TEDxSV LiveBlog

My notes on ideas that struck me at TEDxSV

• Ustream broadcast: http://bit.ly/7nBVEw


• Twitter hashtag: #tedxsv

Featured videos:

• Jay Walker http://www.ted.com/talks/jay_walker_on_the_world_s_english_mania.html


• Aimee Mullins http://www.ted.com/talks/aimee_mullins_prosthetic_aesthetics.html


• Cryptozoo http://cryptozoo.ning.com/

Featured speakers:

YouthSpeaks

• "Today is the day"


• "We are the search engine to our solution"

Reid Hoffman

• "public intellectuals help us reflect on who we are and who we should be as individuals and as a society"


• concept: "cause-based movements/companies"


• 3 things to look for in startups: "scalability, margins, defensibility"


• "web 1.0 was about going online to this different place [AOL chatroom] where weird behavior happens, web 2.0 is about real identities"


• "internet: cheap, scalable infrastructure to reach millions of people"


• "we use the same language to talk about cause-based movements as the internet: building 'networks', 'marketplaces', etc."


• "the fastest growing internet corporations are 'pure plays' -- entirely online.  It's harder to get people to actually change what they're going to do on a Saturday afternoon.  But as people get more familiar with being in a network, being in a marketplace, that [behavior change] will become easier.  And it will be sustainable because the low-cost, scalable infrastructure of the Internet helps [reinforce] that behavior."


• concept: "large scale group coordination & distributed effort"


• quote: "the future is sooner and stranger than you think"


• concept: "collective problem identification, crowd-sourced ideation"

Leila Janah, Samasource

• "here in the US, it's easy to think that we live in a meritocracy"


• "well meaning outsiders have created a culture of handouts [in Ghana]"


• "we are witnessing a tremendous surge in human capacity -- global literacy on the rise & 90% decrease in cost to get online."


• "digital microwork: crowd-sourced labor, small tasks worth a few cents each.  this is the future of work."


• "future is about humans and computers working together to get stuff done"


• "people don't need charity, they need a decent way to make a living"

Drue Kataoka

• "building social bridges with art"


• "bridges: art & science, culture & technology"


• concept: "negative space: the space between brush strokes, it's what's NOT there.  it's inherently participatory and collaborative.  it's where imagination can play."


• "social entrepreneurship is about building bridges.  art is uniquely empowered to build those bridges."

Clayborne Carson

• concept:  tension of top-down vs. bottom-up organization in social change...  MLK = top-down, prophetic visionary, difficult to emulate.  Bob Moses = bottom-up organizer, empowering individuals


• "organizer: building self-reliant, grassroots leaders."


• "organizer: our job is to work ourselves out of a job"


• "skilled organizing can create an enormous amount of energy from poor people with small resources"


• "our movement may have still happened without King, but it would have been a very different kind of movement"


• "good organizing, good teaching sets free the best qualities of those who have never been allowed to shine"

Eoin Harrington



Peter Hirschberg & Josette Melchor

• "the meeting place of art & technology"


• "photography -- the quintessential meeting of art and technology -- initially dissed by French literacy establishment"


• "impressionism -- the new 'platform' or 'ecosystem' of its day -- also panned on first reviews"


• new art doesn't fit labels, categories, critics can't write about, people don't understand, it gets shunned


• "what's been bubbling up in the silicon valley technology community is now spilling over into the art community"


• http://www.gaffta.org/

Nancy Lublin

• [Emperor's March from Star Wars] "Do you think of Darth Vader?  Luke?  I think of the Stormtroopers!  They really made things work."


• "We are obsessed with leadership.  Google 'CEO' and you get 4MM hits.  Google 'COO' and you get far fewer..."


• "We are obsessed with 'new', perhaps at the expense of 'impact' -- we don't need another new cancer oragnization, we need the 300 existing ones to work better together."


• "You have permission to JOIN something [instead of 'founding'].  Permission to make IMPACT.  Permission to coin a new title: 'DO-er'"

Di-Ann Eisnor

• "On the CNN map, borders look solid, permanent -- between us and them.  Up close, borders are fluid; they're social."


• "Less than 10% of us cross borders for tourism.  [Correlation to tourist dollars.] 10% of countries take 70% of tourist receipts."


• "273 cross-border groundwater aquifers -- governments need to manage these with each other.  higher potential for conflict."


