Think back to when you were in high school. How did you do your hair? How did you dress? People generally develop a sense of personal fashion over the ensuing years into adulthood, after a few flings with different styles — and hopefully, some honest feedback from friends and family. But Susan Koger, co-founder of the independent online retailer of women’s fashion known as ModCloth, says it’s perfectly “OK to look back and cringe.” She wasn’t talking about day-glow tops and friendship bracelets, though. She was speaking at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) Seminar series, sharing advice on pursuing one’s passion, with students on the cusp of launching their own careers. Her point: Your first attempt at anything new will likely be crude, and so you should give yourself the permission to just do it. If you stick with it and get better, yes, you will probably look back years later and wince. But next to no one crushes it the first time, anyway. True, the stakes may seem higher if you’re an entrepreneur debuting your first rev to the world. But Koger, ModCloth’s chief creative officer, insists that getting started is better than waiting till it’s perfect. https://youtu.be/9aUU1_hUlEE Admitting to ourselves that we are bound to err is humbling. But in the business world, where showing confidence and competence are the norm, having humility may be what gives the entrepreneur an edge. William Marshall, co-founder and CEO of startup satellite maker PlanetLabs, also had some wise words for those interested in entrepreneurship at another recent ETL talk. Actually, he cautioned students at Stanford — all deeply immersed in the Silicon Valley vibe — against “defaulting” to a startup the next time they have an idea that seems to have business potential. Another non-intuitive bit of advice Marshall shared was to not get an M.B.A. Reflecting on his own career, the former NASA scientist said some of the best physicists he’s known didn’t study physics. “The same is true in business: The best business people didn’t study business,” Marshall says. But his final bit of advice, in the video below, was to have humility. Rather than promise everyone that you’re going to create a great product, build it first and then show people how amazing it is. Marshall says they will be much more appreciative if you take that approach. https://youtu.be/BgsueulufRE In that clip, Marshall briefly mentions hiring people smarter than you among his tips for future founders. Heidi Roizen, however, shares that same advice, but in much blunter terms. “My goal truly is to be the dumbest person in the room,” Roizen said at her ETL talk last year, titled “Adventures in Entrepreneurship.” Roizen has spent her life immersed in the Silicon Valley ecosystem, as an entrepreneur, corporate executive, venture capitalist, educator and board member for companies public and private. She is currently is the operations partner at the venture capital firm DFJ and lectures on entrepreneurship in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering. In short, she knows what she’s talking about. https://youtu.be/xtAO0poIPYE

Even for those who aim to think “outside the box,” rules and constraints aren’t always bad. They focus our thinking and remind us to be deliberate with our execution by keeping our goal in mind. So in order to thrive in a landscape characterized by unmade decisions, it’s critical to be thoughtful about what rules we create and how they might guide our choices down the road. At her recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar talk, Stanford Management Science & Engineering Professor Kathleen Eisenhardt drew on the principles from her new book, Simple Rules, on how heuristics are crafted. In the video below, we see how rule formation guides a multinational company through an uncertain future in a responsible manner: [embed]https://youtu.be/COBLkJYnaUk[/embed] Not only do rules inform intelligent choices about the way we do business, they also provide us with constraints, which, as David Heinemeier Hansson said in his 2010 ETL talk, “are your friends.” In an overwhelmingly competitive landscape, boundaries bring us face to face with a hard truth: Sometimes, you just can’t outdo your competition. But you can think differently than your rivals and, ultimately, succeed by recognizing and operating within your own zone of expertise. Amazon Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos once said: “One of the only ways to get out of a tight box is to invent your way out.” Teams and organizations that leverage their own operational limits to think more creatively about how they do business often reap the rewards of differentiation. This sort of creative exercise doesn’t just prompt us to think about how to do things faster, cheaper or better ‐ it makes us question our assumptions and sometimes reinvent ourselves entirely. Hansson — creator of the popular Ruby on Rails web-development framework and founder of the collaboration program Basecamp (formerly 37signals) — talks us through just how this looks in practice: [embed]https://youtu.be/cAr-g7gFvxg[/embed] Perhaps the most important part of developing constructive constraints in business is to first think about our own work ethic. Why do we make the choices we do? Are our own actions aptly guided by a simple set of rules? What personal limits to place on ourselves? Hemant Shah, CEO of Risk Management Solutions, underscores the seriousness of recognizing this as a means to then realizing when we should seek help from others. [embed]https://youtu.be/cOMG2hPCodA[/embed] Rules and limitations can seem like irritating constraints on what we can and cannot do. But think for a moment just how powerful they could be if harnessed in the right way: a simple set of guiding covenants that empower us to make informed choices, ask for help when necessary, and ultimately allow us to save our time and energy for the more important matters in our lives.

An entrepreneur, as the quintessential self-starter, naturally looks inward for inspiration when the road gets rockier and the hurdles higher. But no matter how awesome you are, people can’t always be walking nuclear reactors that generate a constant supply of motivation in a contained, self-sustaining way. And you don’t necessarily need to max out the memory of your tablet with a bunch of the latest books by big-name motivational speakers. You need only look around you to replenish your emotional reserves when the entrepreneurial journey begins to wear you down. Perhaps the most obvious source of motivation outside yourself are the people around you. Imagine you’re the head of a fast-growing startup, confident you’re about to receive a $50 million infusion from several large investors. Then, all of a sudden, you get a call that they’re backing out. Visions of laying off all your loyal and hardworking employees – who laid everything on the line up to this point — cause you to break out in a cold sweat. This is precisely what happened at the biotech startup Invitae at a critical point in their pre-IPO days. But the shared determination of everyone on the team, from the founders to the bankers representing them on the phone, pulled them through, Invitae President and Chief Operating Officer Sean George says in this video clip: https://youtu.be/PyVk6ZRa2cw Motivation can also be found in the mission of your venture — that is, if it’s lofty enough. Again, the path of entrepreneurship is riddled with adversity, and day after day, people will want to dismiss your idea and say you can’t do it. Sooner or later, you’ll wake up one day and ask yourself whether it even makes sense to keep going. For Ron Gutman, founder and CEO of HealthTap, his startup’s mission is “to help people live healthier, longer and happier lives” through on-demand patient treatment services made possible through an app that connects paying members with a network of over 67,000 doctors. A mission as important as that, Gutman says with a smile, “never gets old.” https://youtu.be/vCJQ5sfl_IY A less obvious, but very valuable source of inspiration is the challenge itself — but not so much in the sense of someone simply rising to the occasion. As personal-brand expert Tristan Walker described when he came to speak at Stanford last year, an obstacle is simultaneously “a blessing.” The founder and CEO of Walker and Company Brands learned this after speaking with filmmaker Tyler Perry, and he shared the advice with Stanford Professor of the Practice Tina Seelig at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series: that every challenge an entrepreneur faces yields a lesson on how to deal with it next time. In that sense, the lesson is simply a gift, Walker goes on to explain in this final clip. And once you understand that challenges are just gifts in disguise, you’ll always be able to find motivation in the face of adversity. https://youtu.be/GDzbovUjPsY

Taking time to reflect and understand what matters most to us, both professionally and personally, provides us with a strong framework for making decisions. In addition, staying clear on what matters to us often leads to a greater sense of fulfillment in life altogether. Whether implicitly or explicitly, some of our most recent speakers in the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series discuss how introspection keeps their efforts in line with their values. Joshua Reeves, CEO and co-founder of ZenPayroll, raises the familiar point that professional success does not equal personal happiness, and hence, how crucial it is to choose our path carefully. In other words, take the time to understand what gives you a genuine sense of purpose and, yes, “mission.” In college, Reeves says the academic quarter system provided built-in breaks from work to reflect on where studies were leading you. But even after launching into a career, he insists that we can structure our lives in a way that allows for periodic reflection and soul searching. That’s how Reeves realized his passion for developing technology that empowers others to do what they love. https://youtu.be/IaZ8G0xMtWw Be it during a stroll through a neighborhood park or while commuting to work, taking the time to ask ourselves questions about why we do what we do can get us back in touch with what we consider meaningful and what our real priorities are. Again, it comes down to choice, according to longtime venture capitalist Kathryn Gould. We can spend our time responding to the many opportunities that come to us, or we can choose to actively seek out the opportunities that truly excite us. For Gould, one of the first women venture capitalists in Silicon Valley, the choice was clearly the latter. https://youtu.be/bpxOWEzH-BU However, it is also important to distinguish between what we desire most deeply and when we can compromise. For John Collison, co-founder of the online payment system Stripe, it was always about creating a way for commerce to be seamless across different countries and currencies. Everything else, such as app features and design elements, become bendable means to a steadfast end. This is especially relevant in entrepreneurship, where success depends largely on constant iteration based on customer feedback. But as Collison explains, understanding when to heed others and make adjustments, and knowing when not to budge, only comes after much self-reflection. https://youtu.be/gdloi-SkTr4 There are a few principles in life that keep us on track: a strong sense of what matters, our personal values and our vision. Adopting a ritual that allows for routine reflection keeps us asking the right questions of ourselves and, ultimately, allows us to lead a more fulfilling life. So think for a moment – are your actions in line with what matters to you?

