Entrepreneurship – Page 159 – artdiamondblog.com

Myhrvold Left Work with Hawking for the Excitement of Entrepreneurship

(p. 139) Microsoft was represented ¡n the discussion by its senior vice president for advanced technology, a thirty-five-year-old Nathan Myhrvold. After finishing his Ph.D. at Princeton at age twenty-three, Myhrvold had worked for a year as a postdoctoral fellow with the physicist Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, tackling theories of (p. 140) gravitation and curved space-time, before taking a three-month leave of absence to help some friends in the Bay Area with a software project. He became caught up in the excitement of personal computer software and entrepreneurship and never went back. In Berkeley, he co-founded a company called Dynamical Systems to develop operating system for personal computers, which struggled for two years until Microsoft bought it in 1986. At Microsoft, he persuaded Bill Gates to let him establish a corporate research center, Microsoft Research, with Myhrvold himself in charge.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

James Morrison Was a “Retailing Genius”

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

(p. A13) Morrison was not an inventor-capitalist but a retailing genius, more Sam Walton than Steve Jobs. He catered to England’s growing consumer class by diversifying his wares and, in his ever-growing network of shops, introducing luxurious showrooms. He was a disciple of volume, seeking “high turnover, small profits, and quick returns.” He sent his traveling men not to find buyers, as was typical, but to find the best suppliers. Advantageously purchased in bulk, goods would sell themselves. Morrison’s buyers were specialists, anticipating the practices of later department stores. He kept his finger on the pulse of fashion and on “market making” events. Legendarily, he was never caught short of black crepe when a member of the royal family was ill. “The Duke of York has died most conveniently,” he once quipped while tallying profits.
The “Napoleon of shopkeepers” went on to found his own merchant bank and accumulate a prodigious investment portfolio, much of it in American bonds. Strategic lending to broke aristocrats greased Morrison’s way into Parliament, where he served as a “radical Whig,” championing political reform and free trade.
. . .
. . . Morrison conducted both his retailing and his banking business with impeccable transparency. The investments he sold were honestly structured, and the risks he ran were his own, backed by sufficient collateral. Morrison’s was an era before bailouts, an era of some moral luck but little moral hazard. Markets rose and fell with reasonably predictable effects. For him and many of his contemporaries, credit remained a personal matter of the highest consequence. In this, alas, a character such as Morrison now seems more alien than familiar.

For the full review, see:

JEFFREY COLLINS. “BOOKSHELF; King of the Shopkeepers; The lessons of a merchant prince and a brilliant retailer whose wool, linen, silk, thread and lace flew off the shelves.” The Wall Street Journal (Mon., March 5, 2012): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)

The book under review is:
Dakers, Caroline. A Genius for Money: Business, Art and the Morrisons. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012.

Oswald the Lucky Rabbit Returned to Disney After 78 Years

Do you recognize this rabbit? Source of image: online version of the Omaha World-Herald article quoted and cited below.

The story of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit is one of entrepreneurial resilience. Walt Disney was duped out of his legal rights to Oswald. Instead of fighting it out in court, or giving in to discouragement, he shortened Oswald’s ears and transformed him into a mouse with a new name.

(p. 2E) LOS ANGELES (AP) – One of Walt Disney’s oldest drawings is seeing the light of day after being locked away for nearly 40 years.

A rough 1928 image of Oswald the Lucky Rabbit, the wacky predecessor to Mickey Mouse, was brought out of the Walt Disney Co. archive this week and showcased at an event unveiling “Disney Epic Mickey 2: The Power of Two,” an upcoming action-adventure game for the Wii, PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 that allows players to control both Mickey and Oswald.
The mischievous Oswald was co-created by Disney before Mickey, but he was lost in a 1928 contract dispute with Universal Studios. Oswald hopped back to Disney in 2006 when CEO Bob Iger brokered a deal that sent sportscaster Al Michaels to Universal-NBC. Oswald’s first appearance since his return came in 2010’s “Epic Mickey” as the ruler of a forgotten realm.

For the full story, see:

DERRIK J. LANG. “Disney image displayed for first time in 40 years.” Omaha World-Herald (Sun., March 18, 2012): 2E.

The Project Entrepreneur Does Not Sell Out Soon

“Dropbox founders, Arash Ferdowsi, left, and Drew Houston, won Best Overall Startup at the Crunchies in San Francisco earlier this year.” Source of caption and photo: online version of the WSJ article quoted and cited below.

