Azure Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with over $650 million under management, has been remarkably successful since its inception a little over ten years go. One of its no less exceptional achievements is the number of women CEOs they back in the 23 companies in their active portfolio: five, i.e., over twenty percent! I doubt that any other fund of this size or greater even comes close to this percentage. So I sat down with Cameron Lester, one of the founding General Partners, to know more about how this happened.
“Biases are detrimental to making good investment decisions.” Did Azure follow a specific strategy? No. Cameron is very clear: “It’s not something that we went out with a strategy to accomplish. Rather it was something that developed through the natural process by which we invest.” This process is noteworthy in itself: the strength of the partnership is based on its ability to perform and leverage bottom-up, heavy industrial research, which means identifying meaningful and large opportunities before they emerge as trends to most other VCs and the general public. This knowledge-based, rational methodology enables the firm to keep away from fads and focus on what companies actually do and the relevancy of their product. This approach also curbs the temptation of indulging in standard sociological patterns and typical biases. “A person walks in this room,” Cameron says humorously, “a great presenter, Harvard or Stanford MBA, has worked at Apple or Google. They’ve been backed by maybe another great venture firm that could talk about how great they are. They are really confident, etc. The bias is ‘I don’t care what you say’ because in my mind I am thinking ‘you know what you are doing’. You have the right background. You are 33 years old. Right buzzwords. The space sounds really cool. Check… check… check… ‘Let’s back you.’ The way we do our research is fundamentally different.” What matters to Azure are interesting areas that they have identified themselves as promising, and from there they try to find the startups that fit within the model of what the partnership has decided it is going to invest. Of course, the strength of the CEO does matter, but if that CEO isn’t a male from Stanford, that’s OK. “Biases are detrimental to making good investment decisions. “When we looked at VMWare, we looked at a company with a very unique solution to a fundamental problem and we ended up funding Diane Greene.” VMWare was one of the first companies Azure backed, and they have no reason to regret it! Incidentally also, Azure threw away another bias at the time. It invested in a husband-wife company, as one of the other founders was Diane’s husband, Mendel Rosenblum. “And we continued along…” A great precedent can’t be discouraging, of course. “The women CEOs that we backed have been very strong performers. Azure currently supports Deidre Paknad (of whom I spoke in an earlier post and attracted my attention to Azure Capital!), CEO of PSS Systems, Karen Vergura at ezRez, Tracy Randall at Cooking.com, Lisa Stone one of the three women founders of BlogHer, and very recently, Wendy Lea, the CEO of Get Satisfaction.
“You always want to invest where other people aren’t focused” Cameron is not making any generalization on the style of women-CEOs, well aware that however rewarding working with the women CEOs they have in their portfolio has been, the current sample is still too small. More importantly, this is not even a relevant topic per se, and this is precisely what is great about the whole story. The driving force in Azure’s investment decisions is the very nature of the business companies are in, not the gender of their founders or any other bias. Business women can only benefit from this straightforward objectivity!
Interestingly enough, such freedom from gender prejudice itself drove highly valuable investment decisions. Because of it, Azure was able to get interested in gaining “insight into what’s happening in the female community, particularly as it relates to social media. It has less to do with women CEOs, but gave us an investment theme — and my partner, Mike Kwatinetz, has the credit for this process. In 2006, we were looking at the social media space. Our conclusion was that investing in another teen-oriented social media company would have been kind of investing in the nth company in the space. The winners had already been backed, this was our view. So, instead of trying to invest in the early adopter demographics, we looked at the most valuable demographics from an advertizing perspective and found out that women controlled over 80% of all consumer purchases. To be ahead of the curve, we looked at companies that would address these demographics. Our first investment is more related to parents, and is Education.com, a company that we incubated. The other was BlogHer. We got very lucky because we financed it in May of 2009, when the VC industry went into hiding; so we were able to invest at a very opportune time for us in a company that was just picking up steam. In the first case, the CEO is a male [my note: the CEO is a black man, Ronald Fortune]. It didn’t matter to us, but it’s an example of how our research process drove our investments.”
So, what would happen if all the VCs were both gender and color blind? It might be less of a challenge for women to get funded – provided that they have a VC-fundable business.
While Silicon Valley remains a powerful magnet for entrepreneurs, quite a few locations in the US also offer friendly entrepreneurial ecosystems. That’s definitely the case of Ann Arbor in Michigan, an incredibly energetic University town with a real quality of life, a highly educated workforce… and one of the best music organization in the country. Ann Arbor consistently makes the “Best Of” lists for education, culture, creativity and lifestyle – and Ann Arbor SPARK rightfully claims to be a “driving force in establishing the Ann Arbor Region as a desired place for business expansion and location.”
