metarand

Social Business School: Harvard Points The Way

Social business, the birth of a new industry? I called it in September 2009 and since then social business has risen like a star. Sure, it has a long way to go before it becomes pervasive, but watching Harvard Business School transform itself into a Social Business School is surely a major milestone on the industry’s journey.

If you’ve read my submission to the Australian Federal Government on Entrepreneurism and Venture Capital, you’ll know I’m a huge fan of immersion-style, experiential learning. One of my key tenets is to call for the establishment of a Conservatorium of Entrepreneurship. Harvard is already moving down this path, as this article in Fast Company highlights. Well worth a read.

$100m fund sought to foster entrepreneurs

Rachel Lebihan has written a piece in the Australian Financial Review covering my submission to the Australian Federal Government’s review of the state of entrepreneurship and venture capital.

I’ve uploaded a scan of the article here and here.

WeTeachMe: A Case Study In Pure Unadulterated Hustle

It’s one thing to say, “Where there is a will, there is a way,” but another thing to go out there and put it into practice. The team didn’t want to be another startup that complains about how difficult it is to raise capital. We wanted to take matters into our own hands and do something about it. The need to stay alive was also very motivating.

We’re a strong team, and not only do we know what we have been capable of doing in the past, we know what we can do in the future, and to what extent we are willing to go to make things happen.

The Science of Startups and the Symbiosis between Entrepreneurship and Venture Capital

It’s been a really interesting week in Sydney. On Friday afternoon the latest cohort of Startmate startups strutted their stuff in a demo day to a capacity crowd at DLA Piper’s offices in the city.

Yesterday, Eric Ries spoke to another, much larger, audience on his Lean Startup theories. The auditorium at the Australian Technology Park hasn’t buzzed like that since the heady days of 1999!

Eric’s thesis that we should be measuring and managing startups in a much more sophisticated way totally resonates with me. I have been calling for a science of startups for a while now and in fact included this as one of my main points in a submission I put forward to the Australian Federal Government earlier this week. They had put out an Issues Paper calling for submissions (I understand this was targeted at certain people and organisations) on the state of entrepreneurship and venture capital in the country.

My submission (you can read the entire thing here) spoke to the establishment of an Australian Centre for Entrepreneurship & Venture Capital (ACEVC). This Centre will include an Entrepreneurship Conservatory that is focused on developing a results-based set of training programs for upskilling entrepreneurs using a real time, interactive pedagogy that will form the basis for a ‘science of startups’.

I also call for a VC College that can provide real life experiential training on the job for successive generations of Australian venture capitalists – an initiative designed to build up a true venture capital industry.

I believe that ACEVC is transportable to many other geographies so for all metarand readers from other parts of the world than Australia: feel free to adopt these ideas for your own country.

Besides Eric’s push for lean startups another great evangelist for the science of startups is Steve Blank with his recently released book, The Startup Owner’s Manual. I highly recommend both books for entrepreneurs.

Should/when ACEVC gets up and running, it will draw heavily on the the great work Eric and Steve have done so far to codify the science of startups.

Mentoring an Entrepreneurial Ecosystem: Lessons from Boston

Dave Balter and Jennifer Lum have written a piece in Inc. about mentoring and how this is helping to connect the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Boston.

It really excited me for two reasons. Firstly, I find myself formally and informally mentoring entrepreneurs on a regular basis. It is something I’d like to formalise more into a wholistic entrepreneurial coaching program. Given this, many of the points made in the article resonate with me.

The second reason for my excitement is that I am a big believer in creating truly matrixed entrepreneurial ecosystems. I’ve experienced first hand how Silicon Valley, for example, works and one of my passion areas is fostering such an ecosystem in Sydney and across the region. Sydney is currently where Boston was circa 2010. We have a solid level of entrepreneurial activity bubbling up and some high profile wins. We also have successful serial entrepreneurs returning to our positive economic climate. But we are not sufficiently matrixed.

I was talking with a colleague yesterday who, having returned from a stint working in Silicon Valley, found Sydney to be bubbling with pockets of activity, but no true connection between them and unless she was looking hard these pockets were easy to miss completely.

This article explains beautifully just what is required to create a more matrixed ecosystem. It was only once:

Boston’s start-up “ecosystem” began to deeply interconnect – like some massive neural network…the community is nurturing, embracing, and considerate of its entire being…what was once an environment of competition and posturing has been replaced by one of cultivation and brotherhood.

Are you starting to get the picture?

The momentum that’s brought Boston into 2012 is irrefutable. Everywhere you turn new nodes are being created and synapses are firing.

Similarly, Sydney can benefit from the approaches Dave and Jennifer are advocating, namely spiderweb mentorship and horizontal entrepreneurism.

The crux of the piece is around spiderweb mentorship, which they illuminate on as such:

This is about creating the strongest start-up “web” possible, by weaving an incredible tapestry of ideas and connections, allowing for random new offshoots, connecting divided webs, and oscillating the whole entrepreneurial ecosystem into action.

How can this be achieved?

They argue, and I wholeheartedly agree, that this occurs when experienced veterans (mentors) focus not on making each individual entrepreneur better, but on making the system as a whole stronger. Mentors must be open and willing to (a) connect with people beyond only those with the right “credentials” and (b) focus on the development of “web-like” interconnectivity to other mentors and entrepreneurs.

There are 5 critical behaviors mentors need to follow in order to achieve this:

1. Take the unknown meetings with ambiguous agendas.

Yes, I do this, but will counter that while I’m a big believer in serendipity it can sometimes prove frustrating and one does have to balance the number of such meetings versus those with specific business agendas.