If you’re leading an entrepreneurial venture, the new year can be an ideal time for redefining and rejuvenating. In a startup’s early days, founders can code all night, talk to customers all day, while keeping a small and devoted team on track the rest of the time. But once a business grows and becomes more complex, those sleep-deprived entrepreneurs will have to let go of some of those responsibilities to focus full time on leading the company and charting its path forward. In other words, it becomes a matter of redefining the leadership role. For the final Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders talk of 2014, Ben Horowitz, of the Silicon Valley-based venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, pointed to Google Co-Founder Larry Page as a poignant example of someone who simply cannot take on everyday technical tasks anymore. “He cannot work on production products. It’s a full-time job – even for somebody who can do as many things as Larry,” said Horowitz, author of The Hard Thing About Hard Things: Building a Business When There Are No Easy Answers. “If Larry can’t do it, you can’t, either. I guarantee you.” https://youtu.be/ddxF90a6J7k A new year can also be a great time to start seeing things with fresh eyes. As she discovered while researching for her book Rookie Smarts: Why Learning Beats Knowing in the New Game of Work, leadership educator and author Liz Wiseman found that experience had the ironic effect of limiting people’s ability to see things clearly – because they often made assumptions based on previous experiences instead of being open to new data points, perspectives and possibilities. The solution, Wiseman says, is to maintain a “rookie” mindset. But what if you’re a grizzled veteran in your field who has seen and done it all before? Here, Wiseman shares how a surfer-turned-CEO, French filmmaker and accomplished scholar all found ways to return to their rookie roots and reinvigorate themselves. https://youtu.be/hbqWxM6omik Once rejuvenated, however, it’s also important to maintain perspective. A new year and a new outlook may inspire you to begin the next chapter in your venture. The challenge of building on success, whether it’s refining a product or reinventing a business altogether, is one that few in the tech sector have pulled off at scale: https://youtu.be/dxuGBfautbg In the clip above, Lewis Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic, shows cautious optimism that his software-analytics company will be able to pull it off. And yet, entrepreneurs have always been known to fixate on that next big thing. So, if the only alternative is complacency, is there really any other choice?

It can be tempting around the holidays to tune out all the consumerism. But entrepreneurs would do well to heed customer sentiment. Whether the product being built is a free app or fresh apparel, the bottom line is that, if consumers don’t want it, you’re out of business. Usually, a successful venture begins with identifying an unseen opportunity or a widely shared pain point that no one else has addressed yet. But once you figure out your solution to that problem, or your unique product, building it out before seeing what potential customers think of your idea would be folly. The financial loss from a flop is the most obvious risk. But nowadays, with the average consumer wielding the megaphone of the Internet, if a company gets it wrong, that individual can — and will — let the business and the rest of the world know about it in an instant. Especially in retail, brands no longer have the one-way advantage of dictating tastes to customers. As Tina Wells of Buzz Marketing Group says in this video clip, today, consumers dictate their desires to brands: https://youtu.be/gf-8xdY6mgE At the same time, it’s wise to look closely at cases where others got it wrong – because they can guide you toward success. This was how Method Products, the maker of hip and healthy household cleaners, managed to compete against established giants in the industry: by studying their missteps. Given Method’s niche of making only non-toxic cleaning products, the company asking customers to bring their empty containers to the store for refills would be in line with its Earth-friendly stance. But Method Co-Founder and “Chief Greenskeeper” Adam Lowry saw how others failed with that approach, and in fact, inconvenienced customers more. “You can create the most beautiful, the most sustainable product in the world,” Lowry explains. “But if nobody wants to buy it, if you don’t get a lot of people to buy it, then I would argue that it’s actually not innovative.” https://youtu.be/drSeT8pGxls And by the way, if you can’t build a great product, how can you expect to build a great company. That had a lot to do with the tremendous bust that followed the dot-com boom of the 1990s, according to Silicon Valley luminary Ben Horowitz. Investors turned to “professional CEOs” who knew nothing about building a product that customers would want and relied on these leaders to rapidly grow a company — except that it would fold just as fast because no revenue came in. Again, it all comes back to the consumer — empowered by the digital age, and as ever, holding the power of the purse strings. So take heed: https://youtu.be/CmFOzjW0ow8

November is National Entrepreneurship Month in the United States. But if you have an entrepreneurial mindset, opportunities present themselves every day – whether for a new business, or even just learning something new. The first step is noticing these opportunities. And while it may seem obvious that this requires paying attention to what’s going on around you, it is worth noting because we can all be blinded at times by our own beliefs. Inexperienced entrepreneurs can be especially prone to thinking that a personal epiphany is an opportunity, and unfortunately, pursue it without first verifying whether what they perceive is the reality. Stanford Engineering Professor of the Practice Tina Seelig, a thought leader in the area of creativity and innovation, presented a new model that maps out the process for how ideas are brought to life and what is required at each stage. Called the “Inventure Cycle,” Seelig explains here how one must observe their surroundings before envisioning an opportunity: https://youtu.be/CB_YuOuPipA Opportunities can also be found in places that others overlook or simply don’t care about. This doesn’t mean pursuing things that aren’t important, though. If you can bring passion and optimism to the table, you really can make an impact and even address one of the world’s great problems. Take home heating and cooling. In the United States, the amount of energy needed to keep every house comfy and cozy is greater than the total amount of electricity generated by all the solar or nuclear plants in the nation. The letters H-V-A-C don’t signal sexiness, but clearly, attention is needed here. That’s where Matt Rogers, co-founder and vice president of engineering of the smart-thermostat maker Nest, saw an entrepreneurial opportunity. And before that, when he was a new employee at Apple in 2005, he enthusiastically took on what was then considered just a side project: prototyping the iPhone. Sticking with it at Apple showed how “intrapreneurial” he could be, and this video clip shows how well that experience prepared him to be an entrepreneur in the next chapter of his career. “I think I’ve built my entire career – actually, probably my entire life’s work – on things that no one cares about,” Rogers says. “And I’ve actually done really well doing it.” https://youtu.be/-Iur3kn-uvU Even for the entrepreneur who has already launched a startup, day-to-day activities can lead to new opportunities if you’re observant and take action. That was certainly the case for the founders of the ticketing service Eventbrite. When they spoke last month at the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar Series, the wife-and-husband team Julia and Kevin Hartz recounted how their business goal evolved. Initially set on taking down market leader Ticketmaster, they soon realized the opportunity lying just beneath the tip of the iceberg: all the everyday events that need ticketing. “It’s everything you do in your everyday life where you gain access … cooking classes, yoga seminars, obstacle races,” Julia Hartz says in the clip below. “Capturing this opportunity that wasn’t from the get-go very attractive is why Eventbrite is here today, and why we’re seeing the growth that we’re seeing.” https://youtu.be/jx_Tq5hMbGo

Whether it’s Yahoo! buying Alibaba, or Google gobbling up Nest and Skybox Imaging, the acquisition of startups by tech giants are no longer just fodder for the business section. In today’s screen-lived age, they are increasingly the top news stories of the day. But while entrepreneurship in the tech sector can sometimes seem like a race to cash in from the moment a startup is founded — OK, for some, that’s exactly what it is — acquisition isn’t always the goal. When corporate giants snatch up smaller competitors just to show growth, it hasn’t always worked out well. And when founders allow their startup to get acquired simply for a profit, it can mean the end of a venture that might have otherwise been able to make a truly lasting impact on the world. In short, acquisitions have to be strategic for parties on both sides of the negotiations. Here, Padmasree Warrior, chief technology and strategy officer for Cisco, lays out her company’s rigorous and structured approach to mergers and acquisitions. According to Warrior, Cisco’s acquisitions fall into one of three categories: tech and talent purchases, acquisitions that fill strategic gaps with growth potential, and large, complex platform acquisitions that immediately raise revenue. For the startup being courted, the entrepreneurs behind it also face some tough questions. Although it may be hard to imagine it now, Yelp was once a scrappy upstart — rather than the modern-day Better Business Bureau it has essentially become. In the following clip, Geoff Donaker, the increasingly popular review site’s chief operating officer, talks about the company’s early decisions to turn down lucrative acquisition offers pre-IPO. While selling would’ve benefited Yelp’s founders and early investors, Donaker says it was unclear at the time what the effect would have been for the rest of Yelp’s employees and growing user community. What is clear now is that the company made the right choice. What still has some people scratching their heads is the bold decision by Snapchat’s founders to walk away from Facebook’s $3 billion all-cash offer in late 2013. In the ensuing weeks, mashable published an article in which the messaging service’s CEO Evan Spiegel explained that he and his fellow cofounders sensed desperation when Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg flew out out for repeated face-to-face meetings to convince them to sell out. “There are very few people in the world who get to build a business like this,” Evan Spiegel told Forbes for its cover story on him. “I think trading that for some short-term gain isn’t very interesting.” While some may still question Snapchat’s move, a startup assessing its own market value by seeing how much others would be willing to acquire it is not new. Here, Ed Catmull, president and cofounder of Pixar Animation Studios, recalls how the late Steve Jobs would enter into talks with other companies about selling Pixar as a tactic to determine its market worth. And Jobs, who also co-founded Pixar and was its chief executive officer, was testing the waters at a time when the movie studio was still in startup mode and struggling financially, according to Catmull.