So, if you are an entrepreneur, here is a good reason to move to Michigan. Participate in the Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition, an international business plan competition designed to highlight Michigan as a great venue for innovation and business opportunity. “With more than $1 million in cash winnings, plus in-kind awards of services, staffing and software, the Accelerate Michigan Innovation Competition is the world’s largest business plan competition.”
The prizes are definitely worth it, with a grand prize of $500,000, $150,000 for the runner up, and nine additional prices of $25,000 for best in nine categories (Advanced Materials, Advanced Transportation, Alternative Energy, Defense & Homeland Security, Information Technology, Life Science, Medical Devices, Next Generation Manufacturing, Products and Services). So hurry: the first set if deliverables is due by October 6, 2010. Check the Eligibility & Rules as soon as you can (it’s a straightforward one-pager, easy to read and understand), as well as all the Deliverables & Dates. For complete details: http://www.confmanager.com/main.cfm?cid=2235&nid=14328
If you have never been to Michigan, buy a plane ticket and see the Ann Arbor region with your own eyes. Five years ago, I had no idea of what it looked like. I was born in France and I have lived in California for over twenty years – and now, I look for every single pretext to fly over there!
Winning this competition is an excellent reason to settle there — and no sacrifice at all! All the more so as Michigan has great business ties with virtually every part of the country, especially with California. Incidentally also, don’t forget that Larry Page was born in East Lansing (one hour away from Ann Arbor) and holds a Bachelor of Science degree in computer engineering from the University of Michigan!
Thanks to Jennifer Owens, Ann Arbor Spark’s vice president for business development, for alerting me on this remarkable initiative!
Just received a review copy! Everything about this book makes you feel well!
1) The title is downright uplifting: You’re better than your job search. Most people look for a job these days may be somewhat nervous. More often than not, there is a “better” candidate. With hardships, self-esteem tends to go down; so the idea that one would be better than one’s job search can only help.
2) The design of the book by Priest + Grace: We are getting so used to improvised covers, hasty layouts, inconsistent graphic guidelines that this book comes across as a courteous homage to the reader – and the divider pages separating sections look like great summary posters.
3) The two authors Marc Cenedella, the founder of the Ladders, and Matthew Rothenberg, the Ladders’ Editor in Chief are sincerely “rooting for you” as they guide you through the job seeking process.
4) And, of course, the content and the author’s straightforward approach. The book is more specifically targeted towards people earning 100K+, but is a great guide for everybody. So “before you jump the gun and start applying for jobs (…) take a little time to read this book.”
Regardless of where you stand on the totem pole, looking for a job is always nerve-racking. Sometimes, it’s like shopping for clothes. You see a suit in the windows and you believe that it’s exactly right for you, soon to find out that something that goes amiss. It doesn’t perfectly fit, because of a little something in the design or a little something in you – and as you ponder over possible adjustments, another person comes by and the suit slips through your fingers. The book takes you through the eight key steps of a job search.
– Starting your job search: Take the time to think about all the aspects of the process, from defining your goal, crafting your personal elevator pitch, to becoming aware of how long it will take you to actually land a job, and all the steps in between. So from the very beginning, go through the checklist related to all the components involved.
– Your resume: You want to survive Applicant Tracking Systems (ATS). Yes, your resume must include all the relevant keywords, but don’t think that you can outsmart them that easily. It’s a machine, but a machine that, in the end, often reads humans quite well. Also, if you want to gloss over a few snags in your job history, don’t forget that credibility matters.
– Personal branding: You want to impress, no doubt, so show the excellence in you and as you want it to be perceived; express your arete, an ancient Greek term that the authors quite relevantly use, and dress the part.
– Networking: You need to leverage all available resources to reach out to people and to be reached. Social Media tools are a powerful way to expand your field of vision as well as your visibility, provided that you have a clear strategy and know what you want. Optimize your profile for search, but never forget that in all cases, you must create trust.
– Interviewing: Great step forward – but it’s easy to blow it. Come prepared to the teeth about the company for which you interview. The meeting is not so much about you, your life and your exploits. It’s primarily about what you can do for others, and make sure that you adjust well to the environment that is used for the interview: phone and Web interviews are now common (I would add that they are far trickier for foreigners than for native speakers).
– Work/Life balance: Another interesting chapter. Not quite what you would expect, but a great way to look at your time between jobs. Don’t let stress paralyze you, be flexible, and stay in good shape mentally and physically: “if your job hunt is getting you down, take the weekend and blow off some steam.”
– Salary negotiation: Yes, few professional conversations are “more awkward,” so glean the authors’ tips to establish some comfort zone in you.
– First 90 days in the job: That’s the happy ending. Prepare to feel stupid, though, if you don’t want to come across as an awful brat.
