Entrepreneurship – Page 136 – artdiamondblog.com

Immigration to the U.S. Is the Story of Hope, Achievement, Youth, Freedom and Creation

Source of book image: http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/51VTjY0xVbL.jpg

(p. C6) In his new book, “To America With Love,” the British critic A. A. Gill attempts to make up for his fellow Britons’ grouchiness, sending the United States a frilly, funny valentine.
. . .
Perhaps the most provocative thing in “To America With Love” is Mr. Gill’s European take on our history of immigration. He argues that America over the years has been a magnet, drawing “the young and the strong from Europe; the adventurous, the clever, and the skilled.”
In the United States, “immigration is the story of hope and achievement, of youth, of freedom, of creation,” he writes. “But all entrances on one stage are exits elsewhere. In Europe it is loss. Every one a farewell, a failure, a sadness, a defeat.” Between 1800 and 1914, he says, “more than 30 million Europeans immigrated to the New World: one in four Irishmen, one in five Swedes, three million Germans, five million Poles, four million Italians. There is not a country, a community, a village or household that wasn’t affected by the lure of the West.”
As Mr. Gill sees it, much of the bitterness that animates trans-Atlantic relationships (Europeans, he says, patronize America “for being a big, dumb, fat, belligerent child”) can be traced back to this dynamic. “The belittling, the discounting, the mocking of the States is not about them at all,” he writes. “It’s about us, back here in the ancient, classical, civilized continent.”
Europe’s view of America, he contends, “has been formed and deformed by the truth that we are the ones who stayed behind, for all those good, bad and lazy reasons: because of caution, for comfort, for conformity and obligation, but mostly, I suspect, because of habit and fear. We didn’t take the risky road.”

For the full review, see:
MICHIKO KAKUTANI. “BOOKS OF THE TIMES; A Rebellious Trans-Atlantic Infatuation: Take That, Mrs. Trollope!” The New York Times (Thurs., August 22, 2013): C6.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date August 21, 2013.)

The book under review is:
Gill, A.A. To America with Love. Reprint ed. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013.

“A. A. Gill” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT review quoted and cited above.

Google’s Calico Company Seeks to Expand the Human Life Span

(p. B4) Google Inc.is backing a new company to research aging, taking an unusual business swing at the burgeoning science of extending the human life span.
The venture, which is long on goals but short on specifics, is known as Calico, and will operate separately from Google, the online search giant said on Wednesday.
“We believe we can make good progress within reasonable time scales with the right goals and the right people,” Google CEO Larry Page said in a blog post. “This is clearly a longer-term bet.”
. . .
Google provided scant details about how Calico would operate or how it would tackle its ambitions of improving the health of “millions of lives.” But Jay Olshansky, an expert on aging at the University of Illinois of Chicago, said one potentially promising path is to research therapies that target the aging process itself.
While medical research typically focuses on finding treatments and cures for individual ailments such as cardiovascular disease and cancer, “if you’re going to have an impact on human health and longevity in the future, the way to go is to go after aging itself,” Dr. Olshansky said.
A founder of a consortium called the Longevity Dividend Initiative, Dr. Olshansky said [he gave a talk at conference (sic) in 2010 in which he said that finding a cure for cancer would only extend human life span by about three and one-half years. The reason is, he said, is (sic) it would “expose people who were saved from dying of cancer to all the other diseases and disorders” that are the result of aging.]
. . .
{He said Mr. Brin attended the meeting and asked him questions about the talk. He hasn’t discussed Calico with anyone at Google–the first he’d heard of the venture was Wednesday– though he described the formation of Calico as “great news.”}

For the full story, see:
GREG BENSINGER and RON WINSLOW. “Google Backs New Venture to Research Aging.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., September 19, 2013): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added; square-bracketed words are in the print, but not the online, version of the article; curly-bracketed words are in the online, but not the print, version of the article.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date September 18, 2013, and has the title “Google Backs Venture to Research Aging.”)