This month, we decided to turn to our own faculty and staff for their favorite eCorner video clip from the past school year. With so many to choose from, it was interesting to discover that all the picks contained profound observations on the importance of emotional connections and focusing on what really matters in life. There is no more basic a need than clean drinking water, and yet, diseases from unsafe water and a lack of sanitation kill more people every year than all forms of violence — including war. That’s why Scott Harrison founded the nonprofit charity: water, which has funded over 13,000 water projects in 22 countries since 2006. Here, Harrison explains how leveraging the strengths of technological tools such as web-based templates, Google Maps and Twitter have allowed his organization to emotionally engage supporters in a way that few nonprofits have traditionally done. https://youtu.be/-2JvmkojPyM For Matthew Rabinowitz, technological fixes are all well and good. But the most important thing for an entrepreneur to focus on first is a problem that needs to be solved, not some technology invented in the vacuum of a research institution. Rabinowitz can certainly appreciate this academic lure. He completed his undergraduate, master’s and doctoral degrees at Stanford, receiving the university’s highest student honors in engineering and physics. While completing his dissertation, he co-founded an intelligent online merchandizing company, Panop.com, which later sold for $100 million. Then in 2003, when a family member had a child born with a genetic disease who later died, Rabinowitz began to see entrepreneurship as a way to address more fundamental problems. Drawing on expertise from his seemingly unrelated background, Rabinowitz embarked on a journey with the goal of ensuring that other families need not experience similar pain wrought by the inability to have a healthy child. He brought together a team of experts in medicine, engineering, statistics and genetics – and along with his own skills in optimization, signal processing, informatics and entrepreneurship — he founded Natera. https://youtu.be/LQWY1CWW430 For entrepreneurial thought leadership, you might not think to turn to a Hollywood legend. But during Heidi Roizen’s talk at Stanford last spring, the operating partner at venture capital firm DFJ did just that — evoking the wisdom of longtime entertainer Shirley MacLaine. Roizen, who teaches a management science and engineering course at Stanford titled “The Spirit of Entrepreneurship,” credited MacLaine with coming up with a so-called “20-40-60 rule,” which sounds like it might relate to ownership splits or stocks. What the rule actually captures is a far more important insight that is both empowering and liberating for anyone, whether you’re an entrepreneur or not: “At 20, you are constantly worrying about what other people think of you,” Roizen explains. “At 40, you wake up and you say, ‘I’m not going to give a damn what other people think of me anymore.’” Completing the thought, Roizen then finishes by saying, “At 60, you come to realize that no one is actually thinking of you.” https://youtu.be/Vxrq86WIInU

What’s bad about mentorship? Nothing really. But exploring the nuances can actually reveal some less-than-obvious benefits — especially for entrepreneurs. Isolation is a reality for startup founders passionate about their venture, who commonly find themselves working day and night in the pursuit of perfection. That sort of dedication can morph over time into an obsession that possesses a founder to hold onto control of every aspect of the business, even when help from others could take it to the next level. In his recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Series talk, Hemant Shah of Risk Management Solutions (RMS) provided a real-life example of just this scenario. Having successfully launched a software company in the unique space of earthquake-risk modeling, and securing about $3 million in venture funding based on early evidence of worth to customers, around that time, Shah said he was introduced to someone being considered as the company’s next CEO. In this video clip, Shah first refers to the person as a “colleague.” But Shah said, over the years, this colleague became a mentor who showed him how to grow the company out of its “experimentation phase” into a truly strategic and scalable business. https://youtu.be/cOMG2hPCodA Another wrinkle in the mentorship dynamic is that the relationship need not always take the form of a fatherly figure passing on pearls of wisdom to a wide-eyed newbie. During her Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders talk last May, Kate Mitchell of Scale Venture Partners said she had mentors who were peers, as well as those more senior and junior. Additionally, Mitchell talked about having mentors who worked in the same field as her, and some outside of it. Hearing all those perspectives, Mitchell said, gave her a well-rounded picture of what she was doing well, and what she wasn’t. In this video clip, Mitchell also makes a point that often goes unsaid but that is a vital element in ensuring effective chemistry between a mentor and mentee: the latter must make it easy for the mentor to share brutally honest feedback. Check out her excellent advice on how to do that: https://youtu.be/kfQ83VddA6g One last distinction about mentorship is that the rewards aren’t just reaped by the one receiving advice. The benefits — emotional and physical — of helping others out of the goodness of your own heart are well known by now. And it’s no different in the particular instance of an entrepreneur helping out another. That’s one of the main strengths of StartX, the 5-year-old nonprofit that runs an accelerator program for Stanford-affiliated entrepreneurs. In the video clip below, alumni of the program talk about its “code” — that if you can assist a fellow founder, “you stop what you’re doing and help them.” And back to the benefits of being a mentor: For those who listen as keenly as they speak, they may just glean something that helps them with a problem they’re working through. Otherwise, simply by interacting with someone who reminds you of your younger, hope-filled self, being a mentor could very well rekindle your own passion. https://youtu.be/bE4PyHxcI3k

Over the past academic year, the Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar has brought some of the sharpest innovators to Stanford for weekly talks. And even though school is now out, viewers around the world can still soak up all the great insights online, archived on Stanford’s eCorner, and on YouTube. Summer is also a time to be entertained, of course. And while we can’t compete with blade-knuckled mutants or celebrities in futuristic exoskeletons, we can promise some deep perspectives from the people behind the box-office blockbusters, top-rated TV shows and chart-topping songs we just can’t get enough of. A rat with a gourmet streak that sneaks around in a restaurant kitchen. A nonverbal, trash-picking robot roaming a junkyard planet. Neither of these sound very promising as a premise for a movie. However, Ratatouille and WALL-E both went on to achieve critical and commercial success for Pixar Animation Studios. The secret, as described by Pixar President Ed Catmull, lies in the studio’s “braintrust” of expert storytellers, along with a deep understanding of the creative process. An important part of that process at Pixar, and in other organizations, involves protecting the “ugly baby” from the “hungry beast,” according to Catmull. This clip from his April 30 Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) talk explains the concept: https://youtu.be/LafDex0L7FM Yes, Catmull runs a studio that consistently cranks out Oscar-winning films. But that doesn’t mean a less-proven filmmaker can’t break into the business as well. Gale Anne Hurd, one of Hollywood’s most respected film and television producers, gave an ETL talk the year before, saying that the entertainment industry today is ripe with opportunities in the age of YouTube. It wasn’t so easy for Hurd, who rose through the ranks more traditionally: starting as an executive assistant to acclaimed film producer Roger Corman, ascending to head of marketing, and eventually going on to launch The Terminator saga and produce many of today’s comic-book blockbusters and sci-fi thrillers. Currently, she is among the executive producers of the AMC series The Walking Dead. “There are at least 16 directors,” Hurd said, “who made films for under $15,000 — some of them for $400 — uploaded them on YouTube and are working in the business today, after one film.” https://youtu.be/hGpf9pJg_Ac But before you dismiss the insights of pop-culture captains such as Catmull and Hurd, listen to pop-music singer and songwriter Nate Ruess, founder of the band fun. It is his distinctive voice that carries the pop anthems “We Are Young,” “Some Nights” and “Carry On.” With a name like “fun,” you might expect the band to run with whatever sound is trending with tweens. But when Ruess came to Stanford in February, he spoke maturely about the influence of trends on his work, and how ignoring them can lead to irrelevance. “I’ve become better — a better songwriter, just a better person — by acknowledging what’s happening right now,” Ruess said. “It’s been one of the biggest reasons for my success, is to acknowledge that there’s something in front of me and it’s happening.” https://youtu.be/6PaLVzSt_NE Wise words, whether you yearn to be a hit maker or an entrepreneur.