• thought-provoking: "Who in this room spends time with their friends in East Palo Alto?  The borders that we draw in Silicon Valley have just as much impact as the ones in Gaza."

Yvonne Lee Schultz

• what happens when you turn guns into chocolate?

Alberto Vollmer - CEO of leading Venezuelan rum distillery & bottler

• Project Alcatraz - criminal re-insertion into employment


• [opposing violent criminal gangs in Venezuela] "We have to retaliate, but it has to be creative; it can't be violent."


• [presenting a recruiting pitch in middle of gang-dominated slum] "I came here to make you dream.  Let's talk about what kind of TV you're going to have, what do you want for your kids, what kind of restaurants will be here."


• quote: "hope is so much more powerful than fear, it will always win"

Victor Tsaran - advocate for the blind, musician, Yahoo accessibility lead

• "Transformation through technology.  Using technology to overcome perceptions of what is possible."


• quote: "Life is upbeat, rhythmic, and full of surprises"


• "We create technology to make life meaningful.  With technology, we can do certain things that we could not without technology."

YouthSpeaks

• [teens in Bosnia were tired of foreign journalists coming in to steal their stories] "They wanted to tell their own stories, in their own voices"


• "The #1 fear in this country is public speaking, more than death"

Peter Thiel

• Poll: which disaster is most likely?


• * robots kill/enslave humans


• * biotech-driven pandemic


• * runaway nanotech gray goo


• * nuclear war


• * governments use computers to control everyone


• * runaway global warming


• * singularity takes too long to happen  <== Peter's worried about this


• "our entire civilization is predicated on accelerating technological change"


• "example: retirement planning is based on assumption of 8.5% annual return on investments.  that assumption is based on last 100 years of economic data.  problem: last 100 years have been a time of incredible accelerating technological improvement.  if you ran that same analysis on 1200-1300 A.D. or the last 100 years of the Roman Empire, you'd be lucky to get 0% return, just to keep your money.  Trouble is that the pace of technological progress seems to be slowing..."


• "people seem to be working harder, running really hard just to stay in place."


• "when people talk about progress in the developing world -- China, India -- it's always a 20 year story.  Life there will be so much better in the next 20 years because they'll get all the things that the developed world has now.  But when we talk about progress in the developed countries, it's always on 6 month time scale.  Is the recession over?  What's the market going to be like in 6 months?  Why do we not talk about how life will be dramatically better in the developed world in 20 years?"


• "of 538 congress people, 11 have degrees in engineering.  they all think that 'science and technology are solved by other people.'  but if everyone thinks that, then that's a problem."

Thomas Goetz, ex-Wired editor, Public Health MA

• "Life is an experiment.  How can we turn this into more of a controlled experiment?"


• Health information is dumped on us, scattered, disconnected.  Not effective.  Health problems are increasing in US.


• "Hawthorne effect -- when people know they are being observed, they changed behavior.  Usually experimenters want to get rid of the Hawthorne effect.  But Kansas City orthodontist experiment shows that we can use Hawthorne effect to drive behavior change [brushing teeth more with 'experimental' toothpaste].  Also applies to weight loss [e.g., taking daily photo of your weight on scale]."


• "Whitehall experiment -- controlling for diet and habits, people of high social standing were 2X less likely to die of heart disease than those of low social standing.  Why?  Control.  People at top of social ladder have more control over their lives than those at the bottom."


• "Feedback and Groups are effective, powerful driver of behavior change."


• "Need a control tool: an algorithm, a decision tree that anyone can follow."


• "We want tools and techniques that have minimal friction and scale."


• "Data means more when it's our own."


• "The more we mind our health, the better we are."


• "Don't just make people responsible, but give them the tools and data to make behavioral change."

David de Rothschild - explorer, both poles

• "When people ask about expeditions, the question that has stuck with me: 'How was it out there?'  What does that mean, 'out there'?"


• "Kids are learning about nature, but they're not out there, in it."


• "Nature Defiancy Disorder"


• "We view nature as chaotic, intimidating.  But we like to think things in a linear fashion, things have a start and an end."


• "We are starting to manufacture nature at the expense of nature itself."


• "GDP is a deception -- we treat the cost on nature as an externality.  It's like kid who puts up a lemonade stand, says they made $20 when the lemons, the jug, the sugar, all the materials were paid for by his mom."


