Strategy

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.

Yock's final suggestion comes from Wayne Gretzky. How is he so successful? Gretzky knows how to go where the puck will be, he says.

Jeff Hawkins, one of the founders of Handspring, claims to have witnessed teams of entrepreneurs brainstorming a product just for the sake of the sale, and he criticizes this approach. A good product can only be conjured by a genuine need in the marketplace. If there are no holes to fill, says Hawkins, then there is no point to being an entrepreneur.

Larry Page, co-founder of Google, reveals that basic research and good ideas are the key components to creating a tremendous opportunity in the tech market. A lot of new knowledge is being created all the time and much of it can be used as the foundation for innovation.

Google increasingly has a global focus; as of 2002, traffic is now around 60% outside of the United States and growing. The search supports 74 languages, including many Asian languages, says CEO Eric Schmidt. There is tremendous growth in Japan, where the majority of portals and online services now use Google.

The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin believe that it is incredibly important for people to have access to information around the world -- and that this is something that Google can deliver. They have run into issues with foreign governments over censorship, but recently it has not been a major problem. CEO Eric Schmidt predicts that Google will become an unintended central focus around global copyright and ownership legal issues.

No matter what language people speak, there is much information that is not in their language. Right now, most of the information available online is in English, but that won't always be the case. Google has been interested in translation, especially as it applies to searching. As of this 2002 lecture, automated translation is not perfect, but co-founder Larry Page reports that they are working to make it better.

Khosla states that any big problem is a big opportunity. If there is no problem, there is no solution, and no reason for a company to exist. No one will pay you to solve a a problem that doesn't exist, he explains.

Number 6 in Frank Levinson's Top 10 Things You Must Have to Start a Business. In the spirit of doing anything to keep your business afloat, Levinson explains why it's important to be open to all opportunities.

Bartz discusses Buzzsaw.com, a company created to provide a hosted environment for the construction industry. Because Autodesk had no experience in the construction industry, the company spun out Buzzsaw and then bought it back after a successful fundraising round with VCs.