In a tech-driven society that often fixates on the “next big thing,” it’s comforting to know that truth can trump trend. Rather than launching a venture that seeks to profit off whatever is popular at the moment, the message from those who have succeeded in Silicon Valley — who also speak of true fulfillment in their lives — are innovators who honor authenticity. Below are three recent video clips from The Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar series on how authenticity keeps an immensely popular startup focused on its mission, how it remains vital even within large corporations, and most importantly, how it is the single-best guide in your own entrepreneurial pursuits. As many already know, the free, online education platform Khan Academy began as one man’s hobby of making a math video for his 12-year-old cousin after she bombed a placement test. Ten years later, Khan Academy boasts 5,500 instructional videos, with 4 million exercises solved daily over approximately 200 countries. That well-meaning man, Sal Khan, spoke at Stanford on April 16 and ended his talk by acknowledging the pressure to measure progress by the metrics those around him use. In Silicon Valley, that’s often data points like “unique users,” “click-through rates” and “sales conversions.” Khan Academy’s stated mission is “to provide a free world-class education for anyone, anywhere.” And Khan, the academy’s founder and executive director, concluded his talk by saying that his not-for-profit organization’s biggest challenge is “staying true to our mission.” https://youtu.be/IOyX-UKgFJc Authenticity also has its place in the largest of enterprises. Corporate guideposts such as mission and identity can get complicated and evolve over time as a company grows and shifts focus, which puts the onus on its people to preserve authenticity. In her Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders talk last October, Cisco’s chief technology and strategy officer, Padmasree Warrior, talked about how authenticity makes a “huge difference,” whether you’re trying to attract talented people, or create a work environment where people feel empowered to contribute. https://youtu.be/Hi99Rvj0zZI But if you do plan to launch your own venture, whether tech-related or not, authenticity is critical to ingrain at the start. Entrepreneur Tristan Walker, who spoke in April, found his calling in the “ethnic aisle” at the local drugstore. Walker is African American, and so truly knows the frustration that black men feel throughout their lives when it comes to shaving. So when it came time to launch his own product, he decided on the first end-to-end shaving system specifically designed for men of color. “If I was going to dedicate the next 10-plus years of my life to anything,” Walker said, “I wanted to fundamentally feel like I was the best person in the world to solve that problem.” https://youtu.be/ZPQQ22W1t6o

Students, entrepreneurs and investors filled the sleek, top-floor conference room of Stanford’s Huang Engineering Center. It wasn’t another startup competition with everyone on the lookout for the next game-changing technology. However, all there did agree that there needs to be major disruption. The event was a noontime panel featuring women in senior positions in venture capital. They represent a growing segment of the overwhelmingly male field, where just 11 percent of investing venture partners are women, and only an estimated 4 percent of senior venture partners are female. The firms where the panelists work ranged from a newly launched fund to corporations known worldwide. The April 28 event was hosted by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program — the entrepreneurship center in the university’s School of Engineering — and moderated by STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig. All of the panelists have achieved exceptional success in Silicon Valley and voiced strong opinions about increasing the percentage of women in senior VC partner roles. But instead of solely proposing systemic changes, much of what the panelists had to say focused on what women could do at the individual level. L to R: Theresia Gouw, Lisa Lambert, Deborah Hopkins, Ann Miura-Ko and Jennifer Fonstad The first panelist to speak was Deborah Hopkins, who chairs venture-capital initiatives for the global financial services firm Citi, which provided generous support for the event. She urged women to, above all, remain authentic. In the business world, Hopkins explained, women have witnessed how traits such as being bossy or cruel to colleagues signaled to superiors that they have leadership potential. For the women who follow suit, however, the price they pay is losing a sense of their feminine strengths, Hopkins said. “They’re really being put into some other kind of way of thinking about themselves,” said Hopkins, who also serves as Citi’s chief innovation officer. “At the core of this is authenticity, and it really is the secret of success.” She added that women who rise through the ranks are obliged to support their sisters in industry achieve similar success. Fellow panelist Lisa Lambert picked up on Hopkins’ point and urged women in venture capital to get coaching, seek out mentors and focus on building a vast network of colleagues. Lambert said having a large network ensures you’ll have others who will vouch for you when the inevitable naysayer gets in the way; and having an abundance of connections means more inroads when opportunities open up around you. It’s what helped Lambert go from being a product-marketing engineer when she first came to Intel, to her current role as vice president and managing director of Intel Capital. “This world, especially here in Silicon Valley, operates by informal networks,” said Lambert, founder of UPWARD, a nonprofit that aims to accelerate the careers of professional women. “The reason I’m still here is because I didn’t quit.” Meanwhile, Ann Miura-Ko, co-founding partner of the venture-capital firm Floodgate and a lecturer in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, talked about the luck she encountered throughout her career: from a life-changing mentor relationship with a former CEO of Hewlett-Packard that began with a chance encounter when she was an undergraduate student at Yale, to being offered a founding-partner position at a new venture-capital fund while she was working on her Ph.D. at Stanford — and caring for her first child. Members of the audience and fellow panelists pressed Miura-Ko a bit on her message that all of her success was based on pure luck. The daughter of a NASA scientist and holder of a Stanford doctoral degree in mathematical modeling of computer security, Miura-Ko acknowledged her own innate drive and strengths. But the moral of her story returned to – once again – a message of individual action: “I maximized the opportunity I had to get lucky,” Miura-Ko said. “That’s the thing that people need to understand, is that even though it’s built on luck, you need to create that opportunity.” The final panelists to speak were Theresia Gouw and Jennifer Fonstad, who recently made national news when both left coveted partner positions at top-tier venture-capital firms to co-found their own, Aspect Ventures. When they first made their announcement in February, the longtime colleagues said they wanted to set an example for other women who want to follow the same path. They also said their new fund would emphasize the value that diversity brings to companies. “We need to create a welcoming environment because we know there are bright, talented young women like yourselves — and elsewhere — who want to start companies,” said Gouw, formerly a partner at Accel Partners for 15 years. Fonstad spent 17 years as a partner and managing director at Draper Fisher Jurvetson. She also co-founded Broadway Angels, a San Francisco-based angel investment group made up entirely of women. Its portfolio includes 20 startups founded by female, and male, entrepreneurs. “We now have a community of women entrepreneurs who have been successful who can write their own checks, and are writing their own checks, and making investments in fellow entrepreneurs in their own networks,” Fonstad said. “That’s a very new trend, and it’s an important trend.”

It’s been called “20-20 hindsight,” and sometimes, “Monday morning quarterbacking” — essentially, the after-the-fact analysis of what should’ve or could’ve been done better. And it tends to contain some valid insights. So, if you’re about to launch into a project or initiative that has some uncertainty around success or failure, why not just go ahead and imagine that it flopped, and then, figure out how that happened. In other words, put yourself in the future, visualize the failure and use that trusty 20-20 hindsight to help you anticipate and avoid the pitfalls before you even start. This exercise in imaginary time-travel may evoke memories of the oh-so-eighties flick Back to the Future. But it’s also a strategy that Stanford Profs. Bob Sutton and Huggy Rao stand behind in their new book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less. They call it performing a “premortem,” and they write that teams on the cusp of making a major decision — including launching a growth initiative, the topic of the new book — should make this visualization exercise one of the final steps before proceeding with the plan. “It is just a way of switching perspective when you are on the verge of rolling out something from the few to the many,” said Sutton, a professor in Stanford’s Department of Management Science & Engineering. “And there is pretty good evidence that simply shifting perspective from ‘what do I need to do to succeed?’ to ‘I have succeeded, what steps have I taken?’ leads to more nuanced and useful plans — and is especially useful for identifying risks.” True to their academic credentials, Sutton and Rao back their position with sound citations. They say the premortem builds on Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s favorite approach for making better decisions. Kahneman, meanwhile, credited another psychologist, Gary Klein, with inventing the technique. Here’s how it would work at a company that’s about to scale up: Before implementing the plan, team leaders would split those working on the project into two groups and assign one to imagine that the effort failed miserably, and the other to imagine that it was a spectacular success. Then, each person would be asked to work independently and generate reasons — or even better, write a story — about why the plan succeeded or failed. People should be as detailed as possible in identifying the reasons things occurred, especially those causes they wouldn’t normally mention “for fear of being impolitic.” Next, as the professors outline in the book, each person in the “failure” group would read his or her list or story aloud, while the reasons are recorded and collated. This process is repeated for the “success” group. Then finally, use the reasons from both groups to strengthen the original plan. Sutton stresses that premortems are helpful for organizations, regardless of size. For instance, an individual entrepreneur might approach it this way: “If one year from now, I will have three key customers, $1 million in sales and 10 employees, what steps will I have taken?” Conversely, for a big company, Sutton says a premortem might sound more like this: “If, three weeks from now, the rollout of this new pay policy will be a total disaster — my best people are leaving, and everyone wants me fired — what will have happened?” The exercise is most effective when all the details are fleshed out, actual feasibility is assessed and resources are accounted for — even if the scenarios are entirely made up in the first place. And yet, Sutton says premortems are doable, and moreover, beneficial. “We just did this for a group of 12 senior executives from a Fortune 50 company,” Sutton said recently. “They got quite detailed and the conversation shifted their attention to a pair of risks that, in essence, all seemed to know about but none felt comfortable raising.” Since the book’s debut last month, Scaling Up Excellence has been received well in the business community, especially among entrepreneurs. In the startup space, the challenge of building and uncovering pockets of exemplary performance, and cascading that throughout an organization as it grows, is a real worry. Put simply, Sutton says scaling is spreading more of a good thing to more people and places. But he is quick to add that no guaranteed formula for scaling up was ever identified by himself or Rao in their nearly 10 years of research for the book. And whether you undergo a premortem or any other strategic exercise prior to implementation, Sutton stressed that nothing will make scaling easy or instant. “Anyone who implies they have a sure-fire method or recipe is misguided, dishonest, or both,” Sutton said. “There is a lot of snake oil out there — if someone tries to sell you a scaling cure that sounds too good to be true, it probably is.” Sutton recently gave a talk as part of our Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Seminar. Here’s a sample of his Feb. 12 presentation at Stanford: https://youtu.be/hobRYNWbRWI

