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All small businesses are not the same. Until this is registered and embraced by our legislators, this country will not succeed in its efforts to promote economic growth through innovation or unleash our full capacity to compete globally.
As a participant in Treasury’s Access to Capital Conference held Tuesday in Washington D.C., I was invited to speak on a panel about fostering growth and innovation for high growth small businesses, with a specific focus on the role that debt can play. I was appreciative of the opportunity to represent the needs of truly innovative companies that contribute substantially to U.S. GDP,

A few weeks ago, the White House released a report on the status of American women: “Women in America: Indicators of Social and Economic Well-Being.” This was a big deal: it’s the first comprehensive federal report on women since 1963. Yes, you read that right: The last time the federal government produced a report on women was during the Kennedy administration, with Eleanor Roosevelt in charge. Clearly, they’ve had a lot of time to do research.
The report illustrates how women’s lives are changing in five different arenas — people, families and income; education; employment; health; and crime and violence. Most of it isn’t especially surprising: Women are marrying later and having fewer

I gave a talk at the Stanford Graduate School of Business as part of Entrepreneurship Week on the Democratization of Entrepreneurship. The first 11 minutes or so of the talk (see video below) covers the post I wrote called “When It’s Darkest, Men See the Stars.”
In it, I observe that the barriers to entrepreneurship are not just being removed. They’re being replaced by innovations that are speeding up each step, some by a factor of ten.
My hypothesis is that we’ll look back on this decade as the beginning of a revolution built on entrepreneurship and innovation.

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Conventional wisdom says that great companies are built by business leaders with the greatest vision. However, the truth is that groundbreaking businesses tend to come from entrepreneurs who were smart enough to out-execute everyone else in their space. That means getting products out there and growing a loyal customer base rather than trying to engineer a product to its supposed perfection.
Microsoft is a great example of company that has succeeded by out-executing its competitors. They’ve rarely been first to market with any of their products, but they’ve successfully brought them to market, figured out how to improve them, and reintroduced them again and

We’re now in the second Internet bubble. The signals are loud and clear: seed and late stage valuations are getting frothy and wacky, and hiring talent in Silicon Valley is the toughest it has been since the dot.com bubble. The rules for making money are different in a bubble than in normal times. What are they, how do they differ and what can a startup do to take advantage of them?
First, to understand where we’re going, it’s important to know where we’ve

Our new Stanford Lean LaunchPad class was an experiment in a new model of teaching startup entrepreneurship. This post is part two. Part one is here. The class syllabus is here.
We asked each of the student teams to:
Write down their initial hypotheses for the 9 components of their company’s business model (Who are the customers? What’s the product? What’s the value proposition, distribution channel? etc.)
Come up with ways to test each of the 9 business model hypotheses
Decide what constitutes a pass/fail signal for the

In my last post about the Startup Visa, I was very critical of the Kerry-Lugar legislation. That’s because it required immigrant entrepreneurs to raise at least $250,000 in financing for their startups, of which $100,000 had to come from American VCs or Super Angels. Few startups raise this kind of seed money — even in Silicon Valley. I couldn’t foresee this bill generating more than a few dozen

You’re an expert chef with a beautiful restaurant, friendly staff and great food. In the past, you’ve successfully managed your customer flow through traditional advertising in local newspapers and you sponsor the local little league. Business is great, but a similar restaurant just opened up a few blocks away, and it’s generating lots of buzz. The restaurant is using social media to its advantage, growing its customer base at an accelerated pace, and you’re starting to lose market

If you’ve watched the opening scenes of Slumdog Millionaire, you’ve seen Dharavi, a teeming slum of nearly a million people in the heart of Mumbai. I’m just back from India, including a visit to Dharavi. And, let me assure you, the film was shot on location.
Walking into the slum from Mahim Link Road, poverty slaps you in the face. Ramshackle buildings made of a mlange of found materials and corrugated tin line unpaved

