Category: Entrepreneurship

Wrecking Ball for Bureaucracy That “Is Killing the Country”

(p. B4) America’s big tech companies are facing some of their toughest political challenges as they flirt with or surpass trillion-dollar valuations. Before lawmakers try to rein them in, Reid Hoffman argues government officials better be careful what they wish for.
Mr. Hoffman was chief operating officer of PayPal while it was still a small payments startup before he co-founded the professional social-network LinkedIn.
. . .
WSJ: You’re vociferously opposed to President Trump and even commissioned an anti-Trump card game. Does Silicon Valley have a problem with liberal bias?
Mr. Hoffman: I do think that there is a reflexive bias to liberalism that causes discomfort. I think you have that kind of left bias within the Silicon Valley culture, too, which is, “I’m so convinced that’s idiotic, I’m not listening to anything about it.” And that’s the problem. The problem is not actively listening. But that’s human. It’s not only here. Part of the reason [for strong negative reactions] to Trump is the flat-out lies.
WSJ: When you talk politics with Peter Thiel, PayPal’s co-founder and a well-known Trump supporter, what are those conversations like?
Mr. Hoffman: He’s a friend of mine, but we’ve disagreed about politics since we were college undergraduates. One thing we argue about is how much does Trump lie? I’ve been trying to advance him the case that there’s always been some lying around politicians, but Trump is one or two orders of magnitude worse than ever before. He says Obama is a bigger liar than Trump–based on, for example, the claim that under Obamacare you’d be able to spend as much time with your primary doctor as you did before Obamacare.
Peter thinks that the bureaucracy is killing the country and that you need a wrecking ball to shake it up, and maybe Trump is the only wrecking ball you get. His pro-Trump arguments are that someone needed to stand up to China. Trump at least is, [while] everyone else gave it lip service.

For the full interview, see:
Rolfe Winkler, interviewer. “A Silicon Valley Warning.” The Wall Street Journal (Thursday, Sept. 27, 2018): B4.
(Note: ellipsis added; bolded and bracketed words in original.)
(Note: the online version of the interview has the date Sept. 26, 2018, and the title “LinkedIn’s Co-Founder Warns of Perils in Regulating Big Tech.” The last question and answer quoted above, is included in the online, but not the print, version of the interview.)

“I’m Alive and That’s an Extremely Good Thing”

(p. A4) HONG KONG — When Bill Jaynes realized water was rushing into the plane, he started to panic.
Mr. Jaynes, a Micronesian journalist, was aboard a plane set to land on Weno, the tiny Pacific island that is part of the Federated States of Micronesia.
“I thought we landed hard until I looked over and saw a hole in the side of the plane and water was coming in,” he said in a Facebook video, describing the landing of a Boeing 737-800 flown by Air Niugini at Chuuk International Airport on Friday morning [September 28, 2018]. “And I thought, well, this is not, like, the way it’s supposed to happen.”
But then help suddenly arrived — from a flotilla of local boats that rushed to the plane, which landed short of the runway in the Chuuk lagoon, and all 47 passengers aboard the aircraft were evacuated, according to early statement from the airline.
“It’s just surreal,” said Mr. Jaynes, managing editor of The Kaselehlie Press, a newspaper on Pohnpei, another Micronesian island.
Matthew Colson, a Baptist missionary who lives on Weno, recorded the rescue effort and posted his interview with Mr. Jaynes on Facebook. He said the locals who rushed their boats to the scene were fisherman and construction workers, all locals.
. . .
Mr. Jaynes, reflecting on the experience, said, “I’m alive and that’s an extremely good thing.”

For the full story, see:
Austin Ramzy. “When a Plane Crashed in the Pacific, Fishing Boats Came to the Rescue.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 28, 2018): A4.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 27, 2018, and has the title “‘Their Plane Was Set to Land. The Water Rushed In. Then, the Boats Came.”)

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.

