Category: Entrepreneurship

Mobile Game Helps When Work Is Absurd Drudgery

(p. A1) SEOUL–When Lee Jin-po was laid off last year for the third time in as many years, the 29-year-old mobile-game programmer expressed his frustration in his own instinctive way: He made a mobile game about it.
In Mr. Lee’s “Don’t Get Fired!,” the object is to rise through the ranks at a nameless corporation by performing an endless string of mind-numbing tasks, while avoiding a long list of fireable offenses.
“It’s just like real life,” he says.
In South Korea, where youth unemployment has hit an all-time high amid sluggish economic growth, “Don’t Get Fired!” has become a certified hit–one in a small raft of mobile games that has found success by embracing the drudgery and absurdity of work.
. . .
(p. A10) Mr. Lee later found volunteers to translate it into 12 languages, helping the international version attract another million downloads. Griffin Crowley, a 20-year-old high-school graduate in a Cleveland suburb, couldn’t stop playing after stumbling on it while fiddling with his cellphone. “Sometimes, you just have to laugh at the futility of life,” says Mr. Crowley, who recently worked a stint at a telemarketing company.

For the full story, see:
Cheng, Jonathan. “Congratulations Player One, Your Zombie Boss Didn’t Fire You; South Korean unemployment inspires games about work; laugh at chief’s jokes.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., August 6, 2016): A1 & A10.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date August 8 [sic], 2016.)

Japan Counting on Innovative Entrepreneurs for Economic Growth

(p. B3) TOKYO–Stacks of cardboard boxes serve as makeshift partitions at Mistletoe Inc.’s new office in Tokyo’s posh Aoyama district, where startups gather to work on their latest projects.
The do-it-yourself vibe–a far cry from the stuffiness typical of Japanese corporate offices–is something founder Taizo Son, serial entrepreneur and youngest brother of SoftBank Group Corp. founder Masayoshi Son, wants to see more of.
“Japan has the talent and funds but lacks the necessary ecosystem to create its own Silicon Valley, so that’s what we’re trying to provide,” said Mr. Son, 43, who describes Mistletoe as a program to cofound new businesses.
The nation that created the Walkman and the bullet train before China even had a tech industry now lags behind as Chinese Internet startups like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd. become global powerhouses. With its once-dominant technology industry struggling, Japan is counting on entrepreneurs to rekindle its hobbling economy.
The government is pledging to fund startups, top universities have launched incubators and venture funds to transform their wealth of knowledge into innovation and even Japan’s oldest and largest conglomerates, such as the Mitsubishi and Mitsui groups, are looking to nurture entrepreneurs..

For the full story, see:
ALEXANDER MARTIN. “Japan Looks to Rekindle Its Technology Innovation.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., April 11, 2016): B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date April 10, 2016, and has the title “Japan Tech Hunts for Restart Button.”)

Presence of Biomarkers Predicts Whether Checkpoint Inhibitor Works

(p. D1) A collaboration between an immunologist helping his stepmother fight cancer and the oncologist who treated her led to a discovery that could help many more patients benefit from a transformative new therapy.
A new class of drugs called checkpoint inhibitors works by releasing a molecular brake that stops the immune system from attacking tumors. So-called immunotherapy has been approved for several types of cancers and found to extend lives of patients with advanced disease for many years. The problem is that for most patients immunotherapy doesn’t work.
The researchers, from University of California, San Francisco, said they identified a unique type of immune-system cell that “robustly” predicts whether patients will respond to one of the medicines–an achievement has the potential to significantly expand the number of cancer patients who benefit from checkpoint inhibitors.
The new discovery is based on a high-tech analysis of melanoma tissue from 40 patients treated with a checkpoint inhibitor from Merck & Co. called Keytruda, which targets an immune-system brake called PD-1. Although researchers say it will take further research to determine its value in treating patients, the finding offers fresh insight into the complex relationship between the immune system and tumor cells.
. . .
(p. D3) The researchers analyzed results of a study involving Keytruda before it was approved. They looked at the CD8 cells that had infiltrated the melanoma tumors of 20 patients treated with the drug and found that if at least 30% of those cells were marked by PD-1 and CTLA-4, the patient responded to treatment. When fewer than 20% of the infiltrated cells had those markers, not one patient responded.

