Category: Entrepreneurship

Kid Paid $100,000 to Skip College and Mine Asteroids

(p. 18) As I sat down for lunch at a restaurant in Los Angeles, I placed a copy of “Valley of the Gods,” by Alexandra Wolfe, on the table, and a waitress walking by stopped to peer at the cover. . . .
“It’s about Silicon Valley,” I began. “It follows this young kid, John Burnham, who gets paid $100,000 by this weird billionaire guy, Peter Thiel, whom you’ve probably heard of; he’s a big Trump supporter and spoke at the Republican National Convention?” — a blank stare from the waitress. “Anyway, Thiel pays him (and a bunch of other kids) to forgo college so Burnham can mine asteroids, but he doesn’t actually end up mining the asteroids and. . . .”
. . .
The book begins with the protagonist, Burnham (or antagonist, depending whose side you’re on), who isn’t old enough to drink yet but is debating dropping out of college to follow the Pied Piper of libertarian and contrarian thinking, Peter Thiel, to Silicon Valley. As Wolfe chronicles, Thiel, who has a degree from Stanford University and largely credits where he is today (a billionaire) to his time at that school, started the Thiel Fellowship, in 2011, which awards $100,000 to 20 people under 20 years old to say no to M.I.T., Stanford or, in Burnham’s case, the University of Massachusetts, to pursue an Ayn Randian dream of disrupting archetypal norms.
It won’t be giving away the ending by pointing out that it doesn’t end well for Burnham.

For the full review, see:
NICK BILTON. “Denting the Universe.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, FEB. 19, 2017): 18.
(Note: ellipsis at end of second paragraph, in original; other two, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date FEB. 14, 2017, and has the title “Pet Projects of the New Billionaires.”)

The book under review, is:
Wolfe, Alexandria. Valley of the Gods: A Silicon Valley Story. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017.

France’s “Mille-Feuille” Regulations

(p. A1) France has long been known for its open hostility to corporations and its suspicion of personal wealth. Taxes were high, regulations were baffling and “It’s not possible” was the default answer to any question — if a company could even find the right person to ask.
Now, the country is in the midst of a sweeping attempt at national rebranding. Labor laws are being changed to make hiring and firing easier. New legislation has slashed a “wealth tax” that was said to drive millionaires out of the country.
. . .
(p. A5) “When you grow up in France, none of the heroes you learn about are entrepreneurs,” said Brigitte Granville, a professor of economics at Queen Mary University of London, who was raised in France. “When someone gets rich in France, people immediately ask, ‘What did he do to make this money? He must be a nasty person.'”
. . .
Now, a new crop of French leaders, most notably the free market-supporting president, Emmanuel Macron, are vigorously trying to shed this anticapitalist reputation. During his campaign, he visited London, home to as many as 400,000 French expatriates, urging them to return to France and “innovate.”
. . .
France’s economic makeover has inspired some derision outside of the country, too. It has the faint smell of desperation to people like Nicolas Mackel, the chief executive of Luxembourg for Finance, a public-private partnership that promotes the country as a business hub.
. . .
“You’ll accuse me of bashing the French,” he said over tea recently, “but earlier this year, they announced that they would have regulators who speak English. We didn’t need to do that because our regulators already speak English and always have.”
For France, English-speaking government officials would be little more than a promising start. The country has so many bewildering layers of regulations that its system is known, unaffectionately, as mille-feuille, a reference to a densely layered pastry.

For the full story, see:
DAVID SEGAL. “Paris Tries On A Fresh Look: Less Red Tape.” The New York Times (Mon., DEC. 11, 2017): A1 & A5.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date DEC. 10, 2017, and has the title “As Brexit Looms, Paris Tries a Business Makeover.”)

For Jane Jacobs, “Self-Certainty” Was Better than a Doctorate

(p. 17) Like the critic Pauline Kael and the conservative activist Phyllis Schlafly, Jane Jacobs arrived to churn the fertile soil of American cultural ideology in the 1960s, brandishing a disciplined populist intellect and a comfort with courting enmity. All three were middle-aged mothers by the time they would shake things up. That Jacobs, nee Butzner in 1916, would force a reconsideration of the nature and purpose of cities was an outcome her young adulthood would have hardly suggested. An unexceptional student at Central High in Scranton, Pa., she later studied at Columbia before failing to gain formal admission to Barnard and abandoning the pursuit of a degree entirely. These experiences, Robert Kanigel maintains in his biography “Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs,” left her with a distaste for the academy that she carried throughout her career.
Where others had doctorates, Jacobs had a self-certainty that was manifest early on. In a chronicling of her childhood so thorough it includes the number of times she was late for homeroom during her first semester of high school (seven), Kanigel recounts an incident in which Jane was expelled from third grade for urging her classmates to dismiss the entreaties of a hygiene instructor, who asked them to pledge to brush their teeth twice a day for the rest of their lives. In Jane’s view, the promise would be impossible to keep, making the request absurd.

