a look at this book:

1)   To think about what “creativity” and “innovation” mean in general. You may not like what these guys do. You may even peremptorily declare that some of it is bull shiitake (or whatever animal you want to scapegoat). Now, though, reflect upon your own business: does it withstand the sentence of people who look at you from the outside? If you believe that you are misunderstood, you may realize that you do not always understand others either.

2)   To give a “different” present to people you like – the holiday season is already here. They (or even you) may not be that interested in fashion per se – but they may appreciate by an excellent art-book on contemporary demeanors and appearances.

3)   To get a feel on how you could dress sometimes. If you want to buy something from one of these designers, you may want to wait until you are funded or, even better, are profitable – if you haven’t already made it. Meanwhile, this book might be a great source of inspiration whether you want to look wild, gnarly, or add the tiny touch of quirkiness that can make conservative looks extraordinarily appealing.

The Web Neat-o type

To know more about the fashion writer Hywel Davies (whom I have never met): http://www.showstudio.com/contributors/409

He has also published another great book in October: 100 Fashion Designers (men & women), featuring designers who are still in the first decade of their career.

To know about other very interesting books from the publisher: http://www.laurenceking.co.uk/

To buy:

Modern Menswear

100 New Fashion Designers

Marylene Delbourg-Delphis