For the full story, see:
RON WINSLOW. “Road to a Cancer Advance.” The Wall Street Journal (Tues., Aug. 16, 2016): D1 & D3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 15, 2016, and has the title “Chance Collaboration Yields an Advance in Cancer Treatment.”)

Fracking Entrepreneur Aubrey McClendon Was Pressured by Antitrust Indictment on the Day Before Fatal Car Crash

(p. C2) Mr. McClendon, who co-founded Chesapeake Energy Corp. in 1989 and was a key figure in the shale boom that has upended global energy markets, was ousted from the energy company in 2013 over corporate-governance issues. He spent the three years after leaving Chesapeake building a new energy empire, raising more than $15 billion from investors, including major financial firms, to finance his comeback. But in 2014, oil prices plunged and natural-gas prices languished in a glut partly of his making, pressuring several of his new energy companies and making it more difficult for him to raise cash.
. . .
Exacerbating the pressure on Mr. McClendon was a federal antitrust investigation that culminated in his indictment the day before he died, on a single count of conspiring to rig oil-and-gas leases. Mr. McClendon vowed to fight the felony charge; local authorities later ruled they found no evidence of suicide.

For the full story, see:
RYAN DEZEMBER and KEVIN HELLIKER. “Oil Man Delivers for Heirs.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., Aug. 31, 2016): C1-C2.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 30, 2016, and has the title “Oil-Deal Score Helps Aubrey McClendon’s Heirs Hang on to NBA’s Thunder, for Now.”)

“Cognitive Flexibility” and “Openness to Experience” Promote Creativity

(p. C3) In a 2011 study led by the Dutch psychologist Simone Ritter and published in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, researchers asked some subjects to make breakfast in the “wrong” order and others to perform the task in the conventional manner. Those in the first group–the ones engaged in a schema violation–consistently demonstrated more “cognitive flexibility,” a prerequisite for creative thinking.
. . .
Exceptionally creative people such as Curie and Freud possess many traits, of course, but their “openness to experience” is the most important, says the cognitive psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman of the University of Pennsylvania. That seems to hold for entire societies as well.
Consider a country like Japan, which has historically been among the world’s most closed societies. Examining the long stretch of time from 580 to 1939, Dean Simonton of the University of California, writing in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, compared Japan’s “extra cultural influx” (from immigration, travel abroad, etc.) in different eras with its output in such fields as medicine, philosophy, painting and literature. Dr. Simonton found a consistent correlation: the greater Japan’s openness, the greater its achievements.
It isn’t necessarily new ideas from the outside that directly drive innovation, Dr. Simonton argues. It’s simply their presence as a goad. Some people start to see the arbitrary nature of many of their own cultural habits and open their minds to new possibilities. Once you recognize that there is another way of doing X or thinking about Y, all sorts of new channels open to you, he says. “The awareness of cultural variety helps set the mind free,” he concludes.
History bears this out. In ancient Athens, foreigners known as metics (today we’d call them resident aliens) contributed mightily to the city-state’s brilliance. Renaissance Florence recruited the best and brightest from the crumbling Byzantine Empire. Even when the “extra cultural influx” arrives uninvited, as it did in India during the British Raj, creativity sometimes results. The intermingling of cultures sparked the “Bengal Renaissance” of the late 19th century.

For the full commentary, see:
ERIC WEINER. “The Secret of Immigrant Genius; Having your world turned upside down sparks creative thinking.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Jan. 16, 2016): C3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Jan. 15, 2016.)

The above commentary by Weiner is related to his book, which is:
Weiner, Eric. The Geography of Genius: A Search for the World’s Most Creative Places from Ancient Athens to Silicon Valley. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2016.