From Odysseus to the Merry Pranksters, the road trip is the ultimate rite of discovery. This classic rite is taking a new twist on highways across the country from March 8 through 10: As I write, six buses filled with teams of sleep-deprived innovators — hackers, designers, marketers, dreamers — are headed to Austin, TX on a collective quest to prove that, with the right combination of energy and talent, a viable business startup can be launched from scratch in just 48 hours.
As Elias Bizannes relates, this particular Odyssey started as a joke over drinks in early 2010. Sitting with a group of friends in Silicon Valley, where he is the financial manager with at Vast.com and heavily involved in mentoring tech entrepreneurs, the subject of travel plans for South by Southwest Interactive festival came up. Someone suggested making an entrepreneur’s roadtrip of it — renting a bus and filling it with a collection of enterprising talent to develop, hackathon style, business startups en route.
The March festival was only about a month away, but Bizannes put up a website — actually, a mere splash screen announcing, “YOU AND A TEAM OF STRANGERS ON A BUS TRAVELING AT 60 MILES PER HOUR HAVE 48 HOURS TO CONCEIVE, BUILD, AND LAUNCH A STARTUP.” To his surprise, this tease almost immediately caught the attention of TechCrunch, who published a piece on the project, now officially dubbed Startup

For the past three months, we’ve run an experiment in teaching entrepreneurship.
In January, we introduced a new graduate course at Stanford called the Lean LaunchPad. It was designed to bring together many of the new approaches to building a successful startup – customer development, agile development, business model generation and pivots.
We thought it would be interesting to share the week-by-week progress of how the class actually turned out. This post is part one.
A New Way to Teach Entrepreneurship
As the students filed into the classroom, my entrepreneurial reality distortion field began to weaken. What if I was wrong? Could we even could find 40 Stanford graduate students interested in being guinea pigs for this new class? Would anyone even show up? Even if they did, what if the assumption – that we had developed a better approach to teaching entrepreneurship – was simply mistaken?
We were positing that there has to be a better way to teach entrepreneurship, that 20 years of teaching “how to write a business plan” was

In 2009, Jeffrey Erb left his management position at a premier New York City design firm to branch out and start his own business, Jeffrey Erb Landscape Design, which creates artful urban landscapes and garden designs. Though Jeffrey plans to hire and expand his young business in the future, current economic conditions necessitate that he remain a “one man shop.”
Jeffrey’s situation is becoming increasingly common. The layoffs of the Great Recession have prompted more and more people to set off on their own, trying their hand at running a business. New data from the Kauffman Index of Entrepreneurial Activity indicate that startup activity rose to record highs in 2008 and

In my role at the head of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center, I have the great opportunity, at times, to travel the world and learn about entrepreneurship on a global scale, and to gain knowledge and perspective to help us be more effective in our mission at home. This past week was such an experience.
There is an underlying assumption that to have an innovation-based entrepreneurial ecosystem, there has to be an “MIT-like” anchor university in the ecosystem (Technion in Israel, Stanford in Silicon Valley, IIT in India). The presence of such an institution that attracts, trains, and continually feeds skilled and talented workers into the ecosystem makes perfect sense.
What if I told you of a place where there is a growing and vibrant IT entrepreneurial community, and yet it is in a country that lacks a single university in the top 500 in the world? This is exactly what I found in Romania these past few days.
As I met dynamic entrepreneurs and heard stories of their friends, a pattern emerged. Most have never studied computer science at a university; they said they did have time to do so, and that it was better to get real experience (some did not even graduate from high

“Men wanted for hazardous journey. Low wages, bitter cold, long hours of complete darkness. Safe return doubtful. Honour and recognition in event of success.”
In 1912 Ernest Shackleton placed this ad to recruit a crew for the ship Endurance and his expedition to the South

Imagine yourself running a non-profit in one of the hardest hit economic areas of the country and feeling like you’re making progress with your mission of advancing economic development through a focus in innovation and entrepreneurship. Then, imagine the White House calling and saying that they were so excited by what they were observing in terms of the state of change in the region that they wanted to come look and learn for themselves. Well that’s exactly what happened here.
On February 22, President Obama visited Cleveland with an impressive team of five cabinet members and two senior administration officials for the first in a series of Winning the Future Forum on Small Business gatherings across the

When most people think of networking, they think of it as something you do to meet new people. However, might I suggest defining networking as ‘developing deeper relationships with people you already know’ and using the term direct outreach to mean ‘meeting people that you don’t yet know but would like to know’?
Of course, ultimately, it doesn’t really matter which words you use but, rather, that you make a distinction between meeting knew people and staying connected with the people you already know.
If you make this important distinction, it can help you stay focused on each area specifically and deliberately. To that end, there are four simple but meaningful daily action steps that will build your network and get you booked