Books related to job search can’t be too fancy – understandably so. But they can be more of less informative and more of less efficient at convincing you to reflect on the current best practices (not quite the same as ten years ago!) and to apply them to your personal case. Even if you want to believe that you know it all, read this excellent book first: you may be convinced that you are a “highly experience,” “seasoned,” “world-class,” superlative executive. That’s not enough: Make sure that others are convinced too after you sell them your story!
Clearly, it’s not your average “networking event.” It’s a true party with no name tags, where guests from diverse worlds enjoy a relax atmosphere, discover new things and participate in live activities — such as glamming up at the makeup stations, experiencing an Eye-Fi studio photo-shoot or watching designers’ clothing via Internet-connected touch-screen signage powered by the Intel® Core™i7. It’s a global, inclusive show, where you come nicely dressed (“chic and elegant” is the recommendation) and will see dozens of people who may be more daring than you are, but with whom you will gladly share a festive environment. Don’t go to this event to tell everybody that you are looking for a job or that you are a “world class” expert in this or that. Come if you are a real person, able to communicate with only a few words (it’s too noisy for your latest pitch, anyway). Hold off the technobabble; just be a soft conversationalist and relish the enchantment of a moment.
There is no reason to separate technology from lifestyles. Not only is technology part of our lifestyles, but technology itself is increasingly dependent on stylistic trends – and the ability for product designers to anticipate or capture what will be “it.” With Digital Summer, Eliane achieves two goals: “I attend a huge number of technology events and I am always sorry to find out that there are few women. So when I designed the first Digital Summer, I decided 1) to partner with Girls in Tech because I wanted women in technology to feel welcome and 2) to involve the design teams that create the technology products that we buy. So the idea is to gather around a technology event people who rarely show up.” So, you won’t see ugly products, and maybe you will discover the Vivienne Tam‘s HP mini!
Get hip… And take that California trip, and “get your kicks” a few blocks away from route 80! You are allowed to like fashion, because it’s not only kosher, but also completely normal these days! If you don’t, you might be downright uncool. That’s a change in the Valley that I personally like. When I came over here at the end of the eighties, I had to carefully hide the fact that I had spent quite a few years in the fashion industry and written a few books on the topic for fear of coming across as techie illiterate in the midst of know-it-alls in their post-hippie “casual” wear or standardized business suits that reeked of the seventies to me although they were in their thirties. Of course, you aren’t required to obsess over your clothes and be aware of what’s in at each season, but you certainly lose impact when you discuss the next hottest thing in social media if nothing sparks about you, or places you in what is in the air — the little fancy something that emphasizes your personality. Nobody asks you to turn into a shopaholic townie or to hire professional image advisors (usually godawful dogmatic creatures). Think of it this way: fashion is more about eliminating unwanted weary yester-looks. Technologies do evolve. Looks do too and fashion is a way to revamp oneself now and then. Thank you Ubergizmo!
Note: Objective Marketer is one of the partners of the event – in charge of the social media strategy. More later!
If you are interested in social media and community management, you probably read Jeremiah Owyang’s Web Strategy on a regular basis – and if you don’t, subscribe now! Jeremiah, an industry analyst and founding partner of the Altimeter Group, has been analyzing social media trends and technologies, as well as their impact on corporate marketing strategies, since 2007 when he joined Forrester. How do you become one of the most knowledgeable people in the field in three years or so? By combining a long-nurtured passion with long working hours: Jeremiah did not jump into the field overnight. His immersion into social media dates back from the time he joined Hitachi (2005) and became their blog program manager and blog evangelist.
Perform, Inform, Transform: That might well be Jeremiah’s motto. Perform in all senses of the terms, actually. Jeremiah comes from a musical background: he started to play the piano at age four and graduated in music performance from San Jose State. “I realized that wasn’t my calling and there were other ways of fulfilling my desire to perform,” he says. So he went for bachelors in business administration, market research, and Internet marketing at San Francisco State University School of Business, and decided to perform on a different type of keyboard, the computer keys.
Music performers draw their energy from the combination of an inner strength and their ability to connect with an audience. So do high quality social media performers. “I draw my energy from interactions online or in the real world,” Jeremiah says. This energy is itself supported by an enormous amount of foundational work. Three years ago, he was tracking a handful of companies; now in many of the social media categories he has created, he sometimes has over a hundred companies to track. Two researchers help him out, of course, but most of the legwork he does himself before sunrise, and he takes about three to four hundred formal briefings per year – and this does not include the continuous informal briefings he gets at all times, in social media conferences and meetings of all kinds. That’s a lot of diffuse energy to manage and absorb, for sure, yet one of Jeremiah’s most remarkable treat is his calm – as well as his exquisite politeness.
