Grade A Entrepreneurs

(also: Zeitgeist, great atypical people, books and misc.)

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Women@theFrontier: The Power of Empowering

August 21st, 2011 · 1 Comment · Entrepreneurs, Talents, Innovators

Earlier this week at the Tech Museum of Innovation in San Jose, CA, I was the keynote speaker at the second annual Conference of Women@theFrontier founded by Susan Fonseca-Klein, also founding architect of Singularity University, an interdisciplinary university based at the NASA Ames campus in Silicon Valley whose mission is to educate and inspire leaders to […]

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Democratizing entrepreneurship education: Sramana Mitra’s 1M by 1M program

June 6th, 2011 · 4 Comments · Entrepreneurs, Talents, Innovators

Sramana Mitra, a Silicon Valley entrepreneur and strategy consultant founded the 1M by 1M(One Million by One Million) program, “a framework for Capitalism 2.0,” she says, and which she “envisions as a distributed, democratic capitalism.” Here is what this means: Not everybody can, or even needs to, come to Silicon Valley to create a company. There are creative entrepreneurs […]

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Practically Radical by Bill Taylor: Innovation in “Vujà-dé” territories

February 15th, 2011 · No Comments · Book Review

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis Practically Radical, by Bill Taylor, the co-founder of Fast Company, is about transforming your company, shaking up your industry, and challenging yourself. Now, where do you start? Not from a vacuum: the times for dreams of starting from a clean slate and building up utopias are long gone. So, be practical. Yet […]

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The Mesh: Why the future of business is sharing, by Lisa Gansky

January 3rd, 2011 · 3 Comments · Book Review, Talents, Innovators

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis The Mesh, an old word meaning the “opening between the threads of a net” got its technology flavor with the concept of mesh networking generally defined as “a type of networking wherein each node in the network may act as an independent router.” For Lisa Gansky, in her book The Mesh, […]

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The art of continuous self-reinvention: What started Nilofer Merchant on the entrepreneurial road

December 5th, 2010 · 6 Comments · Entrepreneurs

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis Chatting over breakfast the other day at Il Fornaio with Nilofer Merchant, whose book The New How, Building Business Solutions Through Collaborative Strategy I discussed in a former post, I realized that a “new how” often starts with a “new me.” This “new me” can be triggered by unforeseen events – events […]

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From the spiritual automaton to love-inspiring Androids: Pushkin, the beauty of mechanical computing in 2010

November 9th, 2010 · No Comments · Entrepreneurs, Talents, Innovators

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis From the science of automata to love stories with androids: Think about Wilhelm Schickard‘s “calculating clock” in 1623 and, almost two hundred years later, of Charles Babbage’s first mechanical computer, the difference engine, and about the many inventions in between: Pascal’s Pascaline (1642), Leibniz’s Stepped Reckoner (1672), the dozens of mechanical […]

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Michel Serres, the “troubadour of knowledge”

November 1st, 2010 · 1 Comment · Talents, Innovators

By Marylene Delbourg-Delphis @mddelphis We just celebrated thirty years of lectures in Stanford by French Academician Michel Serres (left with Robert Harrison on his right). The party was organized by Audrey Calefas-Strebelle at the residence of Brigitte et Jean-Louis Gassée in Palo Alto, and included very closed friends of Michel, celebrated philosopher (and also from […]

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Urban Arts Entrepreneur, Matthew Kwatinetz: “Culture as an engine for Cities.”

October 10th, 2010 · 3 Comments · Entrepreneurs, Talents, Innovators

One day, Russell Willis Taylor, the President and CEO of National Arts Strategies told me this:  “Many towns look alike. There is a Starbucks at every corner. There is a Walmart in every town. But you know where you are by the art that is being enjoyed and created — that is what gives us […]

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My takeaway for entrepreneurs from the Winter Olympics: Fail-forward-fast, and fulfill the promise

February 25th, 2010 · No Comments · Talents, Innovators

In a recent powwow, I was asked about my takeaway for entrepreneurs from the Winter Olympics. As I was starting to discuss the make-up of a champion, mentally ranking key characteristics, I changed gears and realized that what struck me the most, ultimately, was the victory of Shen Xue and Zhao Hongbo in pair figure skating. Not […]

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Alain Calefas: How his entrepreneurial quest for adventure led him to create Serenity Valley next to Silicon Valley

November 4th, 2009 · 1 Comment · Entrepreneurs

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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