Former Economics of Entrepreneurship and Economics of Technology Student Luis López Voted Crowd Favorite at Straight Shot Startup Accelerator Demo Day

“Luis López pitches his startup, CardioSys, to investors during Demo Day at Aksarben Cinema this week. The event was the culmination of a 90-day Straight Shot startup accelerator program that offered new companies networking opportunities, advisers and investment dollars. Seven startups were in the inaugural accelerator class.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

Luis López, the entrepreneur who is featured in the article quoted below, was a student of mine in both my Economics of Entrepreneurship and my Economics of Technology seminars (and before that, in micro principles). I cannot say that I taught him everything he knows, but it appears that I did not do him much harm.

(p. 1D) The same day Luis López and his brother, Danny, were accepted into Omaha’s Straight Shot startup accelerator for their new company, corporate America called.

The 25-year-old Central High grad had received a job offer from Gallup. But he turned it down, choosing to take an entrepreneurial risk over a predictable salary and benefits.
“I can always apply for a job in the corporate world,” he said, but it’s not every day that one’s company is accepted into an accelerator program that offers $20,000 in investment, more than 300 mentors and more than $75,000 in in-kind services.
The risk paid off, López said last week as the 90-day program wrapped up. The López brothers’ startup, CardioSys — which uses predictive analytics to calculate a person’s risk of developing conditions like heart disease and diabetes based on factors such as age, blood pressure and lipid profiles — came out of the program with a group of nine advisers.
. . .
(p. 2D) Luis López said CardioSys is hoping to land some investment in the next month or two, and is now looking at applying for a short-term health industry-focused incubator program in California, which the founders were connected with via Straight Shot.
In the long term, however, López said that with its strong community of medical and insurance providers, Omaha is CardioSys’ home. At Demo Day, the startup was voted crowd favorite. “I was surprised. It’s an honor to have people excited about what we’re doing,” he said.

For the full story, see:
Paige Yowell. “Straight Shot at Success; Accelerator’s First Startups Make Their Pitches.” Omaha World-Herald (SATURDAY, OCTOBER 5, 2013): 1D & 2D.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “Straight Shot Accelerator’s First Startups Make Their Pitches.”)

“Luis Lopez, who with his brother Danny Lopez, created CardioSys, gives his pitch at Demo Day.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited above.

“SEC Rules Demanded Complexity”

(p. 152) Google had considerable experience with pleasing users, but in the case of the auction, it could not create a simple interface. SEC rules demanded complexity. So the Google auction was a lot more complicated than buying Pokémon cards on eBay. People had to qualify financially as bidders. Bids had to be placed by a brokerage. If you made an error in reg-(p. 153)istering, you could not correct it but had to reregister. All those problems led to a few postponements of the start of the bidding period.
But the deeper problem was the uncertainty of Google’s prospects. As the press accounts accumulated–with reporters informed by Wall Streeters eager to sabotage the process– the perception grew that Google was a company with an unfamiliar business model run by weird people. A typical Wall Street insider analysis was reflected by Forbes.com columnist Scott Reeves, who concluded that Google’s target price, at the time pegged to the range between $ 108 and $ 135 a share, was excessive. “Only those who were dropped on their head at birth [will] plunk down that kind of cash for an IPO,” Reeves wrote.

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.

Early Funding for Ameritrade Was a Loan Secured by Joe Ricketts’ House and Car

(p. 1D) Even the oldest and most established companies were once a back-of-the-envelope glimmer of an idea.
That was the message Wednesday night from First National Bank’s Clark Lauritzen, president of the company’s FNN Wealth Management.
. . .
TD Ameritrade founder Joe Ricketts, Lauritzen said, started his company in 1975 with a First National loan secured by his car and house; the first office was in the bank’s basement. Now, the online stock brokerage employs 2,000 people in Omaha and is an industry leader.
“Joe reinvested his profits in the business year after year,” Lauritzen said.

For the full story, see:
Russell Hubbard. “Even Big Businesses Start Small, Says First National’s Clark Lauritzen:.” Omaha World-Herald (THURSDAY, AUGUST 29, 2013): 1D.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of he article has the title “First National’s Clark Lauritzen: Even Big Businesses Start Small.”)

“I Didn’t Open My Own Company to Have Someone Else Tell Me How to Run It”

“”They’re picking on my employees,” Edward Taylor, the president of Down East Seafood, said, referring to the commission.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the NYT article quoted and cited below.

