Strategy

According to Arcadia Kim, Chief Operating Officer for Electronic Arts Los Angeles, an entrepreneur is someone who sees an opportunity that other people cannot see, tries to understand the competitive landscape around this opportunity, assumes the inherent risk, and relentlessly and persistently pursues success. Specifically in the game industry, however, the objective for the entrepreneur is to deliver fun, she adds.

Earl talks about how the majority of the products at EA are sequels that are released every year. The main decision for EA on these projects is budgeting how many people to work on each every year, he says. Occasionally, there is a new product idea. This idea must pass a lot of market opportunity analysis before it is launched because it is very expensive and risky to build a new product. Still, new products are seen as a critical part of the future of the company, he adds.

Reedy talks about eBay's global presence in over 27 countries. eBay has partial ownership in some companies, she says. Eighteen countries were running an eBay platform in 1998, for example, when eBay was only operating in the US.

An important area for improvement is cross-border trade, which includes shipping, customs and language translation, says Tilenius. Creating businesses around eBay to continue to grow the trading community (e.g. Auction Drop) is also important. Some of the key questions the company attempts to answer are: How do we convince people of the safety of the site, and how do we make it easier to use?

eBay has about 5000 pages that must be localized, says Tilenius. Hence, eBay plans to reduce pages, keeping the important functionality and making it easier to go from country to country. However, the countries where eBay is present have more similarities than differences. Thus, eBay only has to be customized in a few areas, including language and message boards, she adds.

eBay is in 28 countries and the company is looking into cost effective ways to enter new markets, says Reedy. PayPal will attack Europe next year. Typically, eBay, being global, can enter new countries easily; in the case of PayPal it will take more effort. When making an acquisition eBay lets the business strategy define the process or platform. Over time they look for ways to move the country onto the platform as long as it does not put the country or the business model at risk.

Tilenius talks about the lessons learned as eBay has grown. These include: 1) How to execute and maintain focus 2) Setting the bar very high 3) Doing things fast to maintain momentum 4) Listening to the community 5) Acting with integrity and confidence.

Tilenius talks about the long term plan of eBay, which is to have a language translator so that there is one platform and one user ID to trade across borders. eBay has not found the technology to do this yet, she says.

Tilenius talks about eBay's late launch into Japan when Yahoo! was already Number One in Japan with 500,000 listings. This made it difficult for eBay and they made the decision to exit. We believe that you have to be number one in the market or it isn't worth investing in, she says.

Smith explains that a theory of change in the social sector is roughly equivalent to a combination of the business model and strategy in the for-profit world. You need to identify a change and have a hypothesis about how to make it happen, she says. This is more complex in the social sector because, in additional to market forces, you have to deal with regulatory forces, emotional forces, social forces, and political forces, she adds. A set of core beliefs are usually taken for granted in the business world, but in the social sector they need to be established. She believes the core beliefs are the basis of the theory of change and help you decide what to do--otherwise you could end up trying to change too much. Though there is always a need elsewhere, a social venture can only take on what falls into its focused mission.

After his company zip2, Musk started exploring other opportunities on the web. He realized that money required low bandwidth and there was not enough innovation in the financial industry. Musk shares how he arrived at the idea of PayPal.

Musk started by writing some small software over the summer and eventually started talking to some publishing companies who developed interest.

Kaplan talks about how most people will work on an idea for a company for 2-3 years before they get the money. The best time to start a company, he notes, is when everybody thinks it is impossible.

Kaplan says that every idea is repeatedly proposed. Timing of an idea is very important and very difficult to call. This involves enabling technologies, customers and trends in the investment industry to come together. He gives examples from TiVo and Amazon. An idea does not stand alone independent of timing and the investment industry, he adds.

Thompson stresses the need for customer diversity. Software companies that were dependent on Fortune 1000 companies for their business suffered when their niche clients also suffered in the economic downturn. If a company is to survive challenging economic times, companies must have a diverse customer base, he says. Symantec brings stability to its business by serving individual customers as well as the largest governments and corporations. It brings essential geographic diversity by deriving 51% of its business from outside the US.

Thompson talks about how Symantec was looking at changing from a software business to a content business. He shares the history about the marriage between Symantec and other companies that they have acquired over the years.

John Thompson talks about the key driver at Symantec - product focus.To meet this goal, the enterprise was forced to make difficult decisions, including purging products that were not core to their network-centric vision. The result was that hiring and partner relationships, among other things, became much more streamlined.

Estrin talks about the key things that entrepreneurs can do to adapt to the climate today: 1) Adjust the business model and expenses. 2) Ask yourself, can I afford to run this business at critical mass? 3) Look for areas of incremental growth. 4) Lead with tight execution skills and flexibility.

Innovation will drive the next cycle, says Estrin. Startups don't succeed in validated markets; the role of startups is to create a new market, she says. As an entrepreneur, you have be able to take that risk in an unvalidated market, she adds.

Neeleman tells the story of his first startup failure during college, and the airline partner he was working went out of business. He shortly thereafter received a call from June Morris, who encouraged him to come and build Morris Air. Morris Air grew and prospered, and was sold to Southwest for 130 $M, with Neeleman as the second largest shareholder at the time.

One of the premises of the way the Global Fund for Women thought about distributing capital to social entrepreneurs was that there already existed a network of people who knew where critical things were happening on the ground, says Ramdas.

Surromed has had to adapt its business plan, downsize the company, and pair down numbers of diseases, says Ringold. Things are very different from when they started the company. To be stronger when markets open up and to start a company today, one must build slowly and be flexible, he notes.

Yock explains why MedTech is dominated by the importance of patents. People who don't patent their early ideas lose out.

Yock continues the story about a non-invasive cardiac technique and how it quickly had a Stanford connection. Thomas Fogarty, a surgeon at Stanford, worked with Charles Dotter and soon developed another technology - the Balloon Angioplasty Catheter.