• "when you undertake a dream it becomes an adventure.  adventures create stories.  humanity is based on stories.  stories become the inspiration for more dreams." [sidenote: that's a viral loop]


• "humanity always wants to take the path of least resistance.  curiousity and innovation may lead you down a different path, NOT the path of least resistance."


• "you never change something by fighting existing reality.  you change things by building a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." [Buckminster Fuller quote]

Andrew Hessel - "the end of cancer" & PinkArmy.org

• "computer systems are analogy for biological systems.  insight: you can look at humans as a network of trillions of computers."


• "computers and networks break in ways that are similar to biological systems."


• "DNA is genetic instructions, biological software."


• "We generated so much data, information about genetics & cancer through research.  we generate lots of research, we pay a lot of researchers.  but fundamentally, we need to realize that research does not make therapies.  Who makes therapies?  Developers."


• "we're spending more and more on research, while getting fewer and fewer and therapies actually produced."


• "research is exponential [more and more every year], development is linear [can't keep up, obsolete before it's even delivered]"


• "how about focus on the very end of the long tail?  one therapy for one person: YOU"


• "build viruses based on your own DNA, that attack one particular type of cancer in your own body while leaving the rest of your cells alone."


• "co-operative business model - the first drug company for people that don't need to make a profit"

Steve Blank explains the evolution of Customer Development

If you're an entrepreneur or are thinking about starting a company, Steve Blank's blog is must-read material.

Steve's latest series of posts establishes the reasons why Customer Development and Lean Startup methodologies are so important (and why prior models of startup development often resulted in failure).  Read them in order:

The Leading Cause of Startup Death

Customer Development Manifesto Part I

Customer Development Manifesto Part II

Customer Development Manifesto Part III

Customer Development Manifesto Part IV

Many Benefits and The One Big Risk for Entrepreneurs-in-Residence

See my last post for context:  http://framethink.wordpress.com/2009/08/08/what-does-an-eir-do/

There are some really great benefits that come from being associated with a venture fund as an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR).

EIRs have a unique position that makes it easier to launch a company.  In some ways, being an EIR actually inverts the typical resource-gathering exercise that most entrepreneurs go through -- the partners at a venture firm will often pitch ideas to their EIR's and they continuously introduce their EIR's to interesting and talented people who could be potential co-founders or business partners.  The first time that happened to me as an EIR, I was completely bowled over by the fact that a venture capitalist was actually pitching me on an idea instead of the other way around -- it's an interesting role reversal to say the least!

EIR roles are also fantastic for research.  EIR's get direct access to their firm's partners for feedback, advice, and brainstorming. They get to sit in on business pitches and help evaluate them from the VC's perspective.  Participating in pitches and listening to how your venture firms partners think about companies is a truly precious learning experience...  Think about how many VC pitches you might be involved with directly as an entrepreneur -- through the span of an entire career, how many VC pitches do you think might give?  Ten?  Twenty?  An EIR might get to see that many pitches within a few weeks if they wanted to.  Getting exposure to that volume of pitches in a compressed time frame really helps an EIR develop a comparative study of business pitches and gives you an opportunity to see what happens when teams come in to pitch in various states of preparedness & maturity, with varying styles, and different team compositions.   With full advantage of those learnings and direct access to their firm's partners, an EIR should end up with a very good understanding of what pitches will work for their firm (and which ones won't).

And let's not forget the great fringe benefits of being at a venture fund!  Most VC's have very nice office buildings that are quiet, secure, ergonomic places to work (much nicer than trying to do conference calls while hunched over a noisy cafe table).  Firms always have free snacks, coffee, and sodas to power you through long days.  Plus they have comfy couches to crash on after that all-nighter.

It's not all sugar and spice, though -- there are serious downsides to being an EIR, too...

It's seductively easy to hang out in a swanky office, sit in on meetings all day long, listen to other entrepreneurs pitch, and dispense your opinions.  It's fun to play "the connector" role -- introducing that entrepreneur you met at a conference to the firm's partners.  The partners appreciate it.  The entrepreneur who is raising a round really appreciates it.  And you get to give your ego a smug pat on the back for being so smart and well-connected.  All of that is so fun and easy that an EIR might literally spend entire days taking calls, doing meetings, vetting ideas, and introducing people (mea culpa).  That may be fine if the EIR is trying to add value to the firm by essentially playing an associate's role, but definitely is not helping the EIR directly learn about use-cases that a customer would actually pay for or launch a new company per se.  So there is this unfortunate but very real tension between spending time helping the firm vs. working on launching a new venture.