It seems self-evident that any innovative venture or idea begins with an entrepreneurial mindset — especially here in Silicon Valley. But innovation isn’t isolated to any one region, and the concept of an “entrepreneurial mindset” deserves to be defined. It may be helpful, though, to let veterans of the valley explain things from their perspective. For instance, Susan Siegel, a corporate officer at General Electric based in the region, identifies two components that together make up a mindset: attitude and approach. Beyond being a top executive in one of America’s largest and most established corporations, Siegel is also CEO of healthymagination — GE’s $6 billion initiative to improve the quality, access and affordability of healthcare around the world. Here’s what Siegel — recognized as one of “the 100 Most Influential Women in Silicon Valley” — had to say about fostering an innovative mindset at her Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) talk in 2012. https://youtu.be/sNDSt29Ud6M Once you have the proper mindset, of course, the next step is putting those good intentions into action. A recent ETL talk illustrates this perfectly: Stanford math Prof. Gunnar Carlsson appeared on stage last month with Gurjeet Singh, who first stood out to the renowned mathematician while Singh was working on his doctoral degree. But it wasn’t simply Singh’s intelligence that caught Carlsson’s eye, it was the student’s bias towards action. Singh wasn’t just a methodical mathematician, he was a maker in the truest sense. During their talk Carlsson repeatedly mentioned Singh’s penchant for “prototyping” ideas and concepts – a term normally associated with the building of more tangible objects. “Not only do you need to be smart,” Carlsson explained, “but you need to want to do something and to carry something out and to actually solve a problem — as opposed to writing a paper or finding a pretty piece of theory.” The professor and student went on to co-found Ayasdi, a big-data analysis startup focused on major societal problems in need of innovative solutions.  https://youtu.be/CjBifA8yEWE In so many words, that’s also how Stanford Prof. Bob Sutton put it during his Feb. 12 ETL talk on his new book, Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less. Co-written with a colleague at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, Prof. Huggy Rao, Scaling Up Excellence discusses what it takes to build and uncover pockets of exemplary performance and spread a mindset of constructive beliefs and practices as an organization grows. A professor in the Stanford School of Engineering’s Department of Management Science & Engineering, Sutton’s actual words were, “Live a mindset, don’t just talk about it.” https://youtu.be/TbahELEFC5c

With Superbowl XLVIII just around the corner, expect plenty of talk in the days ahead about what makes a great team. And if our Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) seminar series is any indication, the topic of team building is at top of mind in the high-tech field as well. Many of our recent ETL speakers emphasized that, above all else, a business’s success begins with a great team. Cyriac Roeding, co-founder and CEO of the retail-rewards app shopkick, actually identified four distinct characteristics that lead to a great team: each member possessing “individual brilliance,” shared and inflexible values, extreme diversity and a vision that they all believe in. Roeding, who spoke at Stanford in October 2013, explains why these are the essential ingredients for a great team, and how they fit together. Of course, discussion around a given topic wouldn’t be very robust without some difference of opinion. In her ETL talk on Nov. 20, 2013, Sharon Vosmek cited research by Thomas Malone — a renowned professor of management at MIT — who found that the I.Q. of individual members of a group had no correlation to the group’s collective intelligence. “So it didn’t matter how smart the people you put together, it did not then result in a smarter team,” said Vosmek, CEO of Astia, an organization that supports entrepreneurs through a global network of investors, innovators and industry leaders. Instead, the research that Vosmek praised concluded that the factors that really increase group intelligence on teams were 1) the social perceptiveness of the team members, 2) the evenness of conversation among them and 3) the proportion of women on the team. In his ETL talk, also last November, Mike Olson mentioned diversity and intelligence as traits that he looks for when hiring new employees at Cloudera — a powerful and integrated “big data” platform that allows customers to store, process and analyze various types and formats of data. Olson co-founded and serves as chief strategy officer for Cloudera. And as bluntly as he could, he said all that really matters is the quality of the people in the organization. “Everything that we can claim as a success ties to the fact that we have recruited the world’s best team,” he said. It’s also vital for companies to bring on the best and the brightest right at the start, according to Olson, because it perpetuates excellence. “If you don’t do that early, it’s impossible to change it,” he said. “The reason is, really great people gravitationally attract really great people.”

The arrival of a new year gives us a chance to think about what we want to accomplish in the months ahead. But where to start? When a student at a recent Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) seminar asked this very question — “When is the right time to start a company?” — it sounded so basic and blunt that it made the guest speaker chuckle at first. But the speaker then paused, collected himself and responded, “It’s a good question, and I’ll give it a serious answer.” Serial entrepreneur Steve Teig, co-founder of venture-backed semiconductor firm Tabula (and co-founder of two successful biotech companies before that) came to Stanford to talk about embracing the mysteries of entrepreneurship. Teig, the holder of more than 260 patents, also urged students to identify opportunities by taking action, rather than be paralyzed by indecision. And here was his rather decisive answer to the student’s simple question: In her February 2012 ETL talk, Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, founder and chair of Joyus — the Web’s first video-shopping platform — also put it simply: The act of getting started is “taking the first step.” To her, that involves telling someone and getting that person to take that first step with you, whether it’s sketching out a logo or just sitting down and to brainstorm some ideas. “The simple act of involving someone else in something that’s inside your head is the point at which you start being an entrepreneur,” Cassidy said. “And what is such a mysterious art will become known to you very quickly.” And if you’re afraid to start because you haven’t yet perfected every single detail in your head, Warren Packard, who spoke at ETL the week before Cassidy, believes that shouldn’t stop you. In fact, he says, “Imperfection is a great tool to have.” Packard, CEO of the sports-programming app Thuuz, likened it to the classroom concept of getting partial credit for solving part of a test question — even if you didn’t get it 100 percent right. “The god of partial credit works for you in spades as an entrepreneur,” Packard said. “And you have to use that as a tool to get out, get your product launched, get customer feedback, learn from your mistakes, pivot and do it again.” With that, we hope you launch into 2014 by taking that first step.

