Category: Entrepreneurship

German Bookstore Thrives Selling Bread and Sausage

(p. A7) BAD SOODEN-ALLENDORF, Germany — At five minutes after seven on a Saturday morning, the bookstore in this idyllic town was not yet officially open — that happens at 7:30 a.m. — but Susanne Frühauf had already rung up the first three customers of the day. At a shelf in the corner, behind a rack of discount paperbacks, her husband Wolfgang was working as quickly as he could.
“They’re like moths,” said Mr. Frühauf, genially, of his customers. “As soon as the lights go on, they come.”
With that, he got back to work, stacking not books, but rows of freshly baked bread rolls sprinkled with poppy, pumpkin, flax, sesame or sunflower seeds that have brought townspeople flocking. Next to him stood a small refrigerator hung with “ahle wurst” — a delicious air-dried, salami-like pork sausage that is one of the region’s culinary specialties — while in the center aisle, organic tomatoes and cucumbers vied with crime novels for table space.
. . .
Mr. Frühauf’s grandfather founded a bookbindery nearly a century ago, right here on the ground floor of the family house on the market square; Mr. Frühauf grew up above the bookstore, which his parents and uncle ran together. Five years ago, when he saw the numbers, Mr. Frühauf — who still lives upstairs, with his mother and his wife — said the situation was clear: “We had to do something.”
At the same time, news came that the town’s last two bakeries were closing. For residents like Mr. Frühauf, who remember when half a dozen local bakers strove to make the town’s best cream-covered plum cake, cumin roll or pumpernickel loaf, this blow was followed by hopeful news: Norbert Schill, who had lost his storefront lease, wanted to keep baking.
“I said, ‘before there’s no fresh bakery, I’ll clear a shelf, and we can sell the bread here,'” Mr. Frühauf said. Mr. Schill agreed to give it a try.
The experiment was a success. Mr. Frühauf began keeping baker’s hours, and Mr. Schill’s former customers started coming to the bookstore to buy their daily bread. Some, like Norbert Bergmann, a retired Catholic priest, got into the habit of picking up a book or TV guide, too.
Some of Mr. Frühauf’s regular customers found the idea strange at first, but they came around quickly. “It’s fun to eat breakfast again,” said Regina Kistner, who raised her family here, and had been making do with the processed rolls sold at the supermarket. “These taste good,” she added, leaving the store with two rolls (one rye and one sesame), a tabloid paper (for her neighbor) and the British romance novel “A Summer at Sea.”
Mr. Schill, the baker, said he for one was very happy to have found such an open-minded partner in the bookseller. “There’s a saying, I remember learning as a child, from the old people. ‘Go with the times, or with time, you’ll go.'”
. . .
Locking up after a long, warm morning, Mr. Frühauf paused. He took a look around at the 17th century building that houses his eclectic store, and said he enjoys being at the center of a new network of butchers, bakers and beekeepers. “In Germany, I think there’s a tendency now, to be very backward-looking, to say, ‘everything used to be better,'” said Mr. Frühauf. “But all you really need are some new ideas.”

For the full story, see:
Sally McGrane. “‘To Stay Afloat After 100 Years, a German Bookstore Sells Sausage.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018): A7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the title “‘Would You Like Some Sausage With Your Novel?”)

Bezos to Donate $2 Billion for “Montessori Inspired” Preschools

(p. A10) When Jeff Bezos announced last week that he and his wife, MacKenzie Bezos, would create and operate a national network of Montessori preschools, few were more surprised than Montessori organizations and leaders themselves.
In a statement released on Twitter, Mr. Bezos, the chief executive of Amazon and the wealthiest person in the world, said the preschools would be “in underserved communities.” He continued, “We’ll use the same set of principles that have driven Amazon. Most important among those will be genuine, intense customer obsession. The child will be the customer.”
News of the initiative, called the Bezos Day One Fund, came with an eye-popping commitment: $2 billion, some of which will support organizations that help homeless families.
. . .
Montessori’s unique combination of freedom and rigidity — a famously “child-centered” practice with a host of rules and restrictions — can make its classrooms look drastically different from traditional ones.
Students span a three-year age range, say, between 3 and 5. Dressing up or talking about fairies or superheroes is not allowed. Instead of a play kitchen, there may be a real one, where students might pour their own juice into a glass cup, not a plastic one, so that they will learn the lesson that a glass can break if they are careless.
And every day, students get three-hour blocks of unscheduled, uninterrupted “work” time — the word “play” is not used — in which they are free to choose their activities, whether finger-painting or sorting wooden pegs.
. . .
With little else to parse, Montessori leaders pored over Mr. Bezos’ brief statement, which described the planned schools as “Montessori-inspired.” The term “Montessori” is not copyrighted, and any school can choose to describe itself as such.
. . .
Mr. Bezos attended a Montessori preschool in Albuquerque in the 1960s and is one of several tech industry leaders with personal ties to the method. The Google founders, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, have attributed some of their success to their Montessori educations. Dr. Montessori’s reframing of child’s play as “work,” driven by the child’s choices and interests, is, in many ways, a natural fit for Silicon Valley’s culture of founder-driven entrepreneurship and innovation.

