My Own Pirate Radio

Over on the Brightspark blog Mark Skapinker wrote something that really struck a chord with me:

“More “Bill Gateses”, not more graduates”
The press in Canada has been full of articles about how Bill Gates thinks that if Canada and the US want to stay ahead, they should “focus on improving the quality of education and expanding the number of young people who study math and science in school”. He wants us to create new computer scientists, engineers and researchers. Academics like Roger Martin answered him in the Globe and Mail by saying that North America has its lead because of our great MBA schools (like The Rotman School of Business where he is Dean) and management studies and the creation of more managers.”

Mark argues instead that what we really need is “more Bill Gateses. We need entrepreneurs who are willing to “go for it”, start new companies and create startups like Microsoft was not so long ago.”

Woot! This one speaks to me. Lessee, I studied Math and Computer Science at Waterloo, worked at Microsoft, and married a Queens University engineer who recently completed an MBA at Rotman. And now we’re both neck-deep in trying to get a startup off the ground. Must… voice… opinion.

I would love to see more entrepreneurs in Canada, especially in technology. Canada has a huge per-capita gap relative to the US on this. But what’s the cure? Check out some of the comments Mark’s post received:

• “Entrepreneurs are born, not made.”
• “[Bill Gates] was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time, and ruthless enough to profit from it.”
• “[one of] our biggest barriers to entrepreneurship is the negativity surrounding failure”
• “few of our graduating students have entrepreneurship as their goal beyond education”

My take:

On nature versus nurture: It’s both.

Take Gates for example: Sorry naysayers, luck and drive were necessary-but-not-sufficient conditions for his achievements. I used to think wishfully that I could have done the same thing if I was just lucky enough. You know, show up at just the right time to become the driving force behind Windows and Office, grow a company from 2 to 60,000 employees, that sort of thing. But then I met Bill, and reluctantly swallowed my delusions of genius and grandeur.

While at MS I gained a good deal of respect for him. Don’t get me wrong; I’m no toady. He has his flaws, as do we all. But I assure you he is also an extremely talented technical problem-solver and business strategist, and — this is important — a big, big risk-taker. He was very, very good at being chief technology freak in a company chock-full of technology freaks. He will most likely be very, very good at running the Gates Foundation. Some of this capability derives from his nature — raw smarts, passion, drive, and guts — and some of it from nurture: family wealth and encouragement, access to great schooling, brilliant friends and colleagues, among other things. It takes both.

On schooling. Education is a huge enabler. It creates opportunities. In particular, for tech jobs, great problem-solving ability is essential. In large part, this can be taught.

Some might argue that problem-solving skill should emerge from a technical degree, or an MBA, or great community college programs, or from inspirational highschool teachers. I think debating this is a waste of time. We need ALL of these… and we should let the market decide how much of each. Entrepreneurs will emerge from all of these halls, and from the school of hard knocks too.

On funding. Entrepreneurs need financing. As Mark argues in earlier posts, we need a more concerted effort to make funding available for startups through a broad variety of non-governmental orgs.

The government tries, but can’t get it right. Case in point: $40M of government funding pumped into MARS Discovery District. It’s big. It’s beautiful. It makes for great PR. But that same money could have launched a thousand small startups instead.

The funding also has to be made available to companies from early stage up, not just startups that are mature enough for VCs to consider. And it needs to be available from a wider variety of funders, enough so that there is real competition amongst them to find and nurture the next great entrepreneur.

On risk. Innovation is fueled by risk. This single factor underlies everything else, in my opinion… the educational choices we make, the jobs we take, the inventions we create. The Canadian culture and economy needs to get much more comfortable with taking and supporting risks. And as things stand, Canada’s traditional risk-aversion is a real barrier to entrepreneurship. It makes it harder to get funding, it makes it less socially acceptable to fail, and it heaps too much emphasis on doing only “safe” things in school and in the real world thereafter.

That’s my recipe. I’d love to hear yours.