Ryan Says…

Saturday marked the kickoff of National Entrepreneurship Week. I attended an ‘opening ceremony’ at Stanford that featured talks from:

• John Hennessey, president of Stanford
• Carl Scrhamm, president of Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation
• Steve Jurvetson, Partner at Draper Fisher Jurvetson

The talks were interesting with John and Carl focusing more at the ‘macro’ level - about why entrepreneurship is good for the economy etc. Steve focused at the ‘micro’ level with some specific bits of entrepreneurial advice. I wanted to post a few of them here, since Steve is someone whom I respect (as a venture capitalist with perhaps an uncharacteristic level of intelligence and a true thirst for knowledge).

Steve opened his talk by taking a photo of the crowd, which he posted on his Flickr photostream. I decided to snap a photo of Steve taking the photo to give the ‘view from the other side’. Unfortunately it was only with my phone:

• Two of the most important characteristics an entrepreneur should possess are infectious enthusiasm - in order to attract a team, investors and customers, and enough self-confidence to show humility (know what you don’t know).
• Perhaps to the chagrin of the law students in the audience (whom Steve likened to parasites :) he said it is of the utmost importance to produce things and to change the world. Engineers are on the right track.
• The most interesting innovations are disruptive ones, and the most predictable type of disruption are the exponential curves that exist in the technology industry, for example Moore’s Law. Be constantly on the lookout for new things you can do, given the current level of technology, that weren’t possible a few years ago. This also applies to the ‘life sciences’ - an interesting fact Steve mentioned is that 80% of the genes we know about today were discovered in the last 12 months.
• Interdisciplinary collaboration is a great way to generate innovative ideas. Steve recommends working in a field adjacent to what you have studied, so that you can provide unique insights from your unique background.
• The greatest companies are born from unique ideas. A corollary to this uniqueness is that most people will think your idea is bad (its not an understood paradigm). Google was the butt of many jokes in the VC circle before it ‘made it’.

I wish I could have captured more but Steve talks fast and the keypad on my PDA doesn’t allow me to thumb away fast enough :)

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