The paper mentioned above as co-authored by Ritter, is:
Ritter, Simone M., Rodica Ioana Damian, Dean Keith Simonton, Rick B. van Baaren, Madelijn Strick, Jeroen Derks, and Ap Dijksterhuis. “Diversifying Experiences Enhance Cognitive Flexibility.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 48, no. 4 (July 2012): 961-64.

The paper mentioned above by Simonton on Japanese openness, is:
Simonton, Dean Keith. “Foreign Influence and National Achievement: The Impact of Open Milieus on Japanese Civilization.” Journal of Personality & Social Psychology 72, no. 1 (Jan. 1997): 86-94.

Startup Entry and Scaling Are Easier and Faster Due to Internet

(p. B1) The world might be a mess, but look on the bright side: Men’s shaving products are much better than they used to be.
. . .
The same forces that drove Dollar Shave’s rise are altering a wide variety of consumer product categories. Together, they add up to something huge — a new slate of companies that are exploring novel ways of making and marketing some of the most lucrative (p. B7) products we buy today. These firms have become so common that they have acquired a jargony label: the digitally native vertical brand.
These kinds of online brands aren’t new. Dollar Shave is five years old, and Warby Parker, the online eyewear company, began selling glasses over the web in 2010. But over the last few years there’s been a proliferation of such companies — into underwear, children’s clothing, cosmetics and more — and the Dollar Shave deal suggests their growing importance. These firms could become an emerging problem for consumer products conglomerates like Procter & Gamble, and they might also spell trouble for television, which relies heavily on brand advertising for its revenue.
. . .
“We think it’s a unique moment in history where you can create brands that can be scaled quickly thanks to technology, but you can still maintain a one-to-one connection that delivers an elevated level of customer experience,” said Philip Krim, chief executive of Casper, which sells mattresses online.
Mr. Krim and four friends started Casper two years ago after studying the traditional mattress industry. They discovered it was plagued by inefficiencies and annoying gimmicks. Customers had to trudge to a mattress store and awkwardly prostrate themselves on numerous surfaces before choosing one to use for a decade. There were too many choices and brands, and mattresses were expensive.
With Casper, you simply buy the mattress online and it’s shipped to you in a comically small box (the compressed foam expands into a full-sized mattress, like a magic trick). You have three months to try it out, and if you don’t like it, the company will come pick it up free.
Casper’s business model offers a break from the annoyance of offline mattress shopping. It also works out for the company. Casper advertises on social networks, on Google, podcasts and a variety of other places online; the ads are creative, convincing, targeted and cheap. By selling directly rather than through retail middlemen, the company also creates a connection with customers that allows it to test and develop new products — it now sells sheets and pillows, too.
After two years in business, Casper is on track to book $200 million in sales over the next year, but its success isn’t ensured. Precisely because the internet has lowered barriers to entry, Casper is facing a surge of new mattress start-ups like Helix Sleep, Tuft & Needle and Leesa, among others.

For the full commentary, see:
Manjoo, Farhad. “STATE OF THE ART; How Companies Like Dollar Shave Club Are Reshaping the Retail.” The New York Times (Thurs., JULY 28, 2016): B1 & B7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 27, 2016, and has the title “STATE OF THE ART; How Companies Like Dollar Shave Club Are Reshaping the Retail.”)

Patent Holder of Piggly Wiggly Self-Service Method Sued Hoggly Woggly for Infringement

(p. A11) A typical U.S. supermarket carries 42,000 items: Grab a cart, stroll the aisles and help yourself to an extravagant assortment of goods. Today it’s hard to imagine buying groceries any other way. But self-service was a game-changer when Clarence Saunders opened the first Piggly Wiggly in Memphis, Tenn., 100 years ago this month.
Before then a shopper would hand his grocery list to a clerk, who would fetch the merchandise while the customer lingered up front. That might sound appealing in this era of big-box stores with no help in sight, but at busy times the wait could stretch uncomfortably long.
Saunders, a school dropout who worked as a flour and grain salesman, had observed firsthand the inefficiencies of the rural grocers he supplied. Many of these stores, he became convinced, failed for two reasons: credit losses from customers’ charge accounts (which were then customary), and labor costs from clerks and delivery boys.
. . .
Eager to protect his invention, Saunders applied for multiple patents. His first, for a “Self Serving Store,” was granted in 1917. It wasn’t long, though, before imitators like Handy Andy and Helpy Selfy made their debut. Saunders successfully sued an especially brash copycat, Hoggly Woggly, for infringement.
. . .
Saunders didn’t integrate circuits or sequence the human genome. An observer once noted that coming up with a self-service grocery was “as simple as looking out the window or scratching your ear.” Still, it was Saunders who gambled on the unconventional approach, doggedly spread self-service across the nation and shaped the grocery industry we know today.

