Entrepreneurism
…was my specialization during my MBA and I sub-specialized in International Business, so the recent feature in the Economist on Entrepreneurism took me back. It was also relevant to my day job as it talked about clusters and what is needed to stimulate entrepreneurial activity in Vancouver’s inner-city.
I tried to write this post earlier today, but a co-worker kept asking me questions about blogging and WordPress. When did I become a world renown expert on blogging?
Regardless I’ve drank four beers since work ended and the Bootup Labs event with Brad Feld is largely completed, so it has fallen to me to write some inadequate account of the event tying together my experience and leveraging the voluminous material I’ve already written on the subject.
Others waited until they were sober and had time to reflect or perhaps re-watch the video. Timeliness VS Timelessness, but I repeat myself.
First the event was really good, Brad was a great speaker, the turnout was good, not enough free food down front though. The entire thing should be available online (here or here sometime) and it was streamed live. They had a hashtag too, but I let the twits Twitter, I sat and tried to pay attention. I even got the speaker’s attention twice with my glibness.
Once someone asked about which books an entrepreneur should read, people were a bit surprised by his answer. His second recommendation was a long novel which he thought showed commitment to follow and complete, so I immediately asked about “Infinite Jest” which he knew and agreed would adequately replace “Atlas Shrugged“. I once famously described “Infinite Jest” as a foot stool of a novel. I literally stood on it to change a light bulb while in Japan.
The second time was for an Excel spreadsheet I created which proved a business model was basically flawed, even though the business didn’t exist. Funnily enough no one has used it much, I’ll have to post it online someday. I already have plenty of Excel spreadsheets people from the event can steal.
This incident reminded me of a Mark Twain quip, about people who can read, having no advantage over people who can’t if they don’t read good books. If you want to read a good book, that is well written but also extremely thick, I recommend “The Brothers Karamazov“. If you can’t be over-educated, at least be well read.
So back to the event, it was attended by a lot of entrepreneurs and would-be entrepreneurs as well as a VC from every firm in town if you were looking to press the flesh or give an elevator pitch. There will likely be a lot of comments about it online, I’m too tired to find them, plus there were other things I meant to blog about including a bunch of posts I was going to link to. A lot of my previous posts on what VCs look for, how enterprises are valued, the importance of the ‘ecosystem‘ were all mention by Brad and other VCs in the room. Some of the questioners could have prepared better, I mean they should have read “Infinite Jest” or better still “Under the Volcano“.
There are no short easy posts on Muskblog it seems. That domain appears to once again be available if you want to squat on it. This story always amuses or annoys people. I have a lot of stories.
I still haven’t posted some of the many links I’ve collected or saved over the last few days, hours, or months. Here are some more things to read, they may even be related to entrepreneurialism, Brad Feld, and Bootup Labs:
- What can we learn from Boulder?
- Can a “startup factory” work?
- How to do buzz marketing well
- How not to handle online complaints (2009 Edition)
- Hello - Kim Jong Il Speaking Here
- Why Korea (or anywhere else) can’t create another Silicon Valley
- Wanna learn some Digital Kung Fu?
- Worried about defamation while blogging?
The rest are even more off-topic.
Video is now online (May 6th 2009)
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 23rd, 2009 at 1:49 am filed under: Blogging, Excel, Internet, Korea, Literature, MBA, Marketing, Vancouver, Venture Capital, WordPress and tagged: Bootup Labs, Brad Feld, Entrepreneur. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