For the full review, see:
GINIA BELLAFANTE. “Fighting the Power Broker.” The New York Times Book Review (Sunday, OCT. 9, 2016): 17.
(Note: the online version of the review has the date OCT. 7, 2016, and has the title “Two New Books About Jane Jacobs, Urban Visionary.”)

The book under review, is:
Kanigel, Robert. Eyes on the Street: The Life of Jane Jacobs. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

Lobstermen Retooling as Oyster Farmers

(p. A10) COREA, Me. — The boats start up around 3:30 in the morning, stirring the village with the babble of engines before they motor out to sea. They will return hours later, loaded with lobster.
Joe Young’s boat has not gone out lately. Instead, he puts on waders and sloshes into the salt pond behind his house, an inlet where water rushes in and out with the tides. After a lifetime with most of his income tied to what he finds in the sea, this lobsterman — and sixth-generation fisherman — is trying his hand at something new. He is farming oysters.
“Said I would never have a garden,” Mr. Young, 64, says, as he tends to his briny nursery. Tens of thousands of oysters the size of peanuts are growing inside porous boxes, stacked up like underwater file drawers, in a contraption called an “oyster condo.” He gives one of the boxes a shake, hoping to dislodge a slimy orange growth that has taken up residence, and flings away a green crab. Nearby, kelp he is growing sways lazily from a long underwater rope.
Reaching into the glassy water, Mr. Young plucks larger oysters from among the smooth stones, popping the mottled mollusks into a big white bucket.
“It’s different from lobstering,” Mr. Young said, “because I’m in the whole process.”
. . .
“Lobstermen are saying, ‘Boy, not (p. A11) only personally, but community level, we’re all invested in lobsters,’ ” Jon Lewis, the director of the state’s aquaculture division, said. ” ‘Natural resources tend to come and go. If this happens, what do I do?’ ”
. . .
To Mr. Young, aquaculture does not look so different from catching lobsters. “Fishermen are farmers,” he said. “There’s one crop, and it’s lobster.”

For the full story, see:
JESS BIDGOOD. “A Lobsterman Tries a New Line: Oyster Farmer.” The New York Times (Mon., OCT. 23, 2017): A10-A11.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 10, 2017, and has the title “A FISHERMAN TRIES FARMING.”)

Innovation Benefits from Constructive Arguments

(p. 7) When Wilbur and Orville Wright finished their flight at Kitty Hawk, Americans celebrated the brotherly bond. The brothers had grown up playing together, they had been in the newspaper business together, they had built an airplane together. They even said they “thought together.”
These are our images of creativity: filled with harmony. Innovation, we think, is something magical that happens when people find synchrony together. The melodies of Rodgers blend with the lyrics of Hammerstein. It’s why one of the cardinal rules of brainstorming is “withhold criticism.” You want people to build on one another’s ideas, not shoot them down. But that’s not how creativity really happens.
When the Wright brothers said they thought together, what they really meant is that they argued together. One of their pivotal decisions was the design of a propeller for their plane. They squabbled for weeks, often shouting back and forth for hours. “After long arguments we often found ourselves in the ludicrous position of each having been converted to the other’s side,” Orville reflected, “with no more agreement than when the discussion began.” Only after thoroughly decimating each other’s arguments did it dawn on them that they were both wrong. They needed not one but two propellers, which could be spun in opposite directions to create a kind of rotating wing. “I don’t think they really got mad,” their mechanic marveled, “but they sure got awfully hot.”
. . .
Wilbur and Orville Wright came from a wobbly family. Their father, a preacher, never met a moral fight he wasn’t willing to pick. They watched him clash with school authorities who weren’t fond of his decision to let his kids miss a half-day of school from time to time to learn on their own. Their father believed so much in embracing arguments that despite being a bishop in the local church, he had multiple books by atheists in his library — and encouraged his children to read them.
. . .
The Wright brothers weren’t alone. The Beatles fought over instruments and lyrics and melodies. Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony clashed over the right way to win the right to vote. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak argued incessantly while designing the first Apple computer. None of these people succeeded in spite of the drama — they flourished because of it. Brainstorming groups generate 16 percent more ideas when the members are encouraged to criticize one another. The most creative ideas in Chinese technology companies and the best decisions in American hospitals come from teams that have real disagreements early on. Breakthrough labs in microbiology aren’t full of enthusiastic collaborators cheering one another on but of skeptical scientists challenging one another’s interpretations.
If no one ever argues, you’re not likely to give up on old ways of doing things, let alone try new ones. Disagreement is the antidote to groupthink. We’re at our most imaginative when we’re out of sync. There’s no better time than childhood to learn how to dish it out — and to take it.