For the full commentary, see:
JERRY CIANCIOLO. “The Man Who Invented the Grocery Store.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Sept. 8, 2016): A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Sept. 7, 2016.)

The only book I could find about Clarence Saunders, is:
Freeman, Mike. Clarence Saunders and the Founding of Piggly Wiggly: The Rise & Fall of a Memphis Maverick. Charleston, SC: The History Press, 2011.

Sutter Headed BHAG Team that Created Boeing 747

Collins and Porras in Built to Last recommend the pursuit of Big, Hairy, Audacious Goals (BHAGs). A prime example is the Boeing 747.

(p. B9) Joe Sutter, whose team of 4,500 engineers took just 29 months to design and build the first jumbo Boeing 747 jetliner, creating a gleaming late-20th-century airborne answer to the luxury ocean liner, died on Tuesday [August 30, 2016] in Bremerton, Wash.
. . .
In less time than Magellan spent circumnavigating the globe, Boeing engineers transformed Mr. Sutter’s napkin doodles into the humpbacked, wide-bodied behemoth passenger and cargo plane known as the 747. The plane would transform commercial aviation and shrink the world for millions of passengers by traveling faster and farther than other, conventional jetliners, without having to refuel.
. . .
“If ever a program seemed set up for failure, it was mine,” Mr. Sutter said in his 2006 autobiography, “747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures From a Life in Aviation,” written with Jay Spenser.
. . .
Adam Bruckner of the University of Washington’s department of aeronautics and astronautics later described the 747 as “one of the great engineering wonders of the world, like the pyramids of Egypt, the Eiffel Tower or the Panama Canal.”
. . .
“Aviators were more than mere mortals to us,” Mr. Sutter recalled in his autobiography. “They were a different breed, intrepid demigods in silk scarves, puttees and leather flying helmets with goggles.”

For the full obituary, see:
SAM ROBERTS. “Joe Sutter, 95, Is Dead; Guided the Development of Boeing’s 747 Jetliner.” The New York Times (Fri., Sept. 2, 2016): B9.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 1, 2016, and has the title “Joe Sutter, Who Led an Army in Building Boeing’s Jumbo 747, Dies at 95.”)

Sutter’s autobiography, is:
Sutter, Joe, and Jay Spencer. 747: Creating the World’s First Jumbo Jet and Other Adventures from a Life in Aviation. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006.

Airline Startups Stall in Bureaucratic Regulatory Headwinds

(p. B4) Mr. Vallas owns California Pacific Airlines, known as CP Air, his latest venture in a peripatetic business career that has included stints in areas as varied as land development and other aviation-related ventures.
CP Air has sat on a metaphorical runway for years — engines idling, ready for takeoff — while awaiting certification by the Federal Aviation Administration.
Mr. Vallas’s patience is wearing thin. After all, he is 95, and he regards the airline as a legacy, an exclamation point to a colorful life.
. . .
. . . then there was that matter with the F.A.A. The agency has repeatedly denied applications. A letter from 2013, one of several from the agency, advised him that the application’s contents were “incomplete, inaccurate and do not appear to have been reviewed for quality.”
. . .
The government shutdown in 2013 and the F.A.A.’s staff reduction did not help matters, the agency acknowledges.
. . .
The process of greenlighting a new airline has become more complicated since Mr. Vallas sold a previous venture, a charter service called Air Resorts, in 1997.
He acknowledges the vast increase in paperwork since that era but contends that the conditions for acceptance have been met.
Mr. Vallas’s airline is not the only one that has encountered bureaucratic headwinds. Other proposed airlines are in limbo for various reasons, including Baltia Airlines, created in 1989 to fly between New York City and Russia, which still lacks the authorities’ blessing.

