When people ask Elon Musk how he learned to build rockets, he has a simple answer.
"I read books," he reportedly likes to say.
Musk — who was smart enough to get into a physics Ph.D. program at Stanford University and then drop out because it didn't seem that relevant to him — has always been hungry for the written word.
Last year it was Highlight's year to shine at SXSW. This year I think that honor goes to Snapchat.
Twitter had its year. It was Twitter that put SXSW on the tech map. One year FourSquare stole the show.
Next year I think we will see a new paradigm emerge. That new paradigm is the NUI, the Natural User Interface. It will be like moving from 2D to 3D. All apps will need to be overhauled. New possibilities will emerge.
now the third-largest source of referral traffic on the Internet .... The way Pinterest grew had little to do with Silicon Valley wisdom. It was about marketing — mostly grassroots marketing — not better algorithms. ..... In 2010, three months after Pinterest launched, the site had only 3,000 users. ..... So Pinterest started to have meet-ups at local boutiques, and to take fun pictures of people who attended them, and to engage with bloggers to do invitation campaigns like “Pin It Forward,” where bloggers got more invites to the site by spreading the world. ....... Fundamentally, the future is unwritten ..... he himself thought for a while that the secret to Pinterest’s growth woes would be finding some undiscovered Stanford grad student to build a better algorithm.
Remembering RajeevIt is with great sadness that I write about the passing of my teacher and good friend Professor Rajeev Motwani. But I would rather not dwell on the sorrow of his death and instead celebrate his life. ........ When my interest turned to data mining, Rajeev helped to coordinate a regular meeting group on the subject. ...... Later, when Larry and I began to work together on the research that would lead to Google, Rajeev was there to support us and guide us through challenges, both technical and organizational...... Of all the faculty at Stanford, it is with Rajeev that I have stayed the closest and I will miss him dearly.
Rajeev Motwani's death has made me think about a few things at a very fundamental level. I did not know the guy, although I had read about him a few times in passing, had taken pride in an Indian's involvement with something as fundamental as Google: I am half Indian, born in India, grew up next door in Nepal, the poorest country outside of Africa. But had forgotten his name.
Why was he alone? That was the question that struck me, echoed in my mind.
Growing up it was hard if not impossible for me to be alone. There were always people around. The first American city I got to see was Indianapolis. I was taken downtown. My first question was, but where are the people?
At a gut level I always thought of the phrase Third World to be racist. The suggestion is that the so-called Third World is two steps behind the First World on everything. And that simply put is not true.
I went to a school in Kathmandu founded by the British. Every year they would bring along two high school graduates from Britain. They would teach for a year and then go back to college in Britain. I asked one of them after they had been in Nepal a month. So what's the difference? He said he had been in Nepal a month, and he had yet to meet someone who was depressed. That was his tribute to the emotional infrastructure he witnessed.
A few years in America I read online somewhere that Nepal has been the top choice among Peace Corps volunteers during the entire half century of that program's existence.
I once read in an anthropological journal article somewhere that some "tribes" - another racist term - in Africa handled adolescence better than the American society did.
pretty hard nosed about where I come from. I don't glamorize poverty, I don't glamorize children dying from petty diseases. There is much sexism where I come from. Complaining of ethnic prejudice is almost second nature to me. I wish wealth and broadband upon my peoples.
But Global South is the term to use. Otherwise the same white people who have destroyed the environment over 500 years are turning around to lecture you on the environment. What's wrong in the picture?
Why was Rajeev Motwani alone? Why was Ramanujan lonely in England?
Motwani was in the prime of his life, both personally and professionally.
These questions also tie into my recurring theme at this blog, that the human element is central to the web as technology.
Heroic entrepreneursAzim Premji, who transformed Wipro from a vegetable-oil company into a software giant ......... entrepreneurship as a powerful force for doing good as well as doing well. ...... in almost all instances it involves not creative destruction but creative creation. ... The lights may have gone out on Wall Street, but Silicon Valley continues to burn bright. ....... TiE was founded in Silicon Valley in 1992 ....... Wipro’s Mr Premji, was educated at Stanford ....... somebody who offers an innovative solution to a (frequently unrecognised) problem. ....... “the bold and imaginative deviator from established business patterns and practices”. ....... “the pursuit of opportunity beyond the resources you currently control”. ....... entrepreneurship, like all business, is a social activity ........ flourishes in clusters. A third of American venture capital flows into two places, Silicon Valley and Boston, and two-thirds into just six places, New York, Los Angeles, San Diego and Austin as well as the Valley and Boston ........ Harland Sanders started franchising Kentucky Fried Chicken when he was 65. Gary Burrell was 52 when he left Allied Signal to help start Garmin, a GPS giant. Herb Kelleher was 40 when he founded Southwest Airlines ........ the average boss was 39 when he or she started ....... Venture capitalists fund only a small fraction of start-ups. The money for the vast majority comes from personal debt or from the “three fs”—friends, fools and families. .......... Brin and Page founded the company without any money at all and launched it with about $1m raised from friends and connections. ....... some of the most successful entrepreneurs concentrate on processes rather than products ....... Jack Welch tried to transform General Electric from a Goliath into a collection of entrepreneurial Davids. ....... Microsoft works closely with a network of 750,000 small companies around the world. Some 3,500 companies have grown up in Nokia’s shadow. .......... downturns can act as a “good cold shower for the economic system”, releasing capital and labour from dying sectors and allowing newcomers to recombine in imaginative new ways. ....... The information age is making it ever easier for ordinary people to start businesses and harder for incumbents to defend their territory. Back in 1960 the composition of the Fortune 500 was so stable that it took 20 years for a third of the constitutent companies to change. Now it takes only four years. ....... advanced economies are characterised by a shift from manufacturing to services. Service firms are usually smaller than manufacturing firms and there are fewer barriers to entry. ...... Microsoft, Genentech, Gap and The Limited were all founded during recessions. Hewlett-Packard, Geophysical Service (now Texas Instruments), United Technologies, Polaroid and Revlon started in the Depression.