Jeremiah’s heedfulness is a major reason for his ability to distinguish trends from fads, separate the wheat from the chaff and provide meaningful market categorizations and advice for entrepreneurs and companies alike. So don’t expect him to endorse your company just because you believe it’s cutting-edge or groundbreaking. If it really is, he won’t forget you at the right time. His blog is definitely one of the most detailed ones in the social media industry and I haven’t seen him miss anything of value – even better, when he does, he graciously addresses any lapse. Because his purpose is clear: to inform, provide insight to make a difference, and ultimately help companies transform the way they communicate with their customers.
Living by Objectives: When I was thinking of this post, I was considering something around the idea of “Jeremiah Owyang unscripted” only to realize that it didn’t really make sense, for Jeremiah doesn’t follow a prepared script in the first place, and therefore doesn’t have to stray away from any. You can’t really split Jeremiah into a public persona on the one hand, and a private one on the other with a different character. He isn’t a split individual. It’s as simple as that. Such personal unity shows a lot of strength and courage – starting with the guts to do something you really like! His life gravitates around his job — and he did choose what he does: “I was tired of working at Corporate for other people. There is no such thing as a career path. When you take a look at a career path and you compare to an org chart you know what you notice? The org chart gets smaller at the top; so if everybody is given a career path, that means that most of them stop.”
And Jeremiah wasn’t going to let his destiny fizzle out: “You are your own CEO. You are in charge of your destiny and career; you are responsible for educating yourself, marketing yourself, supporting yourself, training yourself, leading yourself and protecting yourself financially. Even if you make 30K a year you’re still your own CFO, you should be protecting your monetary assets. Your time is very valuable and the way you use it to grow yourself. That’s my belief.” By doing so you can include into your professional life everything that might otherwise be called “leisure time.” That’s the purpose of the Operation Blue Water. “It’s a personal goal,” he explains, “not tied to any organization. Here is how I see how to work and fun. A lot of people work all their lives and when they retire they want to go to the beach or travel the world. My point is: if that’s your goal, integrate it into your life now. Make that part of your job. Don’t wait! Whatever your passion is. I love Hawaii and I want to be there 30 days a year. The trick here is this should be net positive, meaning I am not paying to be there. I told everybody about my goals and people got very excited, and a few of them hired me. The interested thing about personal goals is that you may not always hit them, but at least you did more than the year before. I am always going to do one or two weeks out of the 4 weeks. It’s a start. I love traveling and get paid to travel.”
Leadership outside starts with leadership inside. With Jeremiah, what you see is what you get: focus and an authentic kindness. Careful, however: kind and focused people hate to waste their time – That’s what the culture of performance is about!
Incidental note: We all know that the Silicon Valley is a melting pot of nations thriving on an earthquake bedrock. Very few people have deep roots here, but Jeremiah does. He is a 5th generation Chinese American Bay Area. His grand-father’s grandfather was the Chinese Consul General in San Francisco between 1890 and 1913. His great grandmother, Faith Sai So Leong, was the first Chinese woman dentist in the country.
How much do you really know about PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing? If you are not sure – or even if you believe you know a lot – I do recommend that you read PPC Marketing: An Hour A Day by David Szetela, the owner and CEO of ClixMarketing and Joseph Kerschbaum who recently joined the company as its Client Services Director. This book is a must read if you want to either enhance or perfect your understanding of an advertising genre that is not even ten years old and is growing faster than other forms of online advertising. It’s very well written and addresses marketers as well as the rest of us – because in the end, we all are both advertising recipients and initiators. The book is designed as a monthly methodology course that takes you through all the key concepts and processes involved in PPC marketing. Yet, the outstanding readability of the text makes it a fantastic book on the commercial depths of the Internet for non-specialists.
Direct Internet advertising, a science, an art… and a sophisticated iterative process. PPC advertising is all about constant attention to your users and customers – it’s a bottom up process, just like in all form social media campaigns. You can’t throw your mesage out there and wish for the best – because more often than not, nothing will happen; but if you work at it properly – you will get phenomenal results. So, first define what your strategic goal is about, and then implement it knowingly. Chapter after chapter, the book takes you from understanding why keyword research is one of the most important tasks in the discipline of PPC marketing, how “squeezing meaning and motivation into a tiny space” when you create an ad is a skill by itself, or how to maximize traffic as well as conversion of visitors to customers. Google is a huge network, but you must develop best practices and techniques to get results – as you also should for the Microsoft or Yahoo! networks. So build up your knowledge, test and optimize everything you do iteratively. As Dave sums it up: “Success in advertising is based on the mechanics of getting the advertising pieces into the hands of the right people, finding the right target audience, creating persuasive language and images and improving efficiency over time.