For the full story, see:
MIKE TIERNEY. “ITINERARIES; A Start-Up Airline Idles on a California Runway.” The New York Times (Tues., APRIL 26, 2016): B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date APRIL 25, 2016, and has the title “ITINERARIES; Start-Up Airline Idles on a California Runway, Stymied by Bureaucracy.”)

Innovations Make It Easier to Form and Run Smaller Firms

(p. B3) Unilever is paying $1 billion for Dollar Shave Club, a five-year-old start-up that sells razors and other personal products for men. Every other company should be afraid, very afraid.
The deal anecdotally shows that no company is safe from the creative destruction brought by technological change. The very nature of a company is fundamentally changing, becoming smaller and leaner with far fewer employees.
. . .
Now it is possible to leverage technology and transportation systems that never existed before. Dollar Shave Club used Amazon Web Services, a cloud computing service started by the online retailing giant in 2006 that encouraged a proliferation of e-commerce companies. Manufacturing now is just as much a line item as is a distribution apparatus. This is the business strategy of many other disruptive companies, including the home-sharing site Airbnb, which upends the idea of needing a hotel. The ride-hailing start-up Uber could never have been possible without a number of inventions including the internet, the smartphone and, most important, location tracking technology, enabling anyone to be a driver.

For the full commentary, see:
STEVEN DAVIDOFF SOLOMON. “Deal Professor; In Comfort of a Close Shave, a Distressing Disruption.” The New York Times (Weds., JULY 27, 2016): B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date JULY 26, 2016, and has the title “Deal Professor; $1 Billion for Dollar Shave Club: Why Every Company Should Worry.”)

Lack of Control at Job Causes Stress, Leading to Cardiovascular Disease

(p. 6) Allostasis is not about preserving constancy; it is about calibrating the body’s functions in response to external as well as internal conditions. The body doesn’t so much defend a particular set point as allow it to fluctuate in response to changing demands, including those of one’s social circumstances. Allostasis is, in that sense, a politically sophisticated theory of human physiology. Indeed, because of its sensitivity to social circumstances, allostasis is in many ways better than homeostasis for explaining modern chronic diseases.
Consider hypertension. Seventy million adults in the United States have it. For more than 90 percent of them, we don’t know the cause. However, we do have some clues. Hypertension disproportionately affects blacks, especially in poor communities.
. . .
Peter Sterling, a neurobiologist and a proponent of allostasis, has written that hypertension in these communities is a normal response to “chronic arousal” (or stress).
. . .
Allostasis is attractive because it puts psychosocial factors front and center in how we think about health problems. In one of his papers, Dr. Sterling talks about how, while canvassing in poor neighborhoods in Cleveland in the 1960s, he would frequently come across black men with limps and drooping faces, results of stroke. He was shocked, but today it is well established that poverty and racism are associated with stroke and poor cardiovascular health.
These associations also hold true in white communities. One example comes from the Whitehall study of almost 30,000 Civil Service workers in Britain over the past several decades. Mortality and poor health were found to increase stepwise from the highest to the lowest levels in the occupational hierarchy: Messengers and porters, for example, had nearly twice the death rate of administrators, even after accounting for differences in smoking and alcohol consumption. Researchers concluded that stress — from financial instability, time pressures or a general lack of job control — was driving much of the difference in survival.

For the full commentary, see:
SANDEEP JAUHAR. “When Blood Pressure Is Political.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., AUG. 7, 2016): 6.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date AUG. 6, 2016.)

The commentary quoted above is distantly related to Jauhar’s book:
Jauhar, Sandeep. Doctored: The Disillusionment of an American Physician. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014.