The United States of EntrepreneursGoogle and Facebook barely existed a decade ago. .... America was the first country, in the late 1970s, to ditch managerial capitalism for the entrepreneurial variety. .... willing to sacrifice old certainties for new opportunities ...... the world’s most mature venture-capital industry ..... Highland Capital Partners receives about 10,000 plausible business plans a year, conducts about 1,000 meetings followed by 400 company visits and ends up making 10-20 investments a year, all of which are guaranteed to receive an enormous amount of time and expertise. ......... Stanford University gained around $200m in stock when Google went public. ..... 52% of Silicon Valley start-ups were founded by immigrants, up from around a quarter ten years ago. ...... In 2006 foreign nationals were named as inventors or co-inventors in a quarter of American patent applications, up from 7.6% in 1998. ......... “patent trolls”—lawyers who bring cases against companies for violating this or that trumped-up patent ........ rising xenophobia is making the country less open to immigrants. ....... wealth-creating universities, such as Harvard and Stanford ...... Chinese and Indian entrepreneurs, who cut their teeth in Stanford and Silicon Valley, are now returning home in ever larger numbers, determined to recreate Silicon Valley’s magic in Bangalore or Shanghai. ......... Goldman Sachs is spending $100m over the next five years to promote entrepreneurialism among women in the developing world ...... —the EU and Japan—are far less entrepreneurial. ....... only 5% of European companies created from scratch since 1980 have made it into the list of the 1,000 biggest EU companies by market capitalisation. The equivalent figure for America is 22%. ....... different cultural attitudes ...... When Denis Payre was thinking about leaving a safe job in Oracle to start a company in the late 1980s, his French friends gave him ten reasons to stay put whereas his American friends gave him ten reasons to get on his bike. In January last year Mr Payre’s start-up, Business Objects, was sold to Germany’s SAP for €4.8 billion. ......... cultural problems are reinforced by structural ones. ..... A depressing number of European universities remain suspicious of industry, subsisting on declining state subsidies but still unwilling to embrace the private sector. ......... America has at least 50 times as many “angel” investors as Europe ..... In the 1990s Silicon Valley’s moneybags believed that they should invest “no further than 20 miles from their offices”, but lately the Valley’s finest have been establishing offices in Asia and Europe. .............. technological breakthroughs are being made in many more places ....... applying American methods to new economies can start a torrent of entrepreneurial creativity. ........... The success of Skype, which pioneered internet-based telephone calls, was a striking example of the new European entrepreneurialism. The company was started by a Swede and a Dane who contracted out much of their work to computer programmers in Estonia. In 2005 they sold it to eBay for $2.6 billion. .......... the Japanese have been less successful than the Europeans at adapting to entrepreneurial capitalism
Entrepreneurs in India and ChinaBollywood produces 1,000 films a year that are watched by 3.6 billion people (the figures for Hollywood are 700 and 2.6 billion). .... In 2003-05 some 5,000 tech-savvy Indians with more than five years’ experience of working in America returned to India. ...... The British introduced the ideal of meritocracy to India; Jawaharlal Nehru gave it a technocratic twist by launching the Indian Institutes of Technology; and India’s natural love of argument did the rest. ......... When Wu Yi, the country’s then vice-premier, visited America in 2006, she took more than 200 entrepreneurs with her. About 60 Chinese companies are now traded on NASDAQ. ....... So many Chinese expats have returned in the past few years that Valley-slang has given them a special name, B2C (back to China). ....... Baidu is a Chinese Google; Dangdang is a Chinese Amazon; Taobao is a Chinese eBay; Oak Pacific Interactive is a mishmash of MySpace, YouTube, Facebook and Craigslist; Chinacars is a Chinese American Automobile Association. .......... Baidu’s founder, Robin Li, raised funds from American venture capitalists and offered stock options to his earliest employees. ......... Jeff Chen has developed an internet browser which has attracted venture capital from Denmark and is available in 20 languages. ......... Some of the most innovative entrepreneurs are working with mobile telephony ....... the Chinese reportedly maintain three sets of books, one for their bankers, one for their accountants and one for the government. Businessmen often neglect their firms because they spend so much time cultivating political connections.
The formula for entrepreneurshipwould-be Silicon Valleys: Silicon Alley in New York, Silicon Glen in Scotland and even, depressingly, Silicon Roundabout in London. ........ the anchor-firm model ........ People become entrepreneurs when the economy stops supplying jobs. ....... the local-hero model ...... culture makes almost all the difference ....... economic policies matter too .... culture can be changed ..... India and China have become the second and third most entrepreneurial countries in the world, trailing only America ......... a vibrant higher education system .... openness to outsiders. Emigrés have always been more entrepreneurial than their stay-at-home cousins: the three most entrepreneurial spaces in modern history have been the ones inhabited by the Jewish, Chinese and Indian diasporas ........... they mix and match knowledge ........ Shai Agassi, an Israeli-American businessman based in Palo Alto, California, is promising to upend the car industry by going electric ........ local cultures matter
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