The Venture Edge

Ready for some good news on the entrepreneurship front? According to a report released last Thursday by the Kauffman Foundation and Young Invincibles, 54 percent of Americans aged 18 to 34 -- the generation commonly known as the millennials -- want to start their own businesses. Okay, there's just one thing. Of this 54 percent, only 8 percent of them own businesses now, and only 11 percent intend to start businesses within the next year. And what about those other 38 percent -- the potential young entrepreneurs who want to start their own businesses but who don't plan to do so anytime soon? Why have they delayed their dreams of entrepreneurship? 

Although entrepreneurship in its essence is about startup—creating an opportunity and gathering the resources to make that opportunity a successful enterprise—it really is also a way of life. Once you’ve been bitten by the excitement of discovering an opportunity and creating and designing a new business, it’s hard not to see opportunity everywhere you look. But despite the fact that I’ve clearly drunk the entrepreneurial Kool-aid, I do recognize that this lifestyle is not for everyone. 

Okay. I will have to admit that I have never tried Mirassou wine. So I don't anything about the quality or taste -- good or bad. But what I do know is that the Mirassou Winery has an interesting contest for entrepreneurs. According to the Mirassou Winery Facebook page, the company will award five $3,000 grants to individuals with bright ideas to help turn their ideas into reality. In addition, the five grant recipients will also be voted on at the Mirassou Winery’s Facebook page, with the highest vote earner being awarded an additional grant of $5,000. According to the company, the competition is inspired by the Mirassou Family’s winemaking legacy which "...is steeped in entrepreneurism, innovation and empowerment." 

I read Kathy's last post -- An American entrepreneur in the Middle East -- with great interest. About five years ago, I was hired by the Beyster Institute at the Rady School of Management, University of California, San Diego to write a book titled Entrepreneurs at the Crossroads: Success Stories from the Middle East and North Africa. After the book was published, it was widely distributed to entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs-to-be in the Middle East and North Africa. The project was funded by the US State Department, which believes (probably correctly) that it's a good idea for our country to help support entrepreneurship in these volatile areas of the world because the more people who become successful businesspeople, the fewer people who will find terrorism a viable way of life.

One of the great moments in education for those of us who teach comes long after the student leaves the classroom, sometimes years later when out of the blue the student contacts you to thank you for what he learned in your class and how he used it to further his career.

I recently received an email from a high school student with strong entrepreneurial interests who asked me whether I thought it was worthwhile to go to college to study entrepreneurship. Sam even sent me a list of about three dozen books he had read related to entrepreneurship (several of them were mine, so he already knows how to get someone’s attentionJ) As a professor at a university known for entrepreneurship, you would think this would be an easy question for me to answer. Well, it’s not, because in a world where pretty much all the information you might need is readily available online, and since many universities have been successful with online courses, students are questioning how they should spend their time, not to mention their money.

 I just finished the semester at USC and for one of my graduate courses, Technology Commercialization, the students, who come from science, engineering, fine arts, psychology, and business have to write a reflection paper of about 4,500 words on the insights they gained and novel connections they made across all the various activities and requirements of the course. This is always an eye-opening experience for me because I learned long ago that students are frequently learning things you never thought you were teaching!

 Back in February Peter wrote about the new program, Startup America [“Ready. Set. Startup America!], that promises to support a variety of entrepreneurship programs and kick start more new businesses. Looks likethe UK is getting on board with their own version—Startup Britain. 

Here's a funny look at how NOT to pitch a venture capitalist. I love the text-to-video technology used in this video that was developed by xtranormal, a Montreal-based startup. It's a fun, fast, and cool way to make movies on the Web. As the company says, "If you can type, you can make movies."

I read an interesting statistic today. According to Steven Hipple at the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the number of Americans working for themselves has been on the decline over the past year -- dropping from 10.9 percent in the last quarter of 2009, to 10 percent in this the last quarter of 2010. While that might not seem like much, this decline adds up to hundreds of thousands of people who are leaving the ranks of the self-employed.