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.

There is now a video availalable of the talk Malcolm Gladwell presented at Rotman earlier this week. I blogged about the talk here. Other Rotman talks including one by Jack Welch are here.

Or, “Gladwell, Godin, Quantum Physics, and Entrepreneurship”.

I love it when seemingly unrelated things coincide in serendipitous ways. Four events over the last two weeks have collided in a particularly delightful fashion.

Thing 1: Malcolm Gladwell (of “Tipping Point” fame) spoke at University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management today to a full house of MBA students, alumni, faculty, and some free-riding tailgaters like me. Gladwell is a U of T grad and a friend of Rotman’s dean, so he was on home ground. (By the way, he blogs occasionally; see here.)

Gladwell delivered a thought-provoking piece on creativity, dwelling in particular on the dichotomy between early-bloomer creatives like Picasso who peak near the beginning of their careers with a big bang followed by a years-long trail of quiet thunder, and late-bloomer creatives like Cezanne who continually refine a single theme, working up gradually over decades to finally reach a point of mass critical acclaim. Gladwell postulates that the western business world is increasingly focused on funding only those who show visible potential to be early bloomers, to the detriment and marginalization of late-blooming creative efforts.

He cited HBO’s Six Feet Under as an example of a show that took some years to catch on, and would never have been funded on mainstream TV, but is now extremely popular and profitable with a set of diehard fans. In contrast, mainstream media effectively forces artists down the early bloomer path, typically by funding them to do warmed-up rehashes of recipes that are known to work. Why? The risks of investing this way are visibly lower: the design methods are more formulaic and easier to explain, the market reactions are easier to predict, and the profits arrive (or fail to arrive) much faster. The downside is that we the customers get fed a stream of pablum.

Thing 2: Quantum Physics. Last week I got to spend time with Michele Mosca, an old Waterloo classmate who is now Deputy Director at the Institute for Quantum Computing and a researcher at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics. Mike graciously made time to tour me around Perimeter and talk about their ambitious plan to build a world-caliber organization for pushing forward the bounds of physics. Both Perimeter and ICQ invest in the kind of research that, in many cases, may take 15 years or more before it manifests itself in applications. Perimeter’s initial funding came largely from the personal donations of Mike Lazaridis and fellow RIM executives Doug Fregin and Jim Balsillie ($100M, $10M and $10M, respectively). Talk about investing and innovating for the long term. It was an incredibly impressive experience.

Thing 3: Seth Godin. I finally got around to watching Seth Godin’s recent presentation to Google. In it he talks about moving from “interruption marketing” (ads pushed at users regardless of their contextual wants and needs) to “permission-driven” marketing. He advocates the latter approach, in which customers actually want to hear marketing messages, provided they are personal, contextually relevant, and offered in response to an invitation. It’s a great talk, and if you care at all about how to market a concept, you should watch it.

Godin commended Google for growing their usage organically, by first building a service that was remarkably different and then encouraging word-of-mouth recommendations, rather than by plastering ads everywhere. It’s an approach that takes patience. When it works, it ultimately yields many customers who are insanely loyal evangelists for your product. He also warned Google that they need to move to the next step, and start asking customers for their permission to follow through with personalized, relevant marketing messages about their new offerings.

Thing 4: Entrepreneurship. The March ‘06 Toronto DemoCamp event stimulated some interesting conversation about innovation and entrepreneurship in this region. One of the topics is whether it’s worth spending time reviewing demo ideas that come without business plans attached. I argue it is worthwhile: the demoers may eventually want help turning their ideas into businesses, and everyone else in the room is meanwhile benefiting by listening, learning, and building synergy between the demos and ideas of their own. It’s OK if the payoff isn’t immediate.

Conclusions: In a way, a tech community investing time and energy in nurturing its aspiring entrepreneurs is much the same as a formal organization investing time and money in nurturing and marketing long-term creative work. Both entities have important choices to make about how much attention to invest (attention ~= time ~= money), how risky to be with their investments, and how long to wait for commercial success. Striking the right balance is crucial. And good things - some of which may take a long, long time to develop - are worth waiting for.