“Wishing Only for More Time”

(p. A20) Walter Mischel, whose studies of delayed gratification in young children clarified the importance of self-control in human development, and whose work led to a broad reconsideration of how personality is understood, died on Wednesday [September 12, 2018] at his home in Manhattan.
. . .
In a series of experiments at Stanford University beginning in the 1960s, he led a research team that presented preschool-age children with treats — pretzels, cookies, a marshmallow — and instructed them to wait before indulging themselves. Some of the children received strategies from the researchers, like covering their eyes or reimagining the treat as something else; others were left to their own devices.
The studies found that in all conditions, some youngsters were far better than others at deploying the strategies — or devising their own — and that this ability seemed to persist at later ages. And context mattered: Children given reason to distrust the researchers tended to grab the treats earlier.
. . .
For the wider public, it would be the marshmallow test. In the late 1980s, decades after the first experiments were done, Dr. Mischel and two co-authors followed up with about 100 parents whose children had participated in the original studies. They found a striking, if preliminary, correlation: The preschoolers who could put off eating the treat tended to have higher SAT scores, and were better adjusted emotionally on some measures, than those who had given in quickly to temptation.
The paper was cautious in its conclusions, and acknowledged numerous flaws, including a small sample size. No matter. It was widely reported, and a staple of popular psychology writing was born: If Junior can hold off eating a marshmallow for 15 minutes in preschool, then he or she is headed for the dean’s list.
. . .
In 2014, Dr. Mischel published his own account of the experiment and its reception, “The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control.”
In at least one serious replication attempt, scientists failed to find the same results. Still, there is general agreement that self-discipline, persistence, grit — call it what you like — is a good predictor of success in many areas of life.
. . .
“I am glad that at the choice point at 18 I resisted going into my uncle’s umbrella business,” he wrote in the autobiographical essay. “The route I did choose, or stumbled into, still leaves me eager early each morning to get to work in directions I could not have imagined at the start, wishing only for more time, and not wanting to spend too much of it looking back.”

For the full obituary, see:

Benedict Carey. “Walter Mischel, 88, Marshmallow Test Creator, Dies.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018): A20.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed date, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date Sept. 14, 2018, and has the title “Walter Mischel, 88, Psychologist Famed for Marshmallow Test, Dies’.”)

Mischel’s book on delayed gratification, is:
Mischel, Walter. The Marshmallow Test: Mastering Self-Control. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2014.

Hershey Gave the World Chocolate Candy and a Single, Very Rich, Residential School

(p. A19) In the early 20th century, Milton Hershey transformed chocolate from a luxury good to a working-class staple. It made him a fortune, which he used to establish Hershey, Pa.–a model company town 100 miles west of Philadelphia and the self-proclaimed “sweetest place on earth.” He also established an orphanage, the Milton Hershey School, to provide housing and education primarily for children from the area.
. . .
Other early-20th-century philanthropists, such as Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, left behind massive general-purpose foundations that underwrote experiments in medicine, science and higher education, Mr. Kurie observes, while Hershey “gave us chocolate candy and a single residential school in south-central Pennsylvania that remains little known outside the region.”
. . .
. . . , [Mr. Kurie] suggests that the trust can be viewed as a model of philanthropic responsibility, even by institutions without a devoutly local focus. Mr. Kurie’s most significant contribution here is to draw attention to philanthropy’s “external stakeholders,” those people and organizations “who are neither agents nor subjects of philanthropy but who are, for better or worse, caught up in its activities.” He demonstrates how a philanthropic institution can continue to reflect a founder’s vision while shaping and being shaped by the community that grows up around it, one whose bonds can often be bittersweet.

For the full review, see:
Benjamin Soskis. BOOKSHELF; A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, March 26, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed name, added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date March 25, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘In Chocolate We Trust’ Review: A Man, a Brand, a School, a Town.”)

The book under review, is:
Kurie, Peter. In Chocolate We Trust: The Hershey Company Town Unwrapped. Philadelphai, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018.

