Entrepreneurship & Innovation

Clayton Christensen streams live Feb 27 at 4:30 PM. The topic is disruption in journalism. As a kid were are told to behave, but as an adult we are told to be disruptive. Anyone sensing some irony here? Great photo by the way (wish it was one complete image).

MIT review has posted their list of the 50 Disruptive Companies 2013. The list covers companies in 8 sectors and groups them into five categories as shown in the list below.

• Biomedicine
• Computing & Communications
• Energy & Materials
• Internet & Digital Media
• Transportation

New companies this year include Amazon, Corning, Dow Chemical, and Mozilla to name a few. Companies retained from last year include Google, IBM, and SpaceX again to name a few.

HBR gives Nine Practices to Help You Say No. The key step is to know what important to you. Without this, work can overwhelm all your free time.

The WSJ reports the top 50 startups for 2012 valued under $1B.

The Funding The Best In Global Innovation II conference is being held in NYC on February 20-21, 2013. Some of the speakers include:

• David Pakman (Venrock)
• Ben Siscovick (IA Ventures)
• John Frenkel (ff Venture Capital)
• Matt Truck (Bloomberg Ventures)
• Bruce Taragin (Blumberg Capital)
• Kirill Sheynkman ( RTP Ventures)
• David Aronoff (Flybridge Capital)
• Esther Dyson

The AlleyWatch website reports an interesting list of the the 50 VC and Angel Investors Every Entrepreneur Should Know. The list of companies that they have invested in is just impressive.

Etsy has adopted a culture of diversity and gender diversity in particular. Etsy was able to increase the number of female engineer hired into the company by %500 in one year. Etsy offers grants to women to go to hacker school. It's turns out to be difficult to get women engineers to changes jobs so hiring senior women engineers is difficult. Etsy sponsors junior engineers and gets to know them through hacker school. This allows Etsy to hire more women engineers and reduce the risks of bring in someone that is not a good fit. Hiring standards are maintained as the schools standards are high and new employee work hard to get in to the company.

It's full of bloggers. The WSJ has 24ish industry leaders discussing entrepreneurship and building new business at Accelrator central.

Bloomberg posted an interview with Marissa Mayer CEO of Yahoo at the World Economic Forum at Davos. This is the first interview she has given since becoming CEO. She think the personalization is the future of the web and Yahoo. She spent months getting to know the team and strengthening the culture. The focus seems to be on mobile and using search to make the user "the search term" are at least part of it based on the context of their location past searches, and social connections. She thinks giving up some privacy gets you a lot of functionality, but that information is the property of the user and should be portable. I wish the interviewer was more tech savvy to ask how this type of thing works.

Entrepreneur Diana Kander has posted her five 2013 prediction about entrepreneurship at the Huffington Port. Her prediction cover crowd funding, entrepreneur education, startup communities, what investors want, and corporate and government innovation. It should be an interesting year should her predictions happen.