For the full story, see:

Dana Goldstein. “‘Money, but Few Details, In Bezos Montessori Plan.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018): A10.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 21, 2018, and has the title “‘Jeff Bezos Cites a Big Number, but Few Details, in Plan for Low-Income Montessori Preschools.”)

When Volunteer Bystanders Save More Lives than So-Called First Responders

(p. A1) In the days after the shootings at the Route 91 Harvest festival in Las Vegas, many stories emerged of bystander courage. Volunteers combed the grounds for survivors and carried out the injured. Strangers used belts as makeshift tourniquets to stanch bleeding, and then others sped the wounded to hospitals in the back seats of cars and the beds of pickup trucks.
These rescue efforts took place before the county’s emergency medical crews, waylaid by fleeing concertgoers, reached the grassy field, an estimated half-hour or more after the shooting began. When they did arrive, the local fire chief said in an interview, only the dead remained.
“Everybody was treating patients and trying to get there,” Chief Gregory Cassell of the Clark County Fire Department, said of his personnel. “They just couldn’t.”
The experiences in Las Vegas have implications for the nation. Emergency medical services have changed how they respond to mass attacks, charging into insecure areas and immediately helping the injured rather than standing back. Still, every minute counts, and bystanders can play a critical role in saving lives, as shown in the aftermath to the shooting on Oct. 1 [2017] outside the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino.
. . .
(p. A14) In Las Vegas, several factors impeded the arrival of emergency medical workers at the scene of the shooting itself.
Confusion abounded. One fire crew that happened to be passing by during the first few minutes saw people running from the festival and heard what sounded like gunfire. “You got reports of anything?” a member of the fire crew, Capt. Ken O’Shaughnessy of Engine 11, asked a dispatcher over the radio. “That’s a negative, sir,” he was told. Three minutes later, the dispatcher confirmed that there was an active call.
Members of that crew remained nearby, and later assisted injured concertgoers.
“From what it sounds like talking to them, they didn’t identify the hot zone because they didn’t know where it was,” said Mr. Cassell, the fire chief. “They just knew they had dozens and dozens of critical patients.”
More than 10 minutes after the shooting began, a battalion chief advised firefighters to “stage at a distance” and put on protective vests and helmets as he tried to understand the situation and make contact with a police lieutenant on the scene. The battalion chief radioed in seven minutes later that there were reports of gunfire at both the concert grounds and the Mandalay Bay across the street. “We can’t approach it yet,” he said.
The injured were already fleeing and being carried out in several directions. “Those crews making their way to the concert venue were met at every turn by patients in the streets,” Mr. Cassell said. The fire department helped establish several assembly points, and ultimately, about 160 firefighters and emergency medical workers from departments in the region went to the scene.
Inside the nearly empty concert grounds after the shooting stopped, some volunteers remained, roaming among the fallen near the stage, checking pulses and finding some of them unconscious but still breathing.

For the full story, see:
Sheri Fink. “‘First Medics on Scene in Las Vegas: Other Fans.” The New York Times (Monday, Oct. 15, 2017): A1 & A14.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 15, 2017, and has the title “‘After the Las Vegas Shooting, Concertgoers Became Medics.”)

The passages quoted above, provide one more example of one of the main messages of:
Ripley, Amanda. The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why. New York: Crown Publishers, 2008.