(p. B6) Arash Ferdowsi was a Massachusetts Institute of Technology student when he met fellow MIT student Drew Houston through a mutual friend.

The pair collaborated, working from a Cambridge, Mass., apartment, to solve a modern-day problem.
They created a virtual file cabinet that would make it possible for users to access piles of documents, spreadsheets, photos, music and videos from their laptops, tablets or personal devices.
After launching Dropbox Inc. in June 2007, they relocated to San Francisco. Mr. Ferdowsi dropped out of MIT.
. . .
WSJ: Before Steve Jobs of Apple Inc. died, he approached you with a buyout offer. Why did you turn it away?
Mr. Ferdowsi: The problem that we’re trying to solve is a problem that only an independent company can solve. We want to let you use a Mac, or Windows PC, or iPad, or Android, without having to think about any of the technical details. It isn’t a problem any of those larger companies is going to be as inclined to solve in the same way we are.

For the full interview, see:

ANGUS LOTEN, interviewer. “HOW I BUILT IT; Dropbox Seeks Big Solutions.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., March 15, 2012): B6.
(Note: ellipsis added; bold in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview is dated March 14, 2012.)

Diamond to Teach Economics of Entrepreneurship in Fall 2012

Some Questions to Be Discussed:

• How can policies encouraging innovative entrepreneurship help us recover from the current economic stagnation?

• Are innovative entrepreneurs smarter, or less risk-averse, or more intuitive, or more determined, or more frugal, or nobler, or greedier, than the rest of us?

• Can economic historian John Nye defend his claim that successful entrepreneurs are “lucky fools?”

• What is the role of entrepreneurship in the process of creative destruction, and what is the role of creative destruction in making our lives longer and better?

• Would labor be better off in an economy in which innovative entrepreneurship is encouraged?

• Why does economist Will Baumol believe that too much higher education can discourage successful innovative entrepreneurship?

• What are the most promising sources of financing for successful innovative entrepreneurship?

Lasseter’s Success Came from Seeing How the Details Affected the Storytelling

(p. 138) “I had no reason to think it would be any good,” recalled Barzel, who was then a recently minted California Institute of Technology Ph.D. on the lighting team. “I knew John was absolutely brilliant as a animator of shorts. But I’ve read authors who write good short stories and crummy novels; I figured it’s a different skill. I had no reason to think John would have the skill to pull off a full-length movie.”
He expected something that animators and animation buffs might find interesting, but that probably would not have a particularly wide audience.
“I joined because I wanted the practical experience,” he said, “I thought, Well, it’s going to be the first full-length [computer-animated] movie, so it’ll be a fun thing to have been associated with, however it turns out.”
What finally made Barzel a believer was watching Lasseter at work. He found that Lasseter had an uncanny ability to shift between the macro level of the entire film and the micro level of whatever detail he was dealing with at the moment. “Looking at an individual frame — it’s meticulous work– he would always be aware of its role in the larger context of storytelling,” Barzel recalled. “He’d say something like, ‘This is the first time this character responds to that situation; it’s really important that he get the right glint in his eye.’ ” Barzel started to think, John knows what he’s doing. This movie could be really good.

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: italics and brackets in original.)
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)

Lean Start-Ups “Ruthlessly Cull Failures”

Eric Ries and his book. Source of photo: http://nemonics.files.wordpress.com/2011/11/eric-ries-lean-startup.jpg?w=584&h=262

(p. D3) “What’s different in the Valley is that we’ve found a quasi-scientific method for reinventing businesses and industries, not just products,” said Randy Komisar, a partner in a leading venture capital firm, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers, and a lecturer on entrepreneurship at Stanford University. “The approach is much more systematic than it was several years ago.”

The newer model for starting businesses relies on hypothesis, experiment and testing in the marketplace, from the day a company is founded. That is a sharp break with the traditional approach of drawing up a business plan, setting financial targets, building a finished product and then rolling out the business and hoping to succeed. It was time-consuming and costly.
The preferred formula today is often called the “lean start-up.” Its foremost proponents include Eric Ries, an engineer, entrepreneur and author who coined the term and is now an entrepreneur in residence at the Harvard Business School, and Steven Blank, a serial entrepreneur, author and lecturer at Stanford.
The approach emphasizes quickly developing “minimum viable products,” low-cost versions that are shown to customers for reaction, and then improved. Flexibility is the other hallmark. Test business models and ideas, and ruthlessly cull failures and move on to Plan B, Plan C, Plan D and so on — “pivoting,” as the process is known.

