Startups

Noam Wasserman, associate professor at Harvard Business School, discusses decisions around the timing and structure of co-founder equity splits. To illustrate the dynamics and uncertainties in play in these decisions, Wasserman contrasts real-world examples from Zipcar and Ockham Technologies.

Noam Wasserman, of Harvard Business School, explains how he came to focus on trying to understand why high potential startups commonly fail. According to Wasserman, while a certain percentage of these ventures succumb to issues of product or market fit, the vast majority meet their end due to people problems.

Entrepreneurial former Stanford students Kit Rodgers, Steve Garrity and Divya Nag discuss whether entrepreneurship can be taught or learned, and whether entrepreneurial skills come from innate qualities within an individual. Concepts explored include exposure to conducive environments, being entrepreneurially-minded as a member of a team, and the importance of pattern recognition.

"Entrepreneurship is not synonymous with being a founder," says Roelof Botha, a partner at Sequoia Capital. Using examples from his colleagues at PayPal, Botha urges individuals with an entrepreneurial drive to join other small companies first to learn a lot and live out the entrepreneurial spirit before founding a company.

Stanford Management Science & Engineering Assistant Professor Chuck Eesley shares impressive economic results and quantitative data collected from the Stanford Innovation Survey, which measured the economic impact of Stanford alumni engaged in entrepreneurial activity.

In response to an audience question, venture capitalist Geoff Yang explains the skills he values in entrepreneurs, particularly around technology startups. Yang describes the importance of getting the right mix between engineering knowledge and product knowledge that can serve as the voice of the customer within a venture.

Dropbox CEO Drew Houston describes how he met his co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi. After a visit to Silicon Valley, Houston and Ferdowsi were introduced and decided they would work together on the project. While it worked out great, says Houston, "It was kind of like getting married on the first date."

Dropbox Co-Founder Drew Houston articulates why one of the biggest challenges his company faces is deciding the order in which to build features or fix problems. Houston shares insights from his company's experiences interacting with customer requests for changes, and the considerations that come into play when making decisions on these requests.

According to Dropbox Co-Founder Drew Houston, the need for product distribution strategies is often overlooked at startups. Here he shares some of the mistakes he made around this issue and some of the guerilla-style successes the company achieved to grow their user base.

"There's a bunch of different paths to success," says entrepreneur Drew Houston. Here the co-founder of Dropbox explains why founding companies is not about "checking off boxes" from a list, and encourages entrepreneurs to embrace the fact that they won't have all the answers.

Creating clear and compelling messaging is key to Apple's marketing approach, says Fortune magazine Senior Editor Adam Lashinsky. Moreover, the company compounds success in this area by staying on a unified message. Lashinsky also shares an amusing example of how Apple reminds its employees to strive for simplicity.

Fortune magazine Senior Editor Adam Lashinsky explains the challenges faced by Apple when co-founder Steve Jobs returned to the company in 1997. With the company on the verge of insolvency, Lashinsky discusses what actions Jobs took to streamline the product line, fix supply chain operations, and unify the company's branding.

Based on his research into the inner workings of Apple, Fortune magazine Senior Editor Adam Lashinsky describes the premium the company places on keeping secrets, even when it comes to internal communications and processes. According to Lashinsky, Apple's commitment to secrecy often includes employees only seeing finished products they worked on once the products are revealed to the general public.

Spotify Co-Founder Daniel Ek explains his approach to building products to solve problems, with KPCB venture capitalist Chi-Hua Chien. Ek credits his engineering background and the ability to test product iterations as key components in his approach. He also discusses the importance of streamlined user interfaces, the opportunity to leverage global platforms to reach audiences at scale, and being selective in addressing the right customer use cases.

As a powerful distribution channel and a growing competitor in publishing, Amazon plays a disruptive role in the publishing industry. HarperCollins CEO and President Brian Murray describes the "complicated relationship" publishers have with Amazon, who is a partner they work with and compete against. "The term 'frenemy' is a great term to capture what business is like today," says Murray, here in conversation with STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig.

HarperColliins CEO and President Brian Murray shares some interesting statistics from his company's operations. As the world's third-largest English language publisher, the company must re-invent its revenue streams each year, says Murray, and contend with supplying content to new platforms while launching, on average, 12 new products per day.

In response to a question from STVP Executive Director Tina Seelig, HarperCollins CEO Brian Murray explains how his early engineering background continues to serve him as leader of a major publishing company. Murray believes engineers are solvers of complicated problems by training, and that, "a publishing company, any company, is one big, complex problem" needing to be solved.

HarperCollins CEO and President Brian Murray talks about challenges and opportunities he sees on the horizon in the publishing industry. One of the primary issues, says Murray, is ensuring that the right digital ecosystem exists to continue to produce, market and sell books.

HarperCollins CEO and President Brian Murray describes how the publishing industry landscape has fundamentally changed since he arrived at the company in the late 1990s.

The issue of using digital rights management (DRM) technologies on content is a complicated one, says HarperCollins CEO and President Brian Murray. Here he shares both the benefits and disadvantages of DRM, and describes tests being conducted to find a solution balancing a company's intellectual property rights with consumer desire to transfer files.

Brian Murray explains why publishing companies function much like venture capitalists, investing millions of dollars a year into developing new products in a culture business. Here the CEO and president of HarperCollins also articulates how the company leverages their understanding of the marketplace when placing bets on authors and projects.