Even if you do not want to build your PPC campaigns yourself, real familiarity with PPC marketing is a must-have in 2010, even if you hire the right people to do it for you. Of course, one of the best companies you might consider is actually Dave’s company, ClixMarketing. There two main reasons for this:
A field-tested competence: Dave has been involved in direct marketing for twenty years. After nine years at the University to become a scientist just like his father who had worked for United Technologies for thirty-five years, he dropped out six months before finalizing his Ph.D. in Chemistry with a minor in Computer Sciences. He had gotten obsessed with the Apple II and decided that the personal computer industry would be his world. So he joined one of the first magazine publisher on the the Apple II to combine his love of the computer industry with his love of writing … and I found another love: direct (snail)mail advertising. From that day on, even after he joined Apple Computer as Developer Services Manager, he had one goal: Inform and advertise users and customers effectively? When PPC advertising started to really take shape in 2003, Dave started ClixMarketing.
A practitioner engaged in your success: One of the main competitive advantages of ClixMarketing is that they charge their clients based on the performance of the advertising campaigns: “We decided,” Dave says, “that the usual method for charging clients based on how much money is spent on advertising is anachronistic and provides only an incentive to spend more money with no guarantee of wider impact. ClixMarketing takes responsibility for the results and takes a share of it.” Very few agencies (if any) operate this way in the United States. There are reasons to this. While it’s extremely attractive to clients, it’s difficult to manage for traditional ad agencies. Many of the factors that are crucial for profitability have to do with the way visitors behave when they get to the site and traditionally ad agencies do not get involved in page and site design and optimization. The strength of ClixMarketing is its ability to provide a holistic approach and efficiently interact with the design and optimization and processes – that’s the big plus of an agency that was digital native from day one.
Engage is the name of the game. Engaging in a bottom-up strategy is the name of success on the Web. It’s social in nature, whether you befriend people or advertise what you do. PPC Marketing is the art of interacting with people on their own terms. You must find them. You must speak their language, and in the end you must be truthful. That’s the type of advertising people actually like: it’s not blasted into their face, but part of their own discovery process.
Disclosure note: I have known Dave Szetela for twenty years, when he was working at Apple. He was a fabulous resource for Apple developers, always ready to find a solution (and never afraid to hear about an issue). We have remained friends since then, and I must admit that he trained me about PPC. Incidentally, Dave is a fantastic musician too. Some of you may remember the band that was playing at Esther Dyson’s or Stewart Alsop’s Conferences. He was the one who initiated the trend. We talked about it recently. “I had formed an opinion that there was a disproportionately large number of musicians in the personal computer industry,” he recalls. “Clearly there was some correlation between programming and enjoying/practicing music. I was testing this theory when I met Roger McNamee, the founding partner of the venture capital firm Elevation Partners. We created the band “Random Axes” and always had great concerts.” My take is that Dave had a lot to do with Roger McNamee turning into a touring musician (along with his wife, Ann, a music theory Ph.D). Please take a look at Ann Atomic and of course at Moonalice!
As far as I am concerned, I have “formed the opinion” to reuse Dave’s word that musicians have the most essential quality required for social media: they interact with an audience, and when they don’t, they fail!
I recently went to a master class given in the context of the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (BASOTI), an intensive summer program for pre-professional singers founded by Sylvia Anderson in 1992 that my daughter Sophie Delphis is currently attending. This master class was given by BASOTI’s Artistic Director, Yefim Maizel, a well-known and remarkable stage director. After graduating with a master’s degree in violin from the Riga Conservatory in 1980, he earned his master’s degree in opera stage direction from the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1987 and moved to the United States in 1989.
Yefim Maizel‘s master classes are different from the ones generally offered to students pursuing singing and opera — that are provided by famous opera singers or esteemed teachers who concentrate on technique and vocal interpretation. Maizel comes to the master class form from a director’s point of view and focuses exclusively on helping singers make an aria comprehensible and believable to people who, more often than not, do not understand Italian, German, French or Russian. And very quickly, his teaching evolves around a key double-statement: Understand what you say and live it out through meaningful gestures. Yes, it’s that simple, except that it’s awfully hard. For singers – and guess what? — for entrepreneurs, too.
Here is one of the main reasons why people don’t care too much about opera: They don’t understand, and singers rarely help them because many of them do not have a thorough understanding of what they actually sing, of the words – and as a result, they are unable to act out these words accurately. They have an idea of the general meaning of what they sing, but rarely a true comprehension of the words themselves and their connotations: in other terms, of the details that give sentences their structural thrust. As a result, singers often indulge in meaningless, approximate or irrelevant gestures, and even worse, reproduce what other singers or teachers have done before, removing themselves even further from any direct comprehension of the actual pulse of the text they sing. For example, why do so many tenors let their arms dangle along their body or keep them on a table as they invite their beloved Manon to share their vision of future happiness in the country side, when a more natural move would be to extend one arm towards the horizon in order to enable both Manon and the audience to project themselves into the paradise of brooks and foliages they are summoning? Sure, the music is divinely romantic, but as Maizel said for another aria: “Don’t float in the music, actually exist in it, cut through it.” Open up, tap into real emotions and into what the words actually mean, give the whole story, and expose a life to which people can relate through concrete moves, gestures and focus points. All of the six singers I heard improved by an order of magnitude when they started to engage their audience through a deeper awareness of the meaning of what they were saying. They began to turn into real people involving the audience into their thought process – conjuring up the secret magic that drives believability.