For the full story, see:
STEVE LOHR. “Looking Backward to Put New Technologies in Focus.” The New York Times (Tues., December 6, 2011): D3 & D4.
(Note: the online version of the story is dated December 5, 2011.)

Ries’ recent book is:
Ries, Eric. The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create Radically Successful Businesses. New York: Crown Business, 2011.

Blank’s books are:
Blank, Steve. Not All Those Who Wander Are Lost. CafePress.com, 2010.
Blank, Steven Gary. The Four Steps to the Epiphany: Successful Strategies for Products That Win. 2nd ed: CafePress.com, 2005.
Blank, Steve, and Bob Dorf. The Startup Owner’s Manual: The Step-by-Step Guide for Building a Great Company. K & S Ranch, 2012.

Another relevant book is:
Maurya, Ash. Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works. 2nd ed. Sebastopol, CA: O’Reilly Media, 2012.

“Being Able to Work on a Great Project”

(p. 133) Recruiting was brisk; the magnet for talent was not the pay, generally mediocre, but rather the allure of taking part in the first fully computer-animated feature film. “Disney gave us a very modest budget [$17.5 million] for Toy Story,” Guggenheim said. “Although that budget went up progressively over time, it didn’t afford for very high salaries, unfortunately. We tried to make the other working conditions better. Just the enthusiasm of being able to work on a great project is as often as not what attracts artists and animators.”

Innovative Entrepreneurs Need to Be Able to Fire People

(p. 116) Jobs met with the remaining employees soon after the layoffs and brought his reality distortion field with him. “You’re seeing your friends packing their stuff up and pushing it out to their cars,” Phillips remembered, “and yet somehow he had convinced you that that was the greatest possible thing that could happen.”
Within the Silicon Valley community, the talk was not of the way Jobs had handled his former employees at Pixar, but of his having kept Pixar going at all. It seemed to make little sense from a business point of view. For all his bravado about RenderMan, his motivation was likely a matter of status as much as economics. After his rise and fall at Apple, the onus was on him either to create another success story or to leave his peers to conclude that the first one had been a quirk of fate.
“It wasn’t really working,” Smith said of Pixar’s early years. “In fact, that’s being kind of gentle. We should have failed. But it seemed to me that Steve just would not suffer a defeat. He couldn’t sustain it.”

The Intensity of Entrepreneur Jobs

(p. 114) As Jobs was criticizing the Pixar managers for failing to hit a delivery date on a project, Smith interrupted and said, “Steve, but you haven’t delivered your board on time”–meaning, a board for the NeXT computer.
It was the sort of remark Jobs normally might have put up with, but it seemed Smith had crossed a line by joking about Jobs’s [sic] computer. “He went completely nonlinear,” Smith recalled. “He went crazy on me and started insulting my accent.”
Jobs had homed in on a sensitive spot. Smith’s native southwestern accent, which he had mostly suppressed since his days as an academic in New York City, sometimes reemerged in moments of stress. Jobs mocked it.
“So I went nonlinear, too, which I had never done before or since,” Smith remembered. “We’re screaming at each other, and our faces are about three inches apart.”
There was an unspoken understanding around Jobs that the whiteboard in his office was part of his personal space–no one else was to write on it. As the confrontation went on, Smith defiantly marched past him and started writing on the whiteboard. “You can’t do that,” Jobs interjected. When Smith continued writing, Jobs stormed out of the room.
To outward appearances, the conflict blew over, but the men’s relationship would never be the same.

Tool Makers Cannot Predict Creative Ways Tools Will Be Used

(p. 89) Jobs had no use for small-minded naysayers. His experience had taught him that if you offered a better computer, well priced and accessible, there was no limit to what human ingenuity could achieve with it. No one, after all, had thought of electronic spread-sheets when he and Wozniak rolled out the Apple II, in 1977, but within two years, a spreadsheet program called VisiCalc–created in an attic by a first-year Harvard MBA student and a programmer friend–was one of the strongest drivers of Apple Il sales. The PIC was not a consumer product like the Apple II, but the principle was the same. “People are inherently creative,” Jobs remarked to an interviewer a few years later. “They will use tools in ways the tool makers never thought possible.”

Source:
Price, David A. The Pixar Touch: The Making of a Company. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.
(Note: my strong impression is that the pagination is the same for the 2008 hardback and the 2009 paperback editions, except for part of the epilogue, which is revised and expanded in the paperback. I believe the passage above has the same page number in both editions.)