(p. A16) The day after Jonathan Sanchez was released from prison in 2010 after serving three years for a burglary, he walked into Down East Seafood in Hunts Point in the South Bronx and asked for a job, and a second chance. He got both.

But now Mr. Sanchez must document the past he has tried to leave behind, in an 11-page application for a photo identification card issued by a city agency that is responsible for ferreting out organized crime. He is one of hundreds of food workers who have come under scrutiny in recent years by the agency, the New York City Business Integrity Commission, not because of any known ties to mob bosses but simply because they work for a company in Hunts Point.
. . .
“This was my brand new start,” said Mr. Sanchez, 26, who makes $40,000 a year packing lobster orders.
Mr. Sanchez said he worried that his past crime will follow him from job to job and brand him as an ex-con. “I feel violated because I don’t think those things have to be asked,” he said. “I feel that it could stigmatize me.”
. . .
Edward Taylor, the president of Down East Seafood, said more than half of his 60 employees had told him they did not want to complete the application. A couple of them have even said they would instead quit.
Mr. Taylor, who had to answer similar questions himself to register the company, said he would not have moved to Hunts Point from Manhattan in 2005 if he had known about the commission. The company, which he started in 1990 with $500 borrowed from a friend, supplies more than 700 establishments, including Dean & DeLuca, the Harvard and Yale Clubs and the dining rooms at the United Nations.
“They’re picking on my employees,” he said. “I didn’t open my own company to have someone else tell me how to run it.”

For the full story, see:
WINNIE HU. “Food Workers Criticize a Commission’s Scrutiny.” The New York Times (Sat., September 21, 2013): A16.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date September 20, 2013, and has the title “Food Workers in Hunts Point Criticize a Commission’s Scrutiny.”)

Some Entrepreneurs Are Motivated by Desire for Personal Wealth

Source of book image: online version of the WSJ review quoted and cited below.

I have read many biographies of innovative entrepreneurs. Like the author of the review of the book discussed in the passages quoted below, I believe that they have a variety of motives. But I am more optimistic than the book author that many of the entrepreneurs, those I call “project entrepreneurs,” are motivated mainly by a desire to ‘make a ding in the universe.’ Among these I would count Walt Disney and Steve Jobs.

(p. A11) Successful entrepreneurs, in my experience, are tenacious, hardheaded and creative. They persist with their ideas long after others might have given up, and they are good at persuading clients, partners and investors to take a chance. Like successful people in any field, they are driven by a powerful inner need, sometimes positive, like the hunger to do something entirely original, but often less appealing: a large chip on the shoulder, a desire for revenge, a distaste for authority and in many cases flat-out greed.
. . .
In “Worthless, Impossible, and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value,” Daniel Isenberg, a professor of entrepreneurship at Babson College and before that at Harvard Business School, offers many useful stories of entrepreneurship, culled from his teaching experience. But it isn’t until two-thirds of the way through that he torturously concedes that every entrepreneur needs a streak of Gordon Gekko.
“I have gradually come to the difficult conclusion that the burning desire for extraordinary value capture is almost a sine qua non for the supreme effort required to convert the value from imagined into tangible value,” he writes. “Personal gain is the simplest and most powerful motivation. If a person does not feel deeply that ‘This must pay off for me,’ there will rarely be extraordinary value creation.”

For the full review, see:
PHILIP DELVES BROUGHTON. “BOOKSHELF; Who Moved My Fortune? Some entrepreneurs want to do good. Many more are driven by a chip on the shoulder, a desire for revenge, a distaste for authority.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., July 31, 2013): A11.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date July 30, 2013.)

Office Design that Forces Interaction, Causes Exhaustion, Stress, High Errors and Low Productivity

(p. D1) The big push in office design is forcing co-workers to interact more. Cubicle walls are lower, office doors are no more and communal cafes and snack bars abound.
Like most grand social experiments, though, open-plan offices bring an unintended downside: pesky, productivity-sapping interruptions.
The most common disruptions come from co-workers, as tempting as it is to blame email or instant messaging. Face-to-face interruptions account for one-third more intrusions than email or phone calls, which employees feel freer to defer or ignore, according to a 2011 study in the journal Organization Studies.
Other research published earlier this year links frequent interruptions to higher rates of exhaustion, stress-induced ailments and a doubling of error rates.