Every entrepreneur getting ready to pitch anybody should just watch this type of master class to get a sense of how things either resonate or vanish into thin air. Not only is learning through analogy a powerful way of reflecting on one’s own art and demeanor, but entrepreneurs are actors in many respects. Entrepreneurs do play a role, a role that they have created for themselves (and hopefully is close to them), and they have to connect to stage/company partners and to their audience — customers, partners, VCs, etc. Just as singers, when entrepreneurs give their pitch, it’s very easy for them to basically only go on script rather than remembering that they must actually believe in what they are saying. They have to keep in mind that they are trying to sell what they have in exactly the same way a singer has to sell to an audience on what his or her character is trying to say.
So forget about all the vague industry buzzwords that don’t rhyme with anything in you. Don’t strike unnatural poses, move your hands, your head or your body with a purpose – and sing your story with the right tone and intensity – the right voice pitch — to make it easier for people to relate to you!
If you are interested in Jewish studies and read French, here is yet another great book: Jean-Richard Bloch ou A la découverte du monde connu : Jérusalem et Berlin (1925-1928). The book includes two fascinating essays by Jean-Richard Bloch (1884-1947) Le Robinson Juif, written in 1925 and Mitropa (i.e. Europe of the middle), written in 1928, which had only appeared in magazines. In addition, the book presents the personal letters that Bloch wrote to his wife at the time, and contain fantastic, unfiltered background information to both texts (that Bloch had actually planned to publish in a book, but never did).
Initiated by prominent historian Michel Trebitsch (1948-2004), whose preface to Le Robinson Juif is included, the project was carried out by Wolfgang Asholt, Professor at the Osnabrück University, who prefaced Mitropa, and by my sister, Claudine Delphis-Goettmann, Professor at the University of Paris VII, who put together and annotated the correspondence.
Jerusalem and Berlin: two different worlds of the twenties reunited by a common denominator, a then well-known French author. Like many intellectual Jews of the time, he looked for novel cultures – a world without borders, beyond entrenched ideologies, that would enable both Jews and non-Jews to share a common humanist faith in progress and peace. The creation of the University of Jerusalem, for which inauguration* he was invited, sounded to him like “a natural letter of universal naturalization”: “If so many men came over here from all the corners of the world, with so much trust and hope, it’s because today as we have fallen into allotments, particularisms, nationalisms where the mind, the very free mind, is undergoing a balkanization process, eyes eagerly look towards all the pieces of universalism that remain among the peoples, towards everything, wherever in the world, that tells us about unity and restores the big dream of mutual understanding, something that — madly, maybe — humanity keeps on pursuing.” Kfar Yeladim (the village of the children) was yet another sign of a new future to come. In Tel Aviv and in the “mystic Valley of Galilee,” any Jew from any part of the world, regardless of his/her history, beliefs, or political denomination was like Robinson, finding the island where it’s up to each and every one to create a meaningful future.
The Spielberg Jewish Film Archive – Kfar Yeladim (in 1930) – Silent with Hebrew inter-titles.
As he hung out in the bars, theaters and salons of Berlin, Bloch similarly experienced the German youth’s need for pervasive changes poised to destroy the “old gothic cell,” and relegate to the history books the images of tanks that plowed the villages of Mitropa and killed a whole generation of young men. The “neue Sachlichkeit” (the “new reality”) provided an unconventional perspective on the world, and unprecedented beats, “the tempo of a new Berlin,” fully international, resounded in the ebullient street scenes and avant-garde theater stages. “I live in such a whirlwind,” Bloch wrote to his wife as he worked on his play with Karl Heinz Martin and Piscator. He experienced the same joy as he traveled to Leipzig, where he met with his friend Wilhelm Friedmann, who welcomed all the French authors! Then, absolute bliss in Vienna, too. Berlin had spread its modernity throughout Mitropa.
Jerusalem and Berlin: Two complementary utopias, and dozens of friends or common friends whom Jean-Richard Bloch saw or heard about, whether in Palestine or in Mitropa. As he visited the Jewish Library of Jerusalem, he found that the librarian, Bergmann, was a schoolmate of his friend Paul Amann. As you read Bloch’s letters to his wife (and the three hundred plus footnotes that my sister added to tell you who is who!), you experience two phenomenal cultural melting pots, where you often meet the same people or people who know one another, as well as their amazing constructive optimism.