Jeff Bezos Prefers ‘Entrepreneur Jeff Bezos’ over ‘Richest Person in the World Jeff Bezos’

(p. B3) Mr. Bezos said his primary job each day as a senior executive is to make a small number of high-quality decisions.
. . .
The insight into Mr. Bezos’ philosophy on time management came as the Amazon founder Thursday [September 13, 2018] addressed a crowd of roughly 1,400 at an event held by the Economic Club of Washington, D.C.
He reminisced on the early days of Amazon and the lessons he has learned during decades of rapid change as he went from founding the online bookstore in his garage to overseeing a massive company with several business lines and offices around the world.
That explosive growth helped push Amazon last week to briefly become the second U.S. company to reach a $1 trillion market value, after Apple Inc., and has made Mr. Bezos the richest person in the world.
It is a title Mr. Bezos said he has never sought. “I would much rather if they said like, ‘inventor Jeff Bezos’ or ‘entrepreneur Jeff Bezos’ or ‘father Jeff Bezos.’ Those kinds of things are much more meaningful to me,” he told the audience.

For the full story, see:
Laura Stevens. “A Few Life Lessons from Bezos.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018): B3.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 14, 2018, and has the title “Leadership and Life Lessons from Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.”)

Genetics Entrepreneur Compares FDA to DMV

(p. 1) MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif. — In 2007, Anne Wojcicki, then 33, lassoed the moon.
She was getting her new company, 23andMe, a mail-order genetics testing firm, off the ground with her “Party ’til you spit” celebrity get-togethers.
She married Sergey Brin, the cute co-founder of Google, also 33 and already one of the richest men in America, at a top-secret Esther Williams extravaganza in the Bahamas. The bride in a white bathing suit and the groom in a black one, they swam to a sandbar in the Bahamas and got hitched in the middle of the sparkling aquamarine ocean.
Soon after the marriage, as Mr. Brin accumulated more power, a yacht, and a fleet of jets, Ms. Wojcicki became pregnant with the first of their two children and Google invested millions in her start-up, named after the 23 paired chromosomes that consist of our DNA.
But six years later, the Silicon Valley fairy tale was shattered by two public humiliations: Mr. Brin got involved with a beautiful young Englishwoman named Amanda Ro-(p. 12)senberg, who provided a public face for Google Glass — an attachment that broke up his marriage. And the Food and Drug Administration shut down the primary function of Ms. Wojcicki’s business, calling her D.N.A. spit vial “an unapproved medical device” and imposing stricter rules for consumer genetic testing. Her business, once so ripe with promise to tackle health issues, was curtailed to its ancestry testing division.
. . .
“In some ways, when you have that many bad things happen, it’s a sense of disbelief,” she says. “This was one of those situations where there’s two aspects. A divorce and the F.D.A. There was no workaround in either. So it was one of the first times in my life where you have to accept, you have to actually change. Like, I need to come up with a different way of approaching both of these relationships.”
. . .
(p. 13) She’s focused for now on her children, her new Bengal cats and her company, which has more than three million customers and its own drug-development program. It started selling kits in CVS and Target, got the F.D.A.’s permission to resume giving consumers health reports on 10 conditions, including Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, and the $99 ancestry kit won a spot as one of “Oprah’s favorite things” this year, with Oprah calling it “The Ultimate Selfie.” Fast Company portrayed Ms. Wojcicki as the Comeback Kid of tech.
She realized that she had a treasure trove of DNA data and began teaming with Genentech and Procter & Gamble, which started mining it to make breakthroughs in Parkinson’s, depression and skin care.
In many ways, her struggle with the F.D.A. was a microcosm of the increasingly tense battle between hidebound regulatory agencies and freewheeling tech companies.
Although some people thought Ms. Wojcicki would have to sell her company, she healed the breach with the F.D.A. the same way she healed the breach with Mr. Brin. She did not huff away and seethe and backbite. She “put one foot ahead of the other,” as her mother advises, hired the best regulatory experts and found a respectful new configuration for the relationship.
“We were not communicating in the right way,” she says of the period the F.D.A. felt it was being ignored. “We were not showing Silicon Valley arrogance. We just were running around with our shoes on in a Japanese house. We were not a cultural fit and we weren’t expressing what we were trying to do in the right way.
“Some companies are trying to circumvent the regulators. We weren’t. We just got caught in the cross hairs. We clearly pissed them off. It took us a long time to generate a lot of data to prove that our intentions actually were right. But I feel like we’re doing the right thing in terms of proving that the customer is capable of getting this information on their own.
“I see it from the F.D.A. perspective. It’s a new product. It’s genetics. It’s direct to consumer. It caused anxiety. So, you know, the onus was on us.”
She had to explain to her team: “Listen, when you go to the D.M.V., you don’t argue about the vision test. You don’t say, ‘Oh, I just had a vision test. I don’t need to do the vision test.’ Like, you just do it. The F.D.A. is in charge of public safety, and I have a respect for the job that they have to do. And we’re just going to do the job that they’re asking us to do.”

