NexGen is located in Lindenhurst, New York, and is a leader in providing solvent recycling equipment to factories in a large variety of industries. It has over 8,000 customers in both public and private sectors, small and big companies. It helps reduce waste and re-use expensive solvents. It helps protect the environment in the process. It is a leader in waste solvent handling solutions.
NexGen is well positioned as a company as we become more conscious environmentally as a population, and it feels like we might be on the cusp of a green tech revolution. A company like NexGen makes environment sense, but then it also makes business sense. It helps with cost reduction.
There is research to prove blogging is good for your brain, like running is good for your thighs. Has to be. You can intuitively conclude. You don't need research for that. And by blogging, I mean blogging. That includes podcasting, that includes videoblogging. That includes micro-blogging, of course.
The Internet is the Ultimate Media. Every moment of every life can be recorded, technically speaking. But what if you are not interested in the mundane, what if you are only interested in ideas? What if you don't care if they are mixed up?
A blog is a web log. The web is the interweb - I got that word from Morgan Grice a few days ago - and it is the web that is key. How you log on to it, how you latch on to it, does not matter. Every netizen is a producer, every netizen is a potential consumer.
The netizens suck on the nipples of Mother Web for nourishment. Netizens produce knowledge, perspectives. Even when nothing groundbreaking is happening, even if it is just the proliferation of existing knowledge, something fascinating is happening.
Like I have said many times, you can not bring all Nepalis to MIT, but you can take MIT to everyone in Nepal. If all textbooks, if all journal articles, and all lecture videos are added to the soup called the social web, how much will you be missing if you are not on campus?
And the blog is the center of that action for each individual netizen. If nothing else, it allows you to display your ignorance.
The interweb is not just about putting faces in front of computer screens. It is about taking group dynamics to a whole different level. Barack Obama rode the internet all the way to the most powerful office in the world. How much more real does it have to be? Grassroots governance is going to be more exciting than grassroots campaigning.
The blog is where it gels for the netizen. That space is your space, and it has all the wheels of media. It has the feel of a classroom. It is in your face like a microphone. It is expansive like air, water, space. It is casual like gum. It is private. I mean, if you are struggling to get page hits.
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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