2. Follow the law of three introductions

I like this. I’m always looking for connections across my network and love watching synapses occur when like minds meet.

3. Be constructive – and critical

Indeed. Enough said.

4. If you’re a spider, show up!

I agree that corporate execs should be more prepared to mentor.

5. Start your own web

Looking back 15 years – it was the best thing I ever did!

Ambitious Ideas: Open Sourced Drug Discovery

Paul Graham penned a wonderfully inspirational post recently in which he discussed a number of ‘frighteningly ambitious startup ideas’. Given his proclivity for software and the Internet it is not surprising that the ideas he raises were things like replacing Google’s search engine dominance and delivering us from inbox evil.

Quite separately, a colleague at The University of Sydney, Matthew Todd,  forwarded me an article overnight that he co-authored in Nature on “open science as a research accelerator’.

In the article Matthew and two others discuss how open source-inspired thinking led him on a journey to produce an off-patent drug that could help millions of people around the world deal with bilharzia, a silent pandemic.

From their perspective the key benefit of their open approach was the acceleration of the research:

Experts identified themselves, and spontaneously contributed based on what was being posted online. The research therefore inevitably proceeded faster than if we had attempted to contact people in our limited professional circle individually, in series.

While Matthew was working on open sourcing process chemistry, he posits the question whether a similar approach could be applied to drug discovery.

The pharmaceutical industry is currently undergoing somewhat of a pipeline-related crisis and so the timing could not be better for such an approach to work.

In line with Paul’s thinking this is one of those frighteningly ambitious ideas. As Matthew points out, “There has been discussion of open-source drug discovery, but no coordinated efforts at compound discovery.”

This seems to me to be an area ripe for investigation. One that could herald a new age of abundance (read Peter Diamindis’s new book on this) in health and wellness.

I hope this is a topic that will be covered at the upcoming Founders Fund future conference!

Live Board: The World’s First Digital Real Estate Signboard

I’ve recently joined the board of an innovative company operating in the real estate signage arena: Live Board.

Here’s a video of their product and the company’s CEO, Costa Koulis, talking about the market and his vision:

Entrepreneurs Tackle The Superbowl!

Wow, entrepreneurship is really taking a massive step into the mainstream. Check out this Superbowl ad:

Australia’s Technology Prowess: The Internet and Beyond

Asher Moses has written a wonderfully inspirational piece in the Sydney Morning Herald regarding the rise and rise of Australian entrepreneurial talent. In it he explores how well some of the Internet-focused startups born in Australia are doing in sourcing Silicon Valley venture capital.

It is a great story and touches on much of my experience over the past 15 years. Australia and, closer to home – Sydney, has an incredible wealth of entrepreneurs. But in Asher’s story there is also a hint at the dark side. Let me paint the picture in three ways:

1. Financial arrogance

While I was living in Silicon Valley I assisted a startup to raise its first round of funding from a tier one VC firm, in two weeks and right in the middle of the GFC. Fast forward to today and as Asher has eruditely pointed out, tier one VC’s from Sandhill Road are currently falling over themselves to get the attention of Australia web startups.

Against this backdrop, picture me meeting with a senior executive at one of Australia’s most successful investment banks in the past fortnight. In that meeting I was told how incredibly hard it is to find funding for technology businesses, how no-one is investing in this space in Australia and blah blah. Can you see the disconnect here?

I personally believe Australian ‘investors’ have a heightened level of financial arrogance driven by an absolute ignorance of technology and also tainted in their financial risk profiling by resource-based investing (mining etc).

As long as this position remains I can fully understand why Australian entrepreneurs are US-centric. For Australia though this amounts to a major loss as we are not only losing talent in droves, but also access to ROI as our entrepreneurs grow great businesses with other people’s money!

2. Technological bias

For as long as I can remember Australian government granting schemes and venture firms have had a bias against Internet-related companies. They have preferred to back biotech businesses and other science-heavy companies that are notoriously hard to scale globally and which usually have a hard time getting international attention due to the tyranny of distance.

It is heartening to see this position starting to shift and that web-focused ventures are in fact now getting more access to schemes like Commercialisation Australia.

3. Web-centrism

While I am ecstatic about Australia’s well deserved recognition (finally) for great entrepreneurial talent, I am somewhat concerned that we get seen as only producing web-centric talent and intellectual property.

The Australian Federal government pours some $9.8 billion into public research and there is incredible technology floating around within the countries 43 universities and even more public research institutes (by contrast the US only has 41 universities). However, most of this never sees the light of day. It gets locked up in over-protective tech transfer quagmires and/or stuck in the valley of death between research proof of principle and commercial proof of concept due to a massive lack of funding for this gap.

In contrast, in the UK companies like Imperial Innovations and the IP Group, and Allied Minds in the US, are absolutely going gangbusters building businesses around research intensive technologies and assisting IP through the valley of death.

Australia desperately needs a similar business and it is on my to do list for 2012 to see that one forms. We need to not only continue to support our web-centric entrepreneurs, but also inspire generations of Australians to become tech entrepreneurs in areas that can have major global impact such as energy and health!

No Joke: How to Earn $1 million in less than 2 weeks

Louis CK has proven that people are willing to pay for quality content, even if it is available freely.

The comedian put out a video of his latest performance at $5 a pop via his website. He then used social media to market it and whammo – in 12 days he amassed a whopping $1 million.

Story via Mashable.