Grade A Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurial tourism… It is definitely worth flying to Detroit to spend one or two days at The Henry Ford Museum and Greenfield Village in Dearborn. It is the largest estate dedicated to the history of American lifestyles and technology innovations – and it also includes a high school! Originally called the Edison Institute of Technology [...]

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I already spoke twice about Sramana Mitra – the reality is that she writes a lot and here she is again with the third volume of Entrepreneur Journeys: Entrepreneur Journeys v.3: Positioning: How To Test, Validate, And Bring Your Idea To Market.

Sramana chooses four domains for this book: Going Vertical, Cloud Computing, Collaboration and Content Publishing. [...]

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Just finished Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It’s Becoming, and Why It Matters by Scott Rosenberg (http://www.wordyard.com) the co-founder of  Salon.com. It is definitely a must read. Writing present or quasi-present history is a difficult genre and any author will always be suspected of lacking the distance necessary to separate out the wheat from the [...]

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Life Inc.: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back starts with a telling anecdote: the author, Douglas Rushkoff got mugged on Christmas Eve in from of his Brooklyn apartment, and instead of getting sympathy, he was basically urged to shut up by local residents, afraid as they were that the incident [...]

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A 140 Sec Pitch: At TWTRCON, attendees were invited to vote for six of their favorite vendors. ObjectiveMarketer (http://objectivemarketer.com) was one of them. Amita Paul, the company’s founder, got the opportunity to pitch her product in front of the audience.  I am not sure she used up her 140 seconds, actually, but one thing was clear in [...]

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While the media may have found Twitter, only 5% of Americans are currently using it, according to a research performed by Harris Interactive in April. This doesn’t mean that Twitter is a fad. The adoption of new behaviors is generally a much longer process than is usually anticipated by innovators and early adopters. The truth of [...]

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“Cisco TelePresence. Bringing people and countries a little closer together. That’s the human network effect.” A company mantra is good when it can be memorized outside the company, and even better when it is also embraced by its employees. This is clearly the case of 22-year old Marie Gassée, who joined Cisco in August 2008 [...]

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The entrepreneurial spirit is complex. Sometimes it makes you create companies; sometimes the startup is just yourself, as you keep on developing your multi-faceted persona and meaningfully contribute to the success of a large diversity of ventures.  The latter characterizes a long-time friend, Melissa Eisenstat.

She worked for me in my first company in France very [...]

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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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In the very early 1990’s, whenever the Apple guys wanted to showcase great software to showcase themselves, they would invite the two women who had probably first founded companies focusing on software for desktop computers in the Silicon Valley, Heidi Roizen in the US (who started T/Maker with her brother Peter Roizen in 1983), and [...]

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