Kilby Invented Transistor While Flouting Mandated Summer Vacation

(p. A15) Sixty years. But how much longer? In 1958 Jack St. Clair Kilby–from Great Bend, Kan.–created one of the greatest inventions, a great bend, in the history of mankind. Kilby recently had started at Texas Instruments as an electrical engineer. Most everyone left on a mandated summer break, but he stayed in the lab and worked on combining a transistor, capacitor and three resistors on a single piece of germanium. On Sept. 12, he showed his boss his integrated circuit. At a half-inch long and not very wide, it had ugly wires sticking out, resembling an upside-down cockroach glued to a glass slide.
. . .
Brace yourself. When Moore’s Law finally gives up the ghost, productivity and economic growth will roll over too–unless. The world needs another Great Bend, another Kilbyesque warp in the cosmos, to drive the economy.
. . .
Let’s hope the next Jack Kilby skipped this summer’s vacation.

For the full commentary, see:
Kessler, Andy. “INSIDE VIEW; The Chip That Changed the World; Jack Kilby built the first integrated circuit 60 years ago. We need a new Moore’s Law.” The Wall Street Journal (Monday, Aug. 27, 2018): A15.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date Aug. 26, 2018.)

If She Could Choose Her Father, Lisa Brennan-Jobs Would Choose Steve Jobs

(p. A13) The house that Steve Jobs built had many mansions. One of them was a vast Spanish-style confection with soaring white arches. Majestic and crumbling, it sat on seven acres in the town of Woodside near Palo Alto, Calif. Inside there was an elevator, a ballroom and a church organ. Otherwise it was mostly empty. Jobs’s daughter Lisa was 9 when she began to spend overnights with him there on Wednesdays in the mid-1980s while her mother went to art school in Oakland.
Both the mansion and her father, whom the little girl barely knew, were scary and awe-inspiring, filling her with “a kind of ecstatic expectation,” as Lisa Brennan-Jobs writes in her memoir “Small Fry.”
. . .
For all the emotional injury Ms. Brennan-Jobs describes in her book, there are no villains. She portrays her father as a damaged person who in turn inflicted suffering on others. “There was a thin line between civility and cruelty in him, between what did and what did not set him off,” she writes. When he was not belittling her as if she were a delinquent employee, he could be spontaneously tender. “Hey, Small Fry, let’s blast,” Jobs would say as he arrived to take her roller skating on random weekends. “We’re livin’ on borrowed time.” She learned to navigate around his poisonous moods and not to trust too much in his moments of grace.
Nor are there any heroes here, though there are acts of heroism. Chrisann Brennan’s dedication to Lisa’s care was ironclad over the years as she struggled to support them both. Mona Simpson made helpful interventions on Lisa’s behalf, and Laurene Powell, who married Jobs in 1991, did what she could to include the child in her household. Lisa’s longtime psychiatrist became a trustworthy father figure, as did a sympathetic neighbor. Painful though this childhood was, it was not without a stumbling kind of love. Ms. Brennan-Jobs knows this, and works to forgive. About her parents she admits that, given the opportunity, “I would choose them again.”

For the full review, see:
Donna Rifkind. “BOOKSHELF; Coming of Age in Silicon Valley.” The Wall Street Journal (Friday, Sept. 7, 2018): A13.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the review has the date Sept. 6, 2018, and has the title “BOOKSHELF; ‘Small Fry’ Review: Coming of Age in Silicon Valley.”)

The book under review, is:
Brennan-Jobs, Lisa. Small Fry: A Memoir. New York: Grove Press, 2018.

Fashion Designers Catch Up with Arthur Diamond on Pockets

After decades of wearing shirts with two to four pockets, and cargo pants with many pockets, I am gratified to finally be vindicated as a fashion-forward trendsetter.

(p. D1) IN 1901, Levi’s gave its famous 501 jean its famous fifth pocket. It wasn’t, as many assume, the teensy pocketwatch slot above the right front pocket–that had been there since the jean’s beginnings in 1879–but rather the back left pocket. That unassuming addition granted generations of men (and eventually women) double the rear-end real estate in which to stash bifolds, bandannas, crumpled bar receipts and, of course, awkward hands. For a mere sliver of space, it marked a revolution in clothing.