This post was originally published on Forbes. I have been very fortunate throughout my formative years and still today to be surrounded by inspiring men and women. At the age of 34, I feel I have only scraped the surface of everything I am yet to experience and achieve both professionally and personally. My resume so far is the result of a lot of hard work, but also and mostly of the belief that only the sky is the limit. I started no differently than any other little girl, with perhaps one major exception: I was always told by family, friends, and mentors that I could achieve anything I wanted as long as I was open, worked hard and remained helpful to others. My gender was never part of the discussion, but it seems my experience was rare. It has become clear that we need to do more to shine a light on the ambitious, successful women who dream big and achieve their personal and professional goals while staying true to themselves. Men seem to have these kinds of role models in abundance and perhaps as a result do not struggle to imagine that they can affect change and become leaders. But many girls and young women struggle to find similarly successful, relatable role models who can inspire them to imagine everything they could achieve and believe that each of those possibilities could become a reality. Learning about the stories of these role models can help young women make educated choices about what suits them and then pursue their goals with all their energy. At Boticca, we try to share the stories of inspiring women organically through our business. Eighty percent of our brands are led by women, all entrepreneurs fighting to build sustainable businesses. We love being their partners as they expand their businesses globally and realize what the possibilities truly are. Recently we have partnered with Women for Women International, an organization founded by a formidable woman, Zainab Salbi, one that is committed to giving women in war-torn countries the tools to rebuild their lives while sharing their stories of resilience with the world. It is critical to tell the stories in as many contexts as we can in order to help and celebrate those women who are making a difference. Beyond “Lean In”: More Women Who Help Us Dream Big The key is the awareness that we can design our unique path and as long as we are confident, hard working and willing to give it our all, we can make that path work. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s COO, has shined a lot of light on this subject with her book Lean In. Her arguments make a lot of sense, but to many, she may seem difficult to relate to because of her “one fourth of one percent upper class status,” as Gayle Tzemach Lemmon points out. However, she has emphasized something that applies to all of us regardless of status: we should embrace the theory of the “and.” Why limit ourselves to being either career driven or family oriented? Why not do both, if that’s what we want? Little girls will only figure out what they want by being aware of and evaluating all of the available options. There is no “one path” that works for everyone. Each person is unique and each stage of life is different. The key is the awareness that we can design our unique path and as long as we are confident, hard working and willing to give it our all, we can make that path work. There is only one Sheryl Sandberg, but there are numerous women who gracefully embody the possibility of the “and.” All of their stories should be shared, so that girls and young women can find inspiration in their examples. That’s why I’m sharing the stories of five of the most open, giving, impressive women I know. Each is very unique in her path and identity, however they all share a few very important traits: They are passionate, positive, hard working, confident and most importantly, they are constantly learning and teaching. They promote others and are great leaders with loyal followers. And if you ask each and every one of them, they will tell you that they are no better than you. If they can design their own paths and stay true to themselves, you can, too. Shripriya Mahesh is an incredible woman: A wife, a mother, an award-winning filmmaker and a successful Silicon Valley executive. She owes all of it to her passion, openness and determination. When I first started at eBay, she was assigned to me as my mentor and then became my boss and my friend. I’m now lucky enough to be godmother to her twins, so I know first hand how open, passionate and strong she is. Shri leads by example: She taught me how to create solutions for any problem and above all, that you can pursue your passion at any stage. She reinvented herself as a filmmaker after 15 successful years in technology while having twins and supporting her parents who were struggling with illnesses. Shri has now found a way to fulfil both passions by leading the product launch for a startup and working on her first feature. She proves that it is possible to handle any personal and professional challenge with determination and positive energy. Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, who I mentioned above, is one of the formidable women I am lucky to call a friend. One of my business school classmates, this independent thinker doesn’t take anything for granted. A successful journalist, the New York Times best-selling author of The Dressmaker of Khair Khana and a Senior Fellow with the Council on Foreign Relations’ Women and Foreign Policy program, Gayle went to business school when she was already quite senior in her career. She simply wanted to learn more about business, knowing that the experience would help her achieve her goals. Gayle and her husband both believe nothing is impossible and Gayle manages every challenge with grace. She spent a lot of time in Afghanistan reporting on women’s efforts to be heard by their own government. It was on one of these trips when she found out she was pregnant and due just days before her book’s publishing date. Gayle is from a humble background, but was inspired by hardworking women who showed her that “only our imaginations could determine our limitations.” As a result, she constantly works to inspire and share stories of other women with the world. Nisa Godrej, one of my dearest friends, is another inspiring woman I met at business school. Nisa is a force of nature who inspires others through her vision and drive. She could have chosen a life of leisure, but instead chose to fight to create a performance-oriented culture in the 117-year-old Godrej Group, allowing the company to excel on a global scale. Motivated by a force within, Nisa’s imagination has no limits and she will push herself and those she cares about to achieve their full potential. She is as dedicated to her professional growth as she is to her personal one.  We celebrated her birthday climbing Kilimanjaro, trekked in Bhutan and Iceland on what she considers holidays relaxing for the soul and discovered the ruins of Petra in lieu of a hen party. A dedicated daughter, Nisa’s loyalty is boundless. Now, she is married to a wonderful man who shares her passion for life, they are expecting a child, and she continues to lead her company forward. Judy Gibbons, another mentor of mine, is a truly extraordinary woman. Ranked among the top 20 most influential European businesswomen, she has held senior positions at Apple, HP and Microsoft and is now on the board of the Guardian, Michael Kors and more. The list goes on and on. Again, she owes it all to her hard work, openness and dedication. Judy took me under her wing when I started at Accel Partners and has been a guiding force ever since. She was one of the first people to believe in me when Boticca was only an idea. She has always gently pushed me and others to dream big and believe that we can make anything happen, both in our professional and personal lives, if we put our minds to it. She has been an incredible force for young people in her life including her own nieces to whom she is a surrogate mother. She is multidimensional and will not let anyone be otherwise. There is no either/or for her, it is all about the possibility of the “and.” Sherry Coutu is yet another woman who embodies the possibility of the “and.” I met Sherry a number of years ago when I first moved to London. I remember having lunch with her and finding out that she had just climbed Kilimanjaro, which I planned to climb a few months later. I knew from that moment that she was a force to be reckoned with. A former CEO and angel investor who now serves on the boards of LinkedIn, Cancer Research UK and the University of Cambridge among others, she is a staunch promoter of entrepreneurship, for which she was awarded a CBE in 2013 from Her Majesty the Queen. She is also the founder of Founders4schools an organization that inspires young students to believe in themselves and in their ability to be entrepreneurs. All of these women are great examples because they are not simply hard workers, but are open and looking to share their experiences and learn from others. They are the kind of people you want to work for and be friends with. I don’t believe that there is a particular way a woman should be, or that there is only one way she should be. But I believe that each woman should have the option to choose what she wants, knowing at the beginning all of the possible permutations of her dreams so that she can design her own path. Join me in sharing the stories of women like these.

With the holidays underway and our thoughts attuned to peace and goodwill, now is the perfect time to explore how entrepreneurship can fuel humanitarian efforts. For our weekly Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) seminars, we of course focus on topics central to technology startups. But throughout the academic year, we also invite speakers who bring the entrepreneurial mindset to the nonprofit sector. During a season when there’s no shortage of soirees, and charitable instincts are at front of mind, ETL speaker Scott Harrison offers up a strategy for turning a personal celebration into a splashy charity event that can send ripples around the world. Founder of charity: water, a New York City-based nonprofit that brings clean water to poor villages in Africa and other parts of the world, Harrison describes in this video clip how he tapped his social network from his days as a hotshot nightclub promoter in the Big Apple to bring in big money for the cause closest to his heart. Ashoka, another entrepreneurial nonprofit in New York City, places its social mission front and center. “Ashoka believes that there is nothing more powerful than a new idea in the hands of a social entrepreneur,” the organization’s webpage states about its approach. “Ashoka finds and fosters the most powerful emergent ideas being led by the most effective social entrepreneurs.” Founder and CEO Bill Drayton also spoke recently at ETL, and described how Ashoka maximizes impact by selecting highly potential “changemakers” and building networks of social innovators. But in order for any solution to spread, Drayton said it must first be seen as simple, safe and easy to understand. In terms of private entities, the humanitarian organization bringing the most resources to bear is none other than the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. Its massive assets, now at about $40 billion, support initiatives in education, world health and population. That the co-founder of Microsoft has dedicated his fortune to philanthropy has, in the minds of some, vaulted him past even Steve Jobs as the technology leader they’d most like to emulate. But for all the grandness of the foundation’s aims, it is comforting to hear from Melinda Gates that she wants us to start locally, supporting causes in our own community that we’re passionate about. Most importantly, she wants us to get involved now: Happy holidays and all the best for your entrepreneurial endeavors in 2014.