This notion of the balance between an EIR's firm vs. an EIR's startup leads me to the The One Big Risk for EIRs...

The tension between firm vs. EIR becomes most apparent if/when the entrepreneur seeks financing for their new startup.  VentureHacks would tell you (and I would agree) that the key to closing a financing quickly with favorable terms is to have a strong BATNA.  But an EIR is at a fundamental disadvantage in getting their company favorable financing terms relative to a non-EIR making the exact same pitch...  because EIRs have a harder time creating strong BATNAs.  Why?  There is a fundamental information asymmetry between an EIR's host firm and other venture firms.  Whether or not the EIR's host firm actually does know more about the EIR and her/his company, they appear to have access to much deeper information about the EIR's deal than other venture firms do.  So, as such, if an EIR's firm does not participate in an EIR's deal, then you can imagine the partners at other firms wondering: "What does this EIR's host firm know that we don't know?" , "There's got to be something wrong with this deal..." or "Maybe there's something wrong with the EIR her/himself!"  This information asymmetry gives an EIR's host firm a strong upper-hand in financing negotiations.  That dynamic can prevent other investors from participating in what otherwise would have been a "fundable" deal or cause them to come in with reduced commitment at lower pre-money valuations.  Every EIR I've spoken with has said that their firm brought them in with a promise of "no strings attached, you can work with whomever you want" -- but when it was fundraising time, everyone felt palpable pressure to do the deal with their host firm.  Usurious firms can take advantage of an EIR's lack of negotiating leverage to drive down pre-money valuation and thereby inflate their post-money stake in the firm.  Even well-meaning firms that have great relationships with their EIRs may cause an EIR's company to accept sub-optimal valuations if the EIR fails to create a market for their shares as aggressively as a typical (non-EIR) entrepreneur would have done.

This is the biggest pitfall for an EIR and potentially a dire/fatal situation for a hatchling startup...  If a startup's cap table becomes too tilted towards investors in Series A, then the founder(s) may give up control of their company too quickly, or become too diluted to make the startup worthwhile to pursue.  Obviously, everyone loses when a startup gets pushed to the point that the founders are demotivated.  But that's a very fuzzy boundary and EIRs seem more prone than non-EIRs to end up pushing that boundary in a bad way.

So, is being an EIR the right thing to do?  Depends on your goals and how you manage the risks mentioned above.  I'll wrap up this series on EIRs in my next post with a list of venture hacks for EIRs to mitigate these risks.

What does an EIR do?

I'm back after a looooong blogging hiatus. Yay, glad to be getting back into the swing of things.

So, @vijayv recently asked me:

Would you be able to tell me more about being an eir? Mainly Interested in role specifics/responsibility

I've had the honor of being an entrepreneur-in-residence (EIR) with two VC firms, Venrock and Matrix Partners.  And through those programs, I've been lucky to have met and learned from many other entrepreneurs who have had way more success and experience than me.  And if there's anything I've learned about the EIR role, it's that there's no such thing as a "standard" EIR program.  It's kind of a "make it up as you go along" role (and that actually suits entrepreneurs very well).  Quite frankly, there aren't that many EIRs running around Silicon Valley all the time because most venture firms do not support EIR positions at all.  Those that do will customize the role on a case-by-case basis.

At the highest level, I think we could say that EIR programs involve:

• working with partners at a venture firm whom you've previously worked with or gotten to know very well


• researching existing startups to find promising ones that you'd like to personally join or introduce to the firm


• ideating and creating new businesses


• helping the firm vett business pitches

Within those general activities, roles do vary a lot depending on each individual's prior experience and their goals.  E.g., some EIR's are seasoned executives who are specifically looking for teams that they can pair up with to launch a startup.  Other EIR's are product innovators who are trying to launch new companies while incubated at the VC firm.  Still others are entrepreneurs who are considering switching to become investors and are using an EIR program as a way of getting to know a firm.

And the specific arrangements that an EIR has with their host firm will vary a lot, too.  Some EIRs are actual employees of the firm, some are contractors/consultants, others have no contractual relationship with the firm at all other than coming by to use a spare desk every once in a while.  Most, but not all, EIRs are compensated by their firms; and compensation levels seem to vary significantly from corporate-executive-equivalent to ramen-subsistence-stipend.

There are significant benefits and risks associated with being an EIR and I'll talk about those more in my next post.