For the full story, see:
Maureen Dowd. “‘Adapt and Evolve.” The New York Times, SundayStyles Section (Sunday, Nov. 19, 2017): 1 & 12-13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Nov. 18, 2017, and has the title “‘The Doyenne of DNA Says: Just Chillax With Your Ex.”)

Drones Reduce Worker Danger of Many Tasks

(p. B3) Small, swift and agile, drones have all but replaced the more costly and less nimble helicopter for tasks that involve inspections, measurements and marketing images.
. . .
On building sites, drones are saving money and time by providing digital images, maps and other files that can be shared in a matter of minutes, said Mike Winn, the chief executive of DroneDeploy, a company founded five years ago in San Francisco that creates software for, among other uses, operating drones with mobile apps.
Drones are reducing the travel time for busy executives, Mr. Winn said. “The head office can see what’s going on, and the safety team, the costing team, the designers — all of them can contribute to the project, share data and comment on it, without actually going to the job.”
They could also improve safety. In the days before drones, Mr. Winn said, measuring the roof of a house for solar panels would require “a guy with a tape measure to climb up there,” which often produced inaccurate results and, like anything involving heights, was dangerous.
Such peril is magnified in the construction of skyscrapers, said John Murphy Jr., a contractor on the Paramount Miami Worldcenter, a 58-story condominium tower being built in downtown Miami. Before drones, Mr. Murphy said, workers seeking access to the exterior of a high-rise were “dropped over the side” in so-called swing stages, small platforms that hang from cables. Often used by window cleaners, swing stages are precarious in high winds.
“No one wants to go out there,” he said. “It’s scary.”

For the full story, see:
Nick Madigan. “‘It Can Leap Tall Buildings and Save Money and Lives.” The New York Times (Wednesday, Aug. 15, 2018): B3.
(Note: ellipsis added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 14, 2018, and has the title “‘Need a Quick Inspection of a 58-Story Tower? Send a Drone.”)

Alibaba’s Jack Ma Retires Early as Chinese Communists Intervene in Ventures

(p. B1) HONG KONG — Alibaba’s co-founder and executive chairman, Jack Ma, said he planned to step down from the Chinese e-commerce giant on Monday to pursue philanthropy in education, a changing of the guard for the $420 billion internet company.
A former English teacher, Mr. Ma started Alibaba in 1999 and built it into one of the world’s most consequential e-commerce and digital payments companies, transforming how Chinese people shop and pay for things. That fueled his net worth to more than $40 billion, making him China’s richest man. He is revered by many Chinese, some of whom have put his portrait in their homes to worship in the same way that they worship the God of Wealth.
Mr. Ma is retiring as China’s business environment has soured, with Beijing and state-owned enterprises increasingly playing more interventionist roles with companies. Under President Xi Jinping, China’s internet industry has grown and become more important, prompting the government to tighten its leash. The Chinese economy is also facing slowing growth and increasing debt, and the country is embroiled in an escalating trade war with the United States.
“He’s a symbol of the health of China’s private sector and how high they can fly whether he likes it or not,” Duncan Clark, author of the book “Alibaba: The House Jack Ma Built,” said of Mr. Ma. “His retirement will be interpreted as frustration or concern whether he likes it or not.”
In an interview, Mr. Ma said his retirement is not the end of an era but “the beginning of an era.” He said he would be spending more of his time and fortune focused on education. “I love education,” he said.
Mr. Ma will remain on Alibaba’s board of directors and continue to mentor the company’s management. Mr. Ma turns 54 on Monday, which is also a holiday in China known as Teacher’s Day.
The retirement makes Mr. Ma one of the first founders among a generation of prominent Chinese internet entrepreneurs to step down from their companies. Firms including Alibaba, Tencent, Baidu and JD.com have flourished in recent years, growing to nearly rival American internet behemoths like Amazon and Google in their size, scope and ambition. For Chinese tycoons to step aside in their 50s is rare; they usually remain at the top of their organizations for many years.

For the full story, see:

Li Yuan. “Founder Sees A ‘Beginning’ As He Retires From Alibaba.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018): B1 & B3.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 7, 2018, and has the title “Alibaba’s Jack Ma, China’s Richest Man, to Retire From Company He Co-Founded.”)