New research on entrepreneurship shows that diverse business skills are not always the secret to success in the world of tech start-ups. While different strengths matter sometimes, researchers found that a tech-focused founding team is almost always best. The research, led by assistant professor Chuck Eesley in Stanford University’s Department of Management Science and Engineering, has been published online by the journal Strategic Management.  Two other management professors, from the University of Pennsylvania and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), co-authored the study. The research revealed that a technically focused team can more quickly reach market milestones, from design and prototype completion — all the way to product launch. The research revealed that a technically focused team can more quickly reach market milestones, from design and prototype completion — all the way to product launch. On the other hand, more diverse founding teams are better prepared to compete against mature companies, which similarly have well-established diverse skills in areas like marketing, operations, sales, engineering and other skills. The findings are based on a survey of 2,067 ventures founded by MIT  alumni across multiple industries. The professors examined each firm’s founding team, how well the venture performed, and the business environment that surrounded it. They took into account traits such as age, experience and education, but in this case, did not include traits such as gender or ethnicity. External Factors Lead author Eesley, whose department is in the School of Engineering, researches the influence of external environments on entrepreneurship – specifically, the types of environments that encourage the founding of high-growth, technology-based firms. “If your venture is focused on technological innovation as a key competitive edge or is operating in an industry where it is common for startups to focus on innovating — and then partner with large firms to commercialization those innovations — then it is better to have an all-technical founding team,” he  said. Two business environments that startups commonly enter can be characterized as either cooperative or competitive. In a cooperative environment, startups form partnerships with established firms in the industry to bring products and services to market — like when smaller biotech ventures get acquired by larger pharmaceutical companies. In a competitive environment, startups go head to head with established firms instead of relying on them to get to market — like in the software industry. “If your venture is focused on technological innovation as a key competitive edge… and then partnering with large firms to commercialization those innovations — then it is better to have an all-technical founding team.” However, if a venture’s competitive edge comes from factors other than technological innovation — serving a new market segment, for instance — and it’s more common for startups to compete with established players, Eesley says a founding team with diverse skills makes more sense. The study’s authors gauged the success of firms in their survey by whether they reached a “favorable exit,” such as an acquisition or IPO. One of their findings was that, in a “cooperative environment,” a technically focused founding team had a 12.8 percent greater likelihood of a favorable exit. Practical Advice At Stanford, Eesley teaches about technology entrepreneurship to undergraduates on campus and to students around the world via open online courses. He also lectures internationally, and is often asked by current and would-be entrepreneurs about who they should look for as co-founders. He usually advises them to build a balanced team of founders. “However, I began to wonder if this advice was universally true for all types of startups. I suspected and worried that, in some cases, such advice may actually be harming some founders,” Eesley said. “We should be trying to help them, rather than unintentionally leading them astray.” Eesley is also on faculty at the Stanford Technology Ventures Program, which serves as the engineering school’s entrepreneurship center, helps students develop entrepreneurial skills, and sponsors courses and research related to tech-venture formation. He says the study’s findings are practical for those looking to launch a company now — whether in Silicon Valley or wherever. “For prospective or current entrepreneurs,” Eesley explained, “you want to think carefully about matching the skills and backgrounds of the people you recruit as co-founders with the strategy and industry of the startup you’re passionate about pursuing.” His co-authors include David Hsu, an associate professor of management at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and Edward B. Roberts, a professor of management of technology at M.I.T.’s Sloan School of Management.

This post was originally published on Forbes. Boticca, the world’s luxury bazaar of fashion accessories, just raised $4 million in a series A round from a number of high net worth individuals around the world and UK-based fund, MMC Ventures. Back in 2011, it took us just three months to raise our $2.3 million seed round, at a stage where the company was barely making any revenue. Roughly two years on, it took us nine months to raise our series A, at a stage where unlike most e-commerce startups we had profitable user economics with a cost of acquisition recouped on the first purchase and more than four times lower than our Customer Lifetime Value. The fundamentals of our business were and still are very strong, yet the path to series A presented an array of unexpected challenges. This sounds counterintuitive, doesn’t it? It certainly did to us. However, looking back, we’ve learned more about what happened, what we did wrong, how the environment affected us and how other companies can avoid making the same mistakes. Don’t Waste Your Time: Engage With the Right People When we started thinking about fundraising in December 2012, we were told by many around us, including our own investors, how terrible the fundraising climate was in the US and even more so in Europe. Thus, we decided to reach out to a lot of potential investors. Both my co-founder and I come from a venture capital and a private equity background so we have always had access to many investors. This coupled with the introductions from our existing seed investors gave us a full list of potential people to talk to. Had we done more research prior to these meetings, we could have saved ourselves countless useless conversations. However, we began reaching out to investors without properly considering their fit (surprising, considering how much fit comes into our hiring process). For countless reasons, our list included the wrong people: some no longer invested in series A rounds, preferring to invest either in seed rounds or later rounds (the series A crunch effect). Some were at the end of their funds while others were too long on e-commerce investments that hadn’t yet had any good outcomes.  Had we done more research prior to these meetings, we could have saved ourselves countless useless conversations. It is not just about the number of investors you engage with — you need to get face time with a lot of investors — but more importantly, you need to find the right ones for your business. Don’t Put All Your Eggs In One Basket We made three big mistakes: we trusted too quickly, became too confident and let ourselves be wooed by one main investor. As we were sifting through the large funnel of potential investors, we opened serious discussions with one main European fund, which will remain unnamed. They started doing in depth due diligence before any signed term sheet. This required an incredible amount of time on our end and because of it we stopped or stalled conversations with most other investors. We were confident this would be a success: Our interaction with the fund was extremely positive, we were transparent about our operations and our economics were (and still are) solid. However, we did not realize that this fund had internal operational constraints, which led them to pull out at the 11th hour. We were left with hardly anyone else to fall back on and only three months of cash left in the bank. Learn from our mistake: No matter how well things are going, keep your options open until a term sheet is signed. The following two months were incredibly difficult. They were filled with sleepless nights and stress. However at no point in time did my co-founder or I give up. We had a very healthy business on our hands, a great team, and a huge opportunity. Knowing at all times that we were both in it together and neither one of us would rest until we made it right was a huge factor in our ultimate success. Set Your Ego Aside Many extremely successful entrepreneurs have had near-death experiences, though these experiences rarely come to light. What makes the papers is the final outcome, the end success. But often, the road to success is a rocky one for entrepreneurs. When my co-founder and I were faced with three months of cash left in the bank and no tangible fallback option, one of my close friends, Rupert Shaw, co-founder of Pioneer Point Partners, impressed on me the fact that this was the time to set egos aside and reach out to as many people as possible. So that’s exactly what we did. The amount of support that we received and the number of advocates and evangelists we discovered in them was humbling. We started reaching out to our network of friends, family, mentors, and former colleagues, which includes successful entrepreneurs, business men and women, and investors. We shared the hard facts and were very candid about our dire funding situation. The amount of support that we received and the number of advocates and evangelists we discovered in them was humbling. To my surprise, we weren’t alone. I sat down with numerous successful entrepreneurs who had experienced similar situations multiple times and openly shared them with me. These ended up being the people who either invested in our series A or made the introductions to our series A investors. Each of these candid conversations led to as many as three immediate introductions to great potential investors. In no time, we went from near-death to being oversubscribed in our series A. Do Not Give Up: Create Options For Yourself If you have a strong business, with the right fundamentals, do not give up. My co-founder and I created multiple options and also envisaged the worst. We covered all sorts of actionable scenarios to allow us to keep the team intact (some were more attractive than others). Believing in the possibilities of these alternatives is what kept us going. One scenario involved creating a last-resort plan with our existing lead seed investor, ISAI, who was and continues to be supportive. They believed in the business, however, because of the smaller size of their fund and the amount they had already committed to the business, they could not justify bank rolling our series A with an up round. The terms we discussed with them were only ones we were going to agree to as a last resort. Another involved forgoing our own salaries and taking out personal loans to buy time. We also crafted two different plans for the business, one in which we raised $2 million, half of what we had originally planned but enough to get us to profitability with slower growth and a smaller business, and one in which we raised the original $4 million. We envisaged only raising from angels, though that would have meant a lot of coordination and would not have been the best signal for our next round. We realized we had far more options than we’d originally considered. This enabled us to go into meetings with confidence without allowing investors to smell blood. Make Them Dream and Call The Shots One of my closest friends and a very successful entrepreneur, Alexander Asseily, (co-founder of Jawbone and now State.com) sat down with me early on through this process and gave me two extremely valuable pieces of advice: Make the investors dream. Every investor wants to believe that the business they are investing in will change its industry if not the world, and will make them very rich. Therefore do not play down your dream. Share your passion and vision. Call the shots. You have a good business, you know the environment, so don’t ask for terms and a valuation. Put a deal together and let the investors know that this is it. If they are serious you will know immediately, if they want to negotiate that’s fine. At that point they will have shown real interest. We did both things. We changed our pitch, the deck, and how we delivered it to make it more passionate and true to our vision, explaining how Boticca is disrupting its industry and enabling brands that didn’t have access to distribution before develop very successful businesses. As a result, we were determined, transparent about the situation and confident in the meetings we had. We also put a term sheet together that we felt comfortable with. We priced it attractively, where we knew that anyone who believed in us or understood the industry and the growth of our business would seriously consider the investment. We could easily justify the pricing with comparable examples, while being comfortable with its valuation. As a result, we were determined, transparent about the situation and confident in the meetings we had. It must be said that none of this would have been possible without a sound underlying business. But if your business is built on solid fundamentals, you will be able to cope with adversity. If you’ve built a strong business, yet still find yourself on the brink of near-death, know that with preparation and perseverance, you will be able to overcome even the most daunting challenges. I’ve written this post as candidly as possible in order to allow others who may find themselves in similar situations to learn from my experiences and realize that it is all part of the journey.