These days, our relationship to pockets is undergoing a similar sea change. Whereas Levi’s took a subtle approach, menswear designers are now stitching pockets on garments with the abandon of Jackson Pollock flinging paint on canvas. No longer an afterthought or mundane change-holder, pockets are the defining component of many designs.

For the full story, see:
Jacob Gallagher. “Pick Pockets.” The Wall Street Journal (Saturday, Sept. 8, 2018): D1-D2.
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 6, 2018, and has the title “Think Your Clothes Have Enough Pockets? Think Again.”)

Growing Percent of Seniors Choose Entrepreneurship Over Retirement

(p. A17) Fed up, Mr. Grupper decided to try something new: being his own boss.
. . .
“The risks have paid off,” he said. “I’m making money doing what I love to do.”
. . .
These “encore entrepreneurs” are increasingly finding their niche: Their numbers are growing more than twice as fast as the population of New Yorkers over 50. Now a new report by the Center for an Urban Future, a nonprofit research and policy organization, has documented the trend using an analysis of census and labor data and dozens of interviews with organizations that work with entrepreneurs.
“Ask most New Yorkers to picture an entrepreneur, and they imagine a 20- or 30-something in jeans and sneakers. But the face of entrepreneurship across New York City is changing,” reads the report, “Starting Later: Realizing the Promise of Older Entrepreneurs in New York City.”
The number of self-employed New Yorkers who were at least 50 rose to 209,972 in 2016, up 63.7 percent from 128,282 in 2000. By comparison, the number of city residents overall who were at least 50 rose just 28.5 percent to 2.67 million from 2.08 million during that same period.
These older New York entrepreneurs are also part of a national trend, driven partly by the financial crisis a decade ago. Still, their numbers have grown even as the economy has rebounded. In August [2018], the national unemployment rate was 3.9 percent overall, and 3.1 percent for those 55 years and over, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
For many, it means no more answering to bosses half their age, or making do with part-time jobs bagging groceries to get by in their golden years.

For the full story, see:
Winnie Hu. “They’re Over 50, and Excited for a New Start(up).” The New York Times (Tuesday, Sept. 18, 2018): A17.
(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 17, 2018, and has the title ” of the New York edition with the headline: “Retire? These Graying ‘Encore Entrepreneurs’ Are Just Starting Up.”)

Unemployed Robot Can Open Doors, If the Doors Have the Right Handles

(p. B1) WALTHAM, Mass. — Moving like a large dog, knees bent and hips swaying, the robot walked across a parking lot and into a rain puddle.
There, it danced a jig, splashing water across the asphalt. Then it turned and trotted toward a brick building, climbing over a curb and stopping within inches of a floor-length window. Pausing for several seconds, it seemed to eye its own reflection in the glass.
The scene was mesmerizing — so mesmerizing, it was easy to forget that a woman was guiding the four-legged machine from across the parking lot, a joystick in her hands and a laptop computer strapped to her waist.
The robot was called SpotMini. It was designed by Boston Dynamics, a company widely known for building machines that move like animals and humans. Thanks to a steady stream of YouTube videos from the otherwise secretive robotics lab, its machines have become an internet phenomenon.
But YouTube fame has not translated to very much revenue. In the coming year, Boston Dynamics, which was founded in 1992, plans to start selling the SpotMini, its first commercial robot. The mechanical dog would be a turning point for an outfit that has bewildered people with both its wondrous technology and its seeming lack of interest in making things someone — anyone — would actually want to buy.
Even now, it is not entirely clear what someone would do with one of these robots. That makes it hard to get past a question people have been asking about Boston Dynamics for years: Is this a business or a research lab?
. . .
(p. B4) Walking through the Boston Dynamics lab, Mr. Raibert, 68, wore bluejeans and a Hawaiian shirt, as he does nearly every day. He wants to build robots that can do what humans and animals can do. That was his aim in the early 1980s, when he founded the Leg Lab at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh. And it was his aim when he moved the lab to M.I.T.
. . .
No machine comes closer to his vision than Atlas, a 165-pound anthropomorphic robot that can run, jump and even do back flips. Mr. Raibert would not let us shoot video of Atlas or other robots while inside the lab. But he did give a brief demonstration of the machine.
Like the SpotMini, Atlas is controlled by a joystick, a laptop computer and a wireless radio. When Mr. Raibert signaled for the demo, an engineer touched the joystick and the 165-pound robot crashed to the floor. Atlas is so large and so lifelike, you feel bad for it.
. . .
SpotMini is smaller and cheaper and has better balance than Atlas. It can carry (small) items on its back, and it can open doors (provided the doors have the proper handles). This requires an extra limb that attaches between its shoulders.

