Grade A Entrepreneurs

Last week at a famous bookstore chain, the young lady at the cash register asked me if I had a coupon. “Yes,” I said. “It should show on my account.” “No, it doesn’t work that way,” she replied tersely. “You have to print it.” “Kind of a waste of paper,” I remarked. “It’s not my […]

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I had lunch with Dominique Gibert earlier this week at one of my favorite Parisian haunts, the Brasserie Lipp, Boulevard Saint-Germain. Dominique is the founder of Diateino, the French publisher of Guy Kawasaki’s The Art of the Start and Reality Check as well as of Seth Godin’s Tribes, three books that I translated for her. […]

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Alain Calefas, Serenity Valley founder, with Michel Serres at DBF, a networking organization for French entrepreneurs, on November 2, 2009. That day, Alain Calefas was interviewed by Jean-Louis Gassée (who co-founded DBF in 1994). Alain Calefas graduated from the French Ecole Polytechnique, arguably one of the most elitist schools in Europe. To get in, you […]

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About two weeks ago, everybody was talking about the amazing discovery that a painting catalogued as German, early 19th century, by Christie’s in 1998 and offered for $19,000 was an unknown Leonardo da Vinci worth a fortune. How can the experts be now so sure? “Start with instinct, then try a multispectral scanner (from Lumiere […]

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When famous CEOs tell their stories, you are never quite sure if they their goal is self-aggrandizement or an authentic desire to recount something that will be of real interest to others. Marc Benioff has lots of reasons to be very proud of accomplishments, but his book Behind the Cloud: The Untold Story of How Salesforce.com […]

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Written by Chris Brogan and Julien Smith, Trust Agents: Using the Web to Build Influence, Improve Reputation, and Earn Trust is for everybody, including folks who think that they have already achieved the status of being “trust agents,” and who believe they know all the ropes and tricks of the social media business. I say this from […]

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About 40 students of the INSEAD business school from both the Singapore and the Fontainebleau campuses spent the week in Silicon Valley and attended various presentations and lectures, all remarkably coordinated by Dominique Trempont (left on the picture with three students, Mauricio from Colombia, Fawad from Pakistan and Philipp from Germany). I already spoke about INSEAD […]

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There is often a very special high energy about startups — all types of startups. That’s what I felt when I arrived at the RESONANZ opening gala. A non-profit organization, RESONANZ is starting its first year as a new three-weeks program for young singers in Albany, N.Y. How do you start something in the midst […]

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I just finished reading Sramana Mitra’s Entrepreneur Journeys: Bootstrapping: Weapon Of Mass Reconstruction, the second volume of her Entrepreneur Journeys series. Great title: Yes, small companies and mom-and-pop businesses are the very texture of this country (as they are all over the world), and some of them can be grown to a significant level and address […]

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Do you imagine a world without Yahoo!, Google, eBay or Paypal? Would these companies have existed without Jerry Yang (Yahoo!) who was born in Taipei, Sergey Brin (Google), whose parents came from Russia when he was six, or Pierre Omidyar (eBay), an Iranian born in Paris or Max Levchin, an Ukrainian Jew (Paypal)? What would Intel […]

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