In some sense, the concept of “open innovation” has been with us all along. Yes, this Forbes article claims the term originated just a few years ago with a professor from the University of California, at Berkeley, who once worked as a computer-industry manager in Silicon Valley. And according to Wikipedia, the word “crowdsourcing” was coined in 2006. But before all the business speak, the basic concept existed as the “wisdom of the masses.” Nonetheless, it is insightful to hear from those currently at the forefront of innovation how this creative process has evolved over the years, how it will look in the years ahead, and how it can deepen customer engagement in real time. How It Used to Be In her Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) talk at Stanford last year, Deborah Hopkins, chief innovation officer at Citi Ventures, talked about transparency, openness and idea sharing as the pillars of her operation. But she also acknowledged that, traditionally, it was quite the opposite in the business world. Those with the bright ideas felt like they should keep it to themselves, Hopkins explained, because business professionals back then were taught that “knowledge is power” — and that their secret insights would secure them that corner office with the view. Where We’re Headed Another ETL speaker deeply immersed in innovation, Padmasree Warrior, talked about how, over the past few centuries, we have gone from “the era of the solitary genius” (think Thomas Edison) through the rise of corporate labs such as Bell Labs and Xerox Parc, to more open models of innovation such as, yes, crowdsourcing. But as she sees it, Warrior — the chief technology and strategy officer for Cisco Systems — says the next stage in innovation will deliver products that improve experience across multiple domains: hardware, software, user interface and design. How Else It Helps Besides allowing companies to harvest the best ideas from a broad pool of minds, allowing others to participate in the innovation process can also help a business by deepening customer engagement — especially in the startup phase. As serial entrepreneur Matthew Rabinowitz said in another recent ETL talk, “If your customers feel they are part of that process, and they take a certain ownership, that can really lock them in emotionally.” A Ph.D. candidate in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program recently published a new study related to open innovation — on how organizations elicit suggestions from the public. Read about it here.

A new study co-authored by a researcher in the Stanford Technology Ventures Program (STVP) finds that organizations that display a feedback button on their website to invite suggestions from customers frequently struggle to foster thriving online forums for new ideas. Henning Piezunka The study looked at just over 23,800 organizations and found that success with the online feedback mechanism varied widely, according to co-author Henning Piezunka, a Ph.D. candidate in management science and engineering at Stanford. His research, conducted with a colleague at the European School of Management and Technology, in Berlin, has been published online by the journal Research Policy. The types of organizations included in the study represent nearly every sector: public entities ranging from rural towns to national governments, and private companies ranging from small startups to multinational corporations. Whereas prior studies on suggestion solicitation looked at just a handful of organizations, Piezunka said that working with one of the leading software firms in the field of online feedback allowed he and his colleague to conduct a much more comprehensive study. Why Study Suggestions The findings have broad implications since businesses and other organizations increasingly turn to the Internet to engage customers and innovate through “crowdsourcing.” Emboldened by the ability to tap into a global community, organizations are increasingly adopting so-called “open innovation” strategies to harvest ideas. In the first weeks of September alone, organizations ranging from NASA to the National Football League have announced ambitious open-innovation initiatives. “… the whole topic is important because it has been shown that organizations can innovate if they interact with their customers. But we actually wanted to see how to do it successfully.” More specifically, the study is in line with STVP’s mission of accelerating entrepreneurship education at Stanford and around the world. “When we study entrepreneurship, we are essentially examining how individuals and organizations identify and explore new ideas,” Piezunka said. “Now, how do you actually get new ideas? One crucial avenue is: You engage with customers.” He also pointed out that “the whole topic is important because it has been shown that organizations can innovate if they interact with their customers. But we actually wanted to see how to do it successfully.” Successfully Managing Suggestions Some organizations underscore the great potential of engaging users. For example, Microsoft’s crowdsourcing campaign for Bing Ads was successful in actively engaging customers to contribute suggestions. But not all organizations have the legions of customers or instant name recognition of a company like Microsoft. And yet, smaller entrepreneurial organizations can also succeed in eliciting suggestions: Swiftkey, a London-based startup behind the popular screen-based keyboard, was successful in eliciting numerous suggestions from its customers, which ultimately guided its innovation process. Piezunka says that one of the biggest reasons why most organizations fail to replicate those successes is that outsiders don’t see how much effort actually goes on behind the scenes to make those external-engagement campaigns take off. “People actually fall victim to the general success of open innovation,” Piezunka said. “Organizations often feel like all they need to do is launch their campaign, and it will just take off. But that is absolutely not how it typically goes.” Hence, in addition to pointing out the shortcomings of organizations’ outreach efforts, the researchers also present what they found to be the most effective strategies for encouraging suggestions from the public and nurturing engagement. Through their analysis, they identified several actions that organizations must take if they want external contributors to send in their suggestions: Proactive attention: Instead of waiting for suggestions, the organization should initiate the conversation with an internally developed suggestion to stimulate debate. Reactive attention: Organizations should actively respond to suggestions from external contributors to signal that their thoughts are being heard. The study found this was especially important for newcomers to the discussion. Catalyzation: Organizations should focus their efforts on new users and the early stage of their open-innovation effort. In particular, organizations need to be aware of the time, effort and commitment required to nurture a fledgling forum into a thriving discussion. This includes establishing a process for retrieving, reviewing and responding to suggestions — especially those offered up at the outset. Those may seem like common-sense rules for successful communications. But the reality is that organizations frequently underestimate the investment needed, and often fail to apply such widely understood best practices when it comes to corporate engagement, Piezunka said. For instance, he paints this scenario: Imagine that you’re sitting in a company meeting and saying, “You know what? We just had five customers send in suggestions, and we want to act on that.” “But the critical moment to engage is actually when you hear from those first five customers.” “That’s kind of a hard case to make in a business meeting if you have, say, 100,000 customers. It’s much easier if you can say that all 100,000 customers want something,” Piezunka explained. “But the critical moment to engage is actually when you hear from those first five customers.” Piezunka knows this first hand. Years ago, he founded a web-design company in his native Germany, which is still in business today. He admits that he wasn’t much of a computer programmer back in those days, but that even then he was a “very, very strong believer that you really need early customer input.” “Most organizations don’t do enough. They tend to be product-focused when it comes to innovating, but not customer-centric,” said Piezunka, who figures he was on the road 60 to 70 percent of the time for his company. “If organizations actually adopt the strategies of proactive and reaction attention, they can unlock the enormous potential of open innovation.” The study, “Open to suggestions: How organizations elicit suggestions through proactive and reactive attention,” was co-authored by Linus Dahlander, an associate professor at the European School of Management and Technology. Support for the study was provided by STVP, the Sloan Research Project Grant for the Economics of Knowledge Contribution and Distribution, and the Institute for Research in the Social Sciences at Stanford. More information about Henning Piezunka’s research can be found on www.henningpiezunka.com.

Challenging the status quo is a fight entrepreneurs often like to pick. And with tech startups successfully changing the game practically overnight across industries — Airbnb in travel, Spotify in music, Square in the retail space, Uber and Lyft in the transportation business — an entrepreneur might think it’s as easy as, “Code it, and they will come.” But in reality, bucking the trend is no trivial matter. When you see a business opportunity no one else does, your big idea is inevitably for a product or service that no one is demanding. Knowing what people will want before they actually do is a sweet spot to be in, and realizing how difficult it will be in the beginning will only brace you for the tough — but worthwhile — road ahead. Changing the World is Hard In this eCorner video clip, venture capitalist John Lilly of Greylock Partners quotes longtime STVP faculty member Tom Kosnik in urging aspiring entrepreneurs to “do what makes your soul sing.” That, Lilly says, will give you the strength to persevere in the constant struggle against the status quo. “Because it’s hard, and because it’s constantly hard, and because people are telling you ‘you’re a moron’ and why things won’t work — over and over and over again,” Lilly explained, “it’s important to do things that speak to you and really feed your soul and help you grow over time.” The Rock Star Myth But if you’re an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley, a statistic presented by Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL) speaker David Friedberg serves as a sobering status quo for anyone with dreams of becoming the next Jack Dorsey. According to Friedberg – who launched his own entrepreneurial journey after earning a degree in astrophysics and leading several projects as a mathematical programmer at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory — the odds of starting a company and it being worth over $1 billion is .0006 percent. “There’s a culture of taking leaps and doing big, exciting things here. And you’re an important person if you do that,” said Friedberg, founder of The Climate Corporation. “But just being an entrepreneur does not make one a rock star.” The Danger of Protecting the Status Quo Some say the status quo is upheld at the highest levels. In his ETL talk last spring, author Nassim Taleb mentioned how U.S. monetary policy aimed to preserve the fragile and dysfunctional parts of our economy in the wake of the most recent financial crisis. To Taleb, that sort of intervention runs contrary to the premise of his book Antifragile. Luckily, today’s entrepreneurial culture recognizes the constructive value of failure and embraces the forces of creative destruction — especially in Silicon Valley, where reinvention is a constant.