For the full story, see:
Cade Metz. “‘For Sale: One Robot In Search Of a Job.” The New York Times (Saturday, Sept. 22, 2018): B1 & B4.
(Note: ellipses added.)
(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 21, 2018, and has the title “‘These Robots Run, Dance and Flip. But Are They a Business?”)

Dr. Charles Wilson Had Surgical Intuition, “Sort of an Invisible Hand”

(p. A19) Dr. Wilson sometimes worked in three operating rooms simultaneously: Residents would surgically open and prepare patients for his arrival, and he would then enter to seal an aneurysm or remove a tumor before moving on to the next case.
“He never spent much more than 30 or 60 minutes on each case, and we were left to close the case and make sure everything was O.K.,” Dr. Mitchel Berger, a former resident who is chairman of U.C.S.F.’s neurosurgical department, said in an interview. “It was unorthodox, but it worked. He demanded excellence and we gave him excellence.”
They also gave him silence. He allowed no music, no ringing phones and no idle chatter. Scrub nurses were expected to anticipate his requests.
“He would manage any break of silence with a stern look,” said Dr. Brian Andrews, a neurosurgeon who was one of Dr. Wilson’s residents and also his biographer, with the book “Cherokee Surgeon” (2011). (Dr. Wilson was one-eighth Cherokee.)
Dr. Wilson became world renowned for excising pituitary tumors through the sinus in a surgery called transsphenoidal resection.
. . .
The writer Malcolm Gladwell, in a profile of Dr. Wilson in The New Yorker in 1999, described one of those pituitary cancer surgeries. Looking at a tumor through a surgical microscope, Dr. Wilson used an instrument called a ring curette to peel the tumor from the gland.
“It was, he would say later, like running a squeegee across a windshield,” Mr. Gladwell wrote, “except that in this case, the windshield was a surgical field one centimeter in diameter, flanked on either side by the carotid arteries, the principal sources of blood to the brain.”
A wrong move could nick an artery or damage a nerve, endangering the patient’s vision or his life.
When Dr. Wilson saw bleeding from one side of the gland, he realized that he had not gotten all of the tumor. He found it and removed it. The surgery took only 25 minutes.
Dr. Wilson performed the surgery more than 3,300 times.
He told Mr. Gladwell that he had a special feel for surgery that he could not entirely explain.
“It’s sort of an invisible hand,” he said. “It begins almost to seem mystical. Sometimes a resident asks, ‘Why did you do that?’ ” His response, he told Mr. Gladwell, was to shrug and say, “Well, it just seemed like the right thing.”

For the full obituary, see:
Richard Sandomir. “‘Charles Wilson, 88, Lauded For Excising Brain Tumors, Sometimes Several in a Day.” The New York Times (Monday, March 5, 2018): A19.
(Note: ellipsis, and bracketed year, added.)
(Note: the online version of the obituary has the date March 2, 2018, and has the title “‘Charles Wilson, Top Brain Surgeon and Researcher, Dies at 88.”)

The biography of Wilson, mentioned above, is:
Andrews, Brian T. Cherokee Neurosurgeon: A Biography of Charles Byron Wilson, M.D. Scotts Valley, CA: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2011.