For the full commentary, see:
Grant, Adam. “Kids, Would You Please Start Fighting?” The New York Times, SundayReview Section (Sun., NOV. 5, 2017): 7.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date NOV. 4, 2017.)

Knowledge Transforms a Weed into a Resource

(p. A10) ZADAR, Croatia — For generations, residents of Zadar, an idyllic town on the Adriatic coast of Croatia, used the dry, stringy stems and yellow blossoms of a common variety of a wild daisy as kindling, mostly to singe the hair off pigs destined for the spit.
But about five years ago, cosmetics manufacturers and the essential oils industry started using a rare extract from the flower — known as the curry plant for its spicy aroma — as a critical ingredient in high-end creams, ointments and tinctures, sold for their purported rejuvenating powers.
So let the pigs shave themselves, local residents decided, turning their attention to gathering bushels of the once widely ignored weed, in hopes of creating a new local industry to add to an economy based on construction, fruit farming, olive oil and a touch of tourism.

For the full story, see:
JOSEPH OROVIC. “ZADAR JOURNAL; Croatian Farmers’ Hopes of New Life Rest on a Weed Called Immortelle.” The New York Times (Fri., NOV. 24, 2017): A10.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date NOV. 23, 2017, and has the title “ZADAR; JOURNAL; Can a Wild Daisy Rejuvenate Croatia’s Farming Economy?”)

Startups ‘Push the Flywheel’ Longer than They Admit

(p. A8) Some startups that spend years developing their product say the clock doesn’t start with those years. They count time from the day they came upon a solution that worked–never mind time spent looking for ideas or toiling at approaches that failed.
Milpitas, Calif.-based View Inc., which makes window glass that changes tint electronically, incorporated as Echromics and was in development as early as 2007. When its first technical approach failed, almost the entire staff turned over, said CEO Rao Mulpuri. He took over in December 2008.
A spokeswoman says the company considers 2009–the year it made breakthroughs that made its product possible–as the year it “really started its journey.” The company changed its name to View in 2012.
When it comes to the question of founding a company, Mr. Mulpuri says, “there’s a technical answer, which is the official answer. When was the company founded in the state of Delaware? But as a team, it’s not as simple as that.”
Silicon Valley investors are used to the idea that a “pivot” or new name takes off the years like a shot of Botox–though not all are thrilled.
David Gurle, chief executive of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Symphony Communication Services LLC, isn’t amused by startups that play the age game.
He founded private-messaging startup Perzo in 2012. After Symphony, another startup, acquired it in 2014, it began targeting financial-services clients. He proudly cites 2012 as Symphony’s founding year, despite its permutations.
“If you told me that a flower only started growing when it was out of the earth, then I would say, ‘No, it’s already been growing,'” Mr. Gurle said.

For the full story, see:
Patience Haggin. “Forever Young: Tech Startups, Like Hollywood Celebrities, Fudge Their Age; To look like overnight successes, new companies are playing around with their origin stories.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Aug. 12, 2017): A1 & A8.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Aug. 11, 2017, and has the title “The Secret to Startup Success? Fudge Your Age; To look like overnight successes, new companies are playing around with their origin stories.” The passages quoted from the online version, above, are about a sentence and a half longer than the similar passages in the print version.)