For the full story, see:
SUE SHELLENBARGER. “WORK & FAMILY; The Biggest Distraction in the Office Is Sitting Next to You.” The Wall Street Journal (Weds., September 11, 2013): D1 & D3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date September 10, 2013, and has the title “WORK & FAMILY; The Biggest Office Interruptions Are… …not what most people think. And even a 2-second disruption can lead to a doubling of errors.”)

Among the academic papers referred to in the article are:
Wajcman, Judy, and Emily Rose. “Constant Connectivity: Rethinking Interruptions at Work.” Organization Studies 32, no. 7 (July 2011): 941-61.
Altmann, Erik M., J. Gregory Trafton, and David Z. Hambrick. “Momentary Interruptions Can Derail the Train of Thought.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General (Jan. 7, 2013): 1-12.

Nanny Feds Take Revenge on Zucker for Trying to “Save Our Balls”

Craig Zucker. Source of caricature: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. A11) Mr. Zucker is the former CEO of Maxfield & Oberton, the small company behind Buckyballs, an office toy that became an Internet sensation in 2009 and went on to sell millions of units before it was banned by the feds last year.

A self-described “serial entrepreneur,” Mr. Zucker looks the part with tussled black hair, a scraggly beard and hipster jeans. Yet his casual-Friday outfit does little to subdue his air of ambition and hustle.
Nowadays Mr. Zucker spends most of his waking hours fighting off a vindictive U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission that has set out to punish him for having challenged its regulatory overreach. The outcome of the battle has ramifications far beyond a magnetic toy designed for bored office workers. It implicates bedrock American notions of consumer choice, personal responsibility and limited liability.
. . .
In August 2009, Maxfield & Oberton demonstrated Buckyballs at the New York Gift Show; 600 stores signed up to sell the product. By 2010, the company had built a distribution network of 1,500 stores, including major retailers like Urban Outfitters and Brookstone. People magazine in 2011 named Buckyballs one of the five hottest trends of the year, and in 2012 it made the cover of Brookstone’s catalog.
Maxfield & Oberton now had 10 employees, 150 sales representatives and a distribution network of 5,000 stores. Sales had reached $10 million a year. “Then,” says Mr. Zucker, “we crashed.”
On July 10, 2012, the Consumer Product Safety Commission instructed Maxfield & Oberton to file a “corrective-action plan” within two weeks or face an administrative suit related to Buckyballs’ alleged safety defects. Around the same time–and before Maxfield & Oberton had a chance to tell its side of the story–the commission sent letters to some of Maxfield & Oberton’s retail partners, including Brookstone, warning of the “severity of the risk of injury and death possibly posed by” Buckyballs and requesting them to “voluntarily stop selling” the product.
It was an underhanded move, as Maxfield & Oberton and its lawyers saw it. “Very, very quickly those 5,000 retailers became zero,” says Mr. Zucker. The preliminary letters, and others sent after the complaint, made it clear that selling Buckyballs was still considered lawful pending adjudication. “But if you’re a store like Brookstone or Urban Outfitters . . . you’re bullied into it. You don’t want problems.”
. . .
Maxfield & Oberton resolved to take to the public square.On July 27, just two days after the commission filed suit, the company launched a publicity campaign to rally customers and spotlight the commission’s nanny-state excesses. The campaign’s tagline? “Save Our Balls.”
Online ads pointed out how, under the commission’s reasoning, everything from coconuts (“tasty fruit or deadly sky ballistic?”) to stairways (“are they really worth the risk?”) to hot dogs (“delicious but deadly”) could be banned.
. . .
. . . in February [2013] the Buckyballs saga took a chilling turn: The commission filed a motion requesting that Mr. Zucker be held personally liable for the costs of the recall, which it estimated at $57 million, if the product was ultimately determined to be defective.
This was an astounding departure from the principle of limited liability at the heart of U.S. corporate law.
. . .
Given the fact that Buckyballs have now long been off the market, the attempt to go after Mr. Zucker personally raises the question of retaliation for his public campaign against the commission. Mr. Zucker won’t speculate about the commission’s motives. “It’s very selective and very aggressive,” he says.

