Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Steve Blank reports that the Kauffman Foundation Founder School part 2: The Lean Approach lectures are now available. Professor Blank provides notes with time marks for each video to highlight key points on Customer Development. The Lean Approach lectures can also be found at the Kauffman Foundation website.

The NY Times has posted the article How to Get a Job at Google by Thomas Friedman. According to the article, hiring managers at Google are looking for five key traits in job applicants. These traits include:

• Loves to learn and can process in real time.
• Steps in as needed to provide leadership by taking ownership to solve a problem.
• Has the humility to learn from errors and mistakes.
• Collaborative
• Adaptable

These traits would be of value to most any company.

CB Insights reports on the top VC investors by exit activity. Twenty-two corporate and venture capital investors reported 40 or more M&A or IPO exits since 2009. The firms with the most exits include:

• Intel Capital
• Accel Partners
• New Enterprise Associates
• KPCB
• Sequoia Capital

The report indicates that M&A was the dominate exit by a wide margin.

Michael Fitzgerald at the Pacific Standard reports on How Parents Shape Their Kids’ Risk Tolerance. When parents include their kids in the family decision making, the kids' risk tolerance and trust levels will resemble their parents levels. Trusting tool little results in lost income and trusting too much results in being cheated more often. A small increase in risk tolerance results in a larger increase in the likelihood of being self-employed.

The TNW blog has posted Founders Salary Survey. The average salary is around $36,000 for younger entrepreneurs and $65,000 older entrepreneurs. The article provides many more interesting statistics. Lower founder pay is a good general indicator of startup success.

Simon Sinek gave the very interesting talk, Leadership Is Not a Rank, It's a Decision, at the 99U popup school. It should actually be titled the Biochemistry of Leadership and describes the biochemical reasons why we do things. When business makes all their employees feel safe even at the lowest levels, then the companies are more likely to really engage and serve their customers.

The Stanford Center for Professional (SCPD) has posted the Best Practices for Managing and Measuring Partner Relationships webinar on YouTube. Professor Lynda Kate-Smith describes the process and tools to develop and manage partner relationships. Partnerships can do huge things for your company when integrated into the company's business plan and managed formally.

The HBR says Don’t Build Your Startup Outside of Silicon Valley. If you start a tech company outside of San Francisco bay area, New York, and Boston, then the odd are stacked against you. Outside of these hubs, it's harder to raise money, it takes longer to raise money, it decreases your odds of being acquired, and talent is harder to find. Yikes.

Tina Selling from Stanford University describes The 6 Characteristics of Truly Creative People at a 99U conference. The talk summarizes her book Ingenious and describes how to set yourself up to be creative.

The Stanford Center for Professional Development (SCPD) hosted the Managing Project Uncertainty webinar and it is now available on archive. Professor Sam Savage provided an overview of using statistical analysis in managing a project. He gave examples to show how project tend to be late, over budget, or how profit projections are always lower than projected. The examples files are available from his website too. These tools use Stochastic Information Packet to model projects and projections. The tools use standard functions in MS Excel.