The book by Duncan Clark, that is mentioned above, is:
Clark, Duncan. Alibaba: The House That Jack Ma Built. New York: Harper-Collins Publishers, 2016.

Affordable Methods for Countering CO2 in Atmosphere

(p. A13) A new study partly funded by Bill Gates has dramatically cut the estimated cost of removing CO2 directly from the air to as little as $100 a ton. According to the study, much of this expense could be recaptured by converting the CO2 into low-carbon motor fuel.
Assume California recovered 80% of its costs. For $500 billion a year, or 20% of state gross domestic product, California could solve the alleged problem for the whole world, reducing global emissions by half and meeting the widely touted goal of holding warming to less than 2 degrees Celsius according to prevailing climate models.
Too speculative? Too expensive? Many classic studies suggest that, at a cost as low as $2 billion a year, any highly motivated actor, even one with pockets less deep than California’s, could offset the entire warming effect of excess CO2 by distributing enough high-altitude sulfates or other aerosol particles to limit by 1% the amount of sunlight reaching the planet’s surface. Indeed, experts quietly acknowledge that, by reducing such particulates, our clean-air efforts have actually made our climate problem worse.

For the full commentary, see:
Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. “If California Was Serious About Climate; Its pockets are deep enough to cool the planet if politicians believe their doom-mongering.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Sept. 1, 2018): A13.
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 31, 2018.)

The study, partly funded by Bill Gates, that is mentioned above, is:

Keith, David W., Geoffrey Holmes, David St. Angelo, and Kenton Heidel. “A Process for Capturing CO2 from the Atmosphere.” Joule 2, no. 8 (Aug. 15, 2018): 1573-94.

Cancer Cure Progress Has Been “Painfully Incremental”

(p. A15) Hopes were high in 1971 when President Richard M. Nixon called for a War on Cancer. The disease was as pernicious as it was mysterious, claiming more American lives each year in the 1960s than had perished in combat during all of World War II. Still, it wasn’t hard to imagine medical experts coming up with a cure. After all, hadn’t the country just put a man on the moon?
Almost 50 years later, the war rages on. Decades of hard work and grand promises have yielded more disappointments than breakthroughs. Reliable treatments remain elusive, and researchers still aren’t sure why some people get the disease and others don’t, why some die while others survive. In “Cancerland: A Medical Memoir,” David Scadden offers a personal account of the inspiring but often exasperating hunt for solutions to the profound problem of cancer.
. . .
. . . moving science forward “to create better clinical approaches,” Dr. Scadden writes, “is an almost painfully incremental affair.” This puts physicians in the awkward position of having to explain the slow pace of research to dying patients, many of whom hope that a miraculous new drug or therapy awaits them if they can just hold on for another year or two. This is not a crazy idea. Dr. Scadden’s own mother, who died of colon cancer in 1985, might have survived if certain studies were completed five years sooner. But most clinical trials come to nothing, particularly in cancer. Many patients are stuck with the same interventions that have been around for decades: surgery, radiation and toxic chemotherapy. The miserable side effects can sometimes make life only marginally better than death.

For the full review, see:
Emily Bobrow. “BOOKSHELF; Reason to Hope.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Aug. 2, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Aug. 1, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Cancerland’ Review: Reason to Hope.”)

The book under review, is:
Scadden, David, and Michael D’Antonio. Cancerland: A Medical Memoir. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2018.

Carl Reiner Says Having a Project Motivates Vibrant Longevity

(p. 6B) LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ask 12-time Emmy Award winner Carl Reiner how it feels to be nominated again, and he fires back a wisecrack.
. . .
Reiner is nominated as host-narrator of “If You’re Not in the Obit, Eat Breakfast,” a documentary about how perennial high achievers, including Mel Brooks and Tony Bennett, both 92, stay vibrant.
. . .
Reiner, the oldest-ever Emmy nominee, is willing to look in the rearview mirror, but only to fuel new work.
“When I finish anything, I have to start a new project or I have no reason to get up. Most people are that way — if they have something to do, they hang around,” said Reiner.

For the full story, see:
LYNN ELBER for the Associated Press. “Comedy Legend Carl Reiner Turns His Emmy Shot into a Punchline.” Omaha World-Herald (Monday, Aug. 27, 201): 6B.
(Note: ellipses added.)