For the full interview, see:
SOHRAB AHMARI, interviewer. “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW with Craig Zucker; What Happens When a Man Takes on the Feds; Buckyballs was the hottest office game on the market. Then regulators banned it. Now the government wants to ruin the CEO who fought back.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., August 31, 2013): A11.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date August 30, 2013, and has the title “THE WEEKEND INTERVIEW; Craig Zucker: What Happens When a Man Takes on the Feds. Buckyballs was the hottest office game on the market. Then regulators banned it. Now the government wants to ruin the CEO who fought back.”)

Montessori Taught Larry Page and Sergey Brin to Always Ask Questions

(p. 122) “Their attitude is just like, ‘We’re Montessori kids,'” said Mayer. “We’ve been trained and programmed to question authority.”
Thus it wasn’t surprising to see that attitude as the foundation of Google’s culture. “Why aren’t there dogs at work?” asked Marissa, parroting the never-ending Nerdish Inquisition conducted by her bosses. “Why aren’t there toys at work? Why aren’t snacks free? Why? Why? Why?”
“I think there’s some truth to that,” says Larry Page, who spent his preschool and first elementary school years at Okemos Montessori Radmoor School in Michigan. “I’m always asking questions, and Sergey and I both have this.”
Brin wound up in Montessori almost by chance. When he was six, recently emigrated from the Soviet Union, the Paint Branch Montessori (p. 123) School in Adelphi, Maryland, was the closest private school. “We wanted to place Sergey in a private school to ease up his adaptation to the new life, new language, new friends,” wrote his mother, Eugenia Brin, in 2009. “We did not know much about the Montessori method, but it turned out to be rather crucial for Sergey’s development. It provided a basis for independent thinking and a hands-on approach to life.”
“Montessori really teaches you to do things kind of on your own at your own pace and schedule,” says Brin. “It was a pretty fun, playful environment– as is this.”

Source:
Levy, Steven. In the Plex: How Google Thinks, Works, and Shapes Our Lives. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011.
(Note: italics in original.)

Messy Offices Encourage Creativity

(p. 12) Forty-eight research subjects came individually to our laboratory, . . . assigned to messy or tidy rooms. . . . , we told subjects to imagine that a Ping-Pong ball factory needed to think of new uses for Ping-Pong balls, and to write down as many ideas as they could. We had independent judges rate the subjects’ answers for degree of creativity, which can be done reliably. . . .
When we analyzed the responses, we found that the subjects in both types of rooms came up with about the same number of ideas, which meant they put about the same effort into the task. Nonetheless, the messy room subjects were more creative, as we expected. Not only were their ideas 28 percent more creative on average, but when we analyzed the ideas that judges scored as “highly creative,” we found a remarkable boost from being in the messy room — these subjects came up with almost five times the number of highly creative responses as did their tidy-room counterparts.
. . .
Our findings have practical implications. There is, for instance, a minimalist design trend taking hold in contemporary office spaces: out of favor are private walled-in offices — and even private cubicles. Today’s office environments often involve desk sharing and have minimal “footprints” (smaller office space per worker), which means less room to make a mess.
At the same time, the working world is abuzz about cultivating innovation and creativity, endeavors that our findings suggest might be hampered by the minimalist movement. While cleaning up certainly has its benefits, clean spaces might be too conventional to let inspiration flow.

For the full commentary, see:
KATHLEEN D. VOHS. “GRAY MATTER; It’s Not ‘Mess.’ It’s Creativity.” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., September 15, 2013): 12.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date September 13, 2013.)

The main academic paper referred to in the commentary is:
Vohs, Kathleen D., Joseph P. Redden, and Ryan Rahinel. “Physical Order Produces Healthy Choices, Generosity, and Conventionality, Whereas Disorder Produces Creativity.” Psychological Science 24, no. 9 (Sept. 2013): 1860-67.