Friday, November 28, 2008

The entrepreneurial culture in Silicon Valley

I was reading "Closing the innovation gap" by Judy Estrin and came across this gem that describes brilliantly why being an entrepreneur in Silicon Valley is different:

An acceptance of failure as a necessary stepping-stone to success is an integral part of the culture of Silicon Valley. As a partner at Kleiner Perkins, one of the Valley’s major VC firms, Kevin Compton met with industry leaders from other countries who were visiting the Valley in hopes of learning the secrets of its entrepreneurial magic. He would try to communicate the Valley gestalt with a story. “You’re getting ready for your country’s version of Thanksgiving dinner with the family. You’re 32 years old, you have kids, and you’re going to your in-laws’ for dinner,” says Compton. “After working at your version of IBM for ten years, everything was going great. But all of a sudden you left that job to go to a high-profile start-up that raised a whole bunch of money, and completely flamed out 18 months later. I would ask these guys, ‘Do you go to the family dinner?’ They would usually say no. And I would tell them that in Silicon Valley, not only do you go to dinner, but your brother-in-law comes up and gives you a high-five saying, ‘I wish I had the courage to do that.’ As a risk-taker, you got his attention. That’s in our DNA.”

Having been an entrepreneur in the valley, I can vouch for the accuracy of this assertion. I will go one step further and say my brother-in-law will likely follow up with a question about what were the biggest lessons I learned, and I will respond with here's what I am doing differently with my next start-up as a result of what I learned from my mistakes... the real failure is only when I don't pick myself up to move on and make NEW mistakes.

Friday, November 14, 2008

CSAIL @ MIT

I was in geek paradise this afternoon, and reveled in it. I visited CSAIL and the coolness of the cutting edge research that's going on at building 34 (I am @ MIT after all, of course I share a love for numbers with my fellow engineers :) took my breath away. The CSAIL lab is my Mecca - I became an engineer because I wanted to build robots and intelligent machines. It was good to be in my element after a long time, and it struck me how much I missed engineering and building cool things. The last time I built something really cool was when I designed a Lego Mindstorms robot to collect the dirty coffee mugs my room mate would leave strewn around our apartment. My co-bot (coffee-robot) would collect all the dirty mugs and move them to a spot I'd marked on the kitchen floor with reflective tape. Seems like a lifetime ago.


We visited Russ Tedrake's lab and saw autonomous flying robots and little dog. Robot locomotion has come such a long way since I was in grad school in 1998. I was incredibly impressed with Little Dog's obstacle detection and circumvention mechanisms. It left me longing to pursue a PhD @ CSAIL after the MBA.. I suspect I would be very happy if I became a lifer at MIT, the place just inspires me.

How any of this relates to entrepreneurship - I wonder if there are formal channels available to commercialize the research that comes out of CSAIL. I intend to find out. Stay tuned for the answer.