Yet, here and there in these two very modern essays, you can’t help think that clouds were looming – and that the “old reality” never really disappeared. The League of Nations that was to secure the Jews of Palestine and the peace in Europe was to be unable to fulfill the promises of its idealist mandates – “of preventing war through collective security, disarmament, and settling international disputes through negotiation and arbitration.” Jean-Richard Bloch, as most Jews, had to come to the realization that having been French for generations and fought in the WWI by no means equaled to personal security. Bloch emigrated to Russia, and coming back to Paris early 1945, found out that his second daughter, France, had been arrested as a resistant in 1942 and executed in Hamburg in 1943, and that his 86 year-old mother had died in Auschwitz in June 1944.
Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success… It’s most everybody’s dream, and the title of a very useful book by Kathryn Ullrich, a high tech and consulting executive recruiter at Kathryn Ullrich & Associates located in the Silicon Valley. The book is the result of the Getting to the Top career development programs, a series of seminars and workshops that have been held in Stanford and UCLA business schools since 2006. Each of them had a functional focus: VP Marketing, VP Product Management, VP Sales, VP Bus Dev, VP Strategic Alliances, CEO, COO, General Manager, CIO, CFO.
There are numerous books related to improving one’s skills in marketing, sales, product management, and basically any of the typical corporate functional areas, and tons of books focusing on leadership. Yet, there are very few practical guides, if any, that deal with career development itself, and respond to the seemingly simple question: I am a small biz specialist in a mid-sized company today, how will I become one day the CMO of a Fortune 100? This question is at the back of the head of thousands of MBA students, yet, more often than not, they spend exorbitant tuition costs and hardly get any form of response to their simplest existential problem. You are trained. You are happy to find your first job, and after that, you are pretty much in the wild, haphazardly jumping from one position to another across various companies based on a random variety of criteria: better pay, closer to home, nice boss, trendy area, or whatever. Ten years later, a recruiter looks at your resume, and has the feeling that you have zigzaged through your professional life quite a bit. Or have you? Does what you did reflect a career strategy that you knowingly — or unknowingly — followed? It’s up to you to make it come across, though. It’s up to you to convey your own credibility.
Obviously, you can’t know it all and plan it all when you are 25 (that’s often the sign of conventional bores), but as you evolve, you start to have an idea of what you ultimately want to be at down the road. So sit down, and go through the personal assessment that will enable you to identify the guidelines that traverse your career to both leverage your past course and get better control over your future. However, this doesn’t mean that you should remain deaf to unexpected opportunities. While it’s true, as Kathryn acknowledges very early on in her book, that the vast majority of people now get their jobs through their network, and that not all hiring decisions are not based on requisite skills or experiences, it’s also true that zero sales and marketing experience will be a problem if you apply for a position as VP of Channels and Strategic Alliances or that a total of lack engineering skills are likely to make you a mediocre VP of Product Management. You’ll get on the nerves of engineers in no time!
The particular interest of Getting to the Top is that it’s really one of the very first books to lay down typical career paths in a no fancy way, with real examples of real people. Kathryn’s purpose is not to establish normative criteria and tell you Here Is What You Must Do, but to honestly provide you with typical career paths through true-to-life examples to help you plot your own course and assess where you are at any given point. Stop wondering about what it takes to become a VP: be aware of the definition of the role, check if you have the crafts usually expected in that role, if you have the tactical and strategic skills that are expected and the type of experience that will enable you to succeed. This book will save you a lot of time – as well as spare you from disappointing interviews. Yes you can be lucky and land a job above your actual qualifications, but guess what! You may also be miserable (or ridiculously unfit for the task and suffer from it). Frankly, how good of a CEO will you be if you have no strategic perspective, if you don’t give a damn about what customers think, if you hate to communicate or respond to the (sometimes petty) concerns of your direct reports? In other words – if you have no leadership. Nobody is entitled to anything, but success is within your reach if you are realistic. So look at the stars but keep your feet on the ground and read this no BS guide! Your career development is not only your responsibility, and rising to the top means understanding your goals, developing, and sticking to a career strategy, even as it evolves.
I had the pleasure of welcoming one of the co-founders of LinkedIn, now its CTO, Jean-Luc Vaillant, on a panel on social media for business organized by the French-American Chamber of Commerce that I moderated. I had little to do, as I had remarkable panelists: Kelly Graham from Cisco, Ken Kaplan from Intel, William Gaultier from e-Storm and Harry McCraken from Technologizer. Jean-Luc was the tech guru of the group. Vibrant, crisp, and guess what? just as business-savvy as everybody else – for he is one of these die-hard engineers for whom building things that work for people is a must.