A young person from a wealthy family has an incredible array of choices as he or she enters adulthood and considers the age-old question–what will I do with my life? How do I make a difference? For the heir in a wealthy family, the many opportunities that lie ahead may include an undertone of anxiety, as the young adult tries to reconcile an internal conflict about the best path forward.
First of all, there is the challenge of personal identity. His life has been made special by the achievements of prior generations, some of whom have outsize achievements and personalities to match. How can he or she do anything to justify their inheritance, and make a mark in life? Adding to the family fortune alone may not count for much, but just living off the family fortune is not much of a life.
Second, as the family is well known in the community, he or she wants to do something that adds luster and respect to the family name. How will they serve the community, and earn respect for what they do with their significant

This is part of my Series on Entrepreneurial Culture.
The leading dramatis personae of the early-stage tech ecosystem are well established by now in the mainstream collective consciousness. High-tech wunderkind entrepreneurs are of course the most recognizable of the various archetypes, but nowadays once obscure protagonists with strange appellations such as hacker, combinator, seed-stage VC and angel no longer generate quizzical looks and raised eyebrows when others point them out at cocktail parties or gush about them in the mainstream press. The newest hero/villain cast member is of course the so-called “superangel” who one immediately associates with Silicon Valley Olympians such as Ron Conway, Jeff Clavier, Aydin Senkut, Keith Rabois, Chris Sacca, Dave McClure, Mike Maples and others. If the production were an opera, these men would certainly be the tenors and would be seen furiously making out checks by the hundred to web-native entrepreneurs, enjoying great feasts (sometimes replete with petty human dramas) at restaurants like Bin 38, and occasionally hurling lightning bolts at one another in fits of pique, (or thunderous indigestion).
There remains, however, another sort of actor altogether in this early stage landscape of

With February 14-18 being National Telework Week, now’s a great time to rethink your company’s approach to workplace flexibility. The way we work is increasingly becoming more dispersed and mobile, with business spanning time zones and borders. It is estimated that the number of worldwide mobile workers will reach one billion by 2011, which includes nearly 75 percent of the U.S. workforce, according to David Clemons and Michael Kroth, authors of Managing The Mobile

Let’s be serious – everybody is wondering if there is another shoe to drop in the Great Internet Gold Rush of 2011.
$6 billion for Groupon? Nah, too low. Something between $8-$10 billion for Twitter? Sure, why not? Eight-figure pre-money valuations for numerous West Coast consumer web start-ups? Hey, it’s just supply and demand, and besides which, they DID go through YCombinator. $50 billion+ for Facebook? How about $70 billion in a handful of trades on

I hear it all the time from small business owners: “I can’t afford to spend time tweeting or hanging out on Facebook — I have a business to run!” and “Is it possible for my small business to make money from social media, or is it just a necessary game I have to play?”
The experts tell us that social media is here to stay; it’s no longer a question of “if” your business will have a presence on social media but “when” and “how.” But while many small business owners may be actively participating on social media networks, if someone asked “why” or “how” they are using it to bring in new customers, they wouldn’t have clue.
Most large companies are just now figuring it out themselves. I recently talked to a multi-billion dollar company that has a grand total of one employee whose responsibility it is to manage social media (and still do her day job). Many have outsourced everything to their media agency in hopes that they know what to

The U.S. economy is struggling to emerge from a recession that led to the destruction of eight million jobs. At the same time, the federal budget deficit remains stuck above $1 trillion. Having already allocated more than $1.6 trillion toward economic stimulus (the 2009 stimulus package and the December 2010 tax cut agreement), both parties in Washington should be looking for ways to boost growth without spending even more money, directly or through even more tax cuts.
We know one thing for sure: New jobs will come from a healthy and growing private

For its first few decades Silicon Valley was content flying under the radar of Washington politics.
It wasn’t until Fairchild and Intel were almost bankrupted by Japanese semiconductor manufacturers in the early 1980′s that they formed Silicon Valley’s first lobbying group. Microsoft did not open a Washington office until 1995.
Fast forward to today. The words “startup,” “entrepreneur” and “innovation” are used fast, loose and furious by both parties in

MIT Entrepreneurship Review: How did it feel to have [Hot Potato] acquired by Facebook?
Saadiq Rodgers-King: The acquisition was surreal. In one way, I’ve been more successful than many of my friends who are also entrepreneurs. In another way, I’ve been doing the exact same thing as all of them this entire time. It’s constantly a grind, constantly a hustle, constantly selling it, constantly pitching