After 30 Years, Medical Entrepreneur Rosenberg’s Slow Hunch Pays Off

(p. B3) In the another significant development, the cancer institute’s prominent cancer researcher and chief of surgery, Steven A. Rosenberg, detailed for the first time an immunotherapy success against metastatic breast cancer, in a talk earlier this month.
In the lecture at a Boston meeting of the American Association of Cancer Research, Dr. Rosenberg reported on the first patient with metastatic breast cancer who is disease-free nearly two years after her first immunotherapy treatment. In the therapy, a person’s own cells are multiplied billions of times and reinfused into the patient. Dr. Rosenberg’s lab has already reported successes in treatment of melanoma, lymphoma, colorectal cancer and bile-duct cancer.
That patient is Judy Perkins, a 51-year-old structural engineer from Port St. Lucie, Fla. She was diagnosed with metastatic cancer–cancer that spread beyond the original location–in 2013.
. . .
Ms. Perkins is only one case. But the fact that she had metastatic breast cancer that is no longer detectable makes it very consequential. It follows reports from the Rosenberg lab about other internal-organ cancers, specifically colorectal and bile-duct.
. . .
Dr. Rosenberg’s interest in immunotherapy was piqued three decades ago, when he was struck by a chance encounter with a stomach-cancer patient who improbably recovered despite no treatment. This became a lifelong quest to discover how that patient had in effect cured himself. Scores of recoveries at the cancer institute of melanoma and lymphoma patients followed after immunotherapy treatment from his lab.
Now, his lab is exploring the promise of treating and accomplishing tumor regressions in far-more-common solid-tumor cancers of internal organs, including the breast, colon and bile-duct.

For the full story, see:
Thomas M. Burton. “Immunotherapy Treatments for Cancer Gain Momentum.” The Wall Street Journal (Fri., Oct. 13, 2017): B3.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 12, 2017.)

Reinvesting Profits Enables the Scaling Up of Success

(p. A17) Muhammad Yunus has big goals: zero world poverty, zero unemployment and zero net carbon emissions.
. . .
Mr. Yunus has long been a hero of mine for his innovative faith in the resourcefulness of low-income people.
. . .
If you want to motivate support for social enterprise, a utopian promise of “A World of Three Zeros” makes for a better book title than “Helping 60 Albanian Farmers Grow Herbs.” And Mr. Yunus’s paean to entrepreneurship does indeed deliver inspiration about the power of human creativity. But problematic arguments remain, especially his imprecise criticisms of the current economic system and the implausibility of replacing the whole system with social entrepreneurship.
A major problem is one of scale. Mr. Yunus’s many social-enterprise examples are all on the same micro level as the 60 Albanian herb farmers. And while there’s nothing wrong with making a large number of small-scale efforts to help a great many people, it doesn’t qualify as a whole new system for the $76 trillion global economy. Mr. Yunus doesn’t confront the scaling problem. He could have noted, for instance, that successful social entrepreneurs, unlike successful private entrepreneurs, by definition don’t get the high profits to reinvest in scaling up successes.

For the full review, see:
William Easterly. “BOOKSHELF; How to Solve Global Poverty.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Oct. 3, 2017): A17.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Oct. 2, 2017.)

The book under review, is:
Yunus, Muhammad. A World of Three Zeros: The New Economics of Zero Poverty, Zero Unemployment, and Zero Net Carbon Emissions. New York: PublicAffairs, 2017.

Musk Fires Under-Performing Workers to Speed Output of Mass-Market Electric Sedans

(p. B4) DETROIT — The electric-car maker Tesla fired hundreds of workers this week after a series of performance reviews conducted during the biggest expansion in the company’s history.
Tesla said Friday [Oct. 13, 2017] that the dismissals were not out of the ordinary, even though they came as the automaker tries to increase the production of its first mass-market vehicle, the Model 3 sedan.
The company has been criticized for the slow pace of its early production of the new model, which has generated hundreds of thousands of deposits from prospective buyers.
Tesla built about 25,000 vehicles in the three months that ended Sept. 30, but only 260 of those were Model 3s — considerably fewer than the 1,500 it had projected. The automaker has attributed the low production rate of the new car to unexpected bottlenecks in its manufacturing system.

For the full story, see:
BILL VLASIC. “Tesla Fires Hundreds of Workers.” The New York Times (Sat., OCT. 14, 2017): B4.
(Note: bracketed date added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date OCT. 13, 2017, and has the title “Tesla Fires Hundreds as It Tries to Speed Production of an Electric Sedan.”)