Although the phrase “social media” did not exist in 1996 (it was coined in 2004 by Chris Shipley), Jean-Luc’s Vaillant’s life in this country is all about social media and social networking. He came from France to the Silicon Valley thanks to a job posting on a newsgroup (comp.lang.c++.thread) that specialized in parallel programming in C++. Although job postings were unwelcome in this tiny world of hyper-techies, somebody from Fujitsu was desperate enough to find an engineer with a strong experience in Solaris, C++, parallel computing, and highly scalable system to take the risk of upsetting the community. This was Jean-Luc’s good fortune, as he was wondering how to come to the US, where he had only spent six months as an intern at Bell Labs. He was hired over the phone and obtained his visa. On November 1, 1996, a date that he still cherishes, he landed in San Francisco with his kids, his wife, and his luggage to join a fascinating project, WorldsAway, a new species of online service and one of the first virtual worlds, “part chat room, part adventure game, part puppet show, part simulation,” which Robert Rossneydescribed extensively for a Wired June 1996 article called Metaworlds. A fabulous experience. “Who doesn’t dream of creating a whole new world?” he likes to say. This was also the beginning of a long-lasting relationship with Reid Hoffman, who was the general manager and product manager for WorldsAway. who left to start Socialnet.com during the Summer of 1997 – Jean-Luc joined him in May 1998.
“I came for a great project, WorldsAway. But the whole thing fizzled away. There was a big problem with the business model, and ultimately, it wasn’t my thing to work for an established company. As soon as I set foot in the Valley, I felt that I had to be part of what this place was really about, new entrepreneurial endeavors. So I joined Socialnet.com enthusiastically.” The company was eventually acquired by Match.com, but it expanded Jean-Luc’s experience in a big way. The focus wasn’t to be part of a newsgroup as he had been, nor was it about building a virtual community as in WorldsAway, it was about matching people to one another, facilitating their ability to connect. To this day he is still proud of the matching engine (“still the best dating matching system IMHO” he writes on his LinkedIn profile) that he built with his team. Incidentally, he also met three of the additional co-founders of LinkedIn, Allen Blue, Yan Pujante, and Chris Saccheri.
“Once an engineer, always an engineer.” Jean-Luc continued to expand his understanding of the social Web. It was not enough to have people connect optimally, maybe they could also share objects. This took him to join Spotlife, which offered a stored video service within Yahoo Mail to bring personal video broadcasting to the masses, and ultimately Logitech (which acquired Spotlife). He became the technical manager for Quicksend, a photo sharing service and took charge of the IM Companion product, a P2P video application for instant messaging. But as extraordinary as Logitech had become under the guidance of Guerrino de Luca, the call for more entrepreneurship was stronger than job security, even if the family had welcomed a third child in 2000. So in 2002, after working for five companies in seven years at an unabated pace, he joined the gang of buddies that was to start LinkedIn.
As he tells it: “We were brainstorming on what our next startup would be and around the Summer of 2002, Reid pinged me on a new idea. The idea was to create a company around the Internet consumer without having to get a crazy amount of funding to acquire members. At the time there were companies like Hot or Not with a traffic explosion, but they had no way to monetize. Between us all we had an amazing experience on all the aspects of viral marketing on Internet as well as the social networking power of the Web. So we created a prototype. In the beginning it was supposed to be a sort of week-end hobby. But very quickly, Reid felt that there were other companies in our space. We were faced with the risk that somebody would be first on the market. Ryze.com was founded late 2001 by Adrian Scott to help people leverage their business networks. Plaxo launched in November 2002. We had to get serious and we did. We all decided to leave our day job. The company was launched in December 2002 and by March 2003 the core team was in place.” The rest is history. LinkedIn is the most valuable business social network, and potentially, a critical platform for any consistent business-driven social media strategy. Meanwhile, Jean-Luc remains incredibly simple and I am impressed to see how open he was to the questions or suggestions of numerous budding entrepreneurs sitting in the room where I moderated my panel.
Azure Capital, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm with over $650 million under management, has been remarkably successful since its inception a little over ten years go. One of its no less exceptional achievements is the number of women CEOs they back in the 23 companies in their active portfolio: five, i.e., over twenty percent! I doubt that any other fund of this size or greater even comes close to this percentage. So I sat down with Cameron Lester, one of the founding General Partners, to know more about how this happened.
While Silicon Valley remains a powerful magnet for entrepreneurs, quite a few locations in the US also offer friendly entrepreneurial ecosystems. That’s definitely the case of Ann Arbor in Michigan, an incredibly energetic University town with a real quality of life, a highly educated workforce… and one of the best 
Just received a review copy! Everything about this book makes you feel well!
If you are interested in social media and community management, you probably read Jeremiah Owyang’s 
How much do you really know about PPC (Pay-Per-Click) Marketing? If you are not sure – or even if you believe you know a lot – I do recommend that you read 
I recently went to a master class given in the context of the Bay Area Summer Opera Theater Institute (
If you are interested in Jewish studies and read French, here is yet another great book: 
Getting to the Top: Strategies for Career Success
I had the pleasure of welcoming one of the co-founders of