'Is it too late for me to start my own business?', and other sheepish questions (part 1 of 3)

This is part one of a three-part series on entrepreneurship. The parts:

  1. 'Is it too late for me to start my own business?', and other sheepish questions
  2. Who this new generation of aspiring entrepreneurs are and the new Golden Age of tech (Lucky7 post)
  3. How I define the soul of entrepreneurs: you change the world (Lucky7 post)

Part One

It's March of 2013 and I'm at Wharton serving as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence when I get a question that baffles me. I'm speaking at the Penn Founders' Club, where all University of Pennsylvania students are welcome as long as they are fervently working on a real business while they are in school. I've just wrapped up my opening comments and it is time for Q&A. The baffling question: "Have all of the really big ideas already been thought of?". I couldn't believe it when I could see the student was being serious and not just pulling my leg, and I was fired up. I passionately describe how the world always needs entrepreneurs to drive it forward, and there are always ideas - everywhere - if you just look hard to find them. I talk about how I just read the book Abundance, wrote the longest book review of my life on it at Lucky7, and there are thousands of great ideas in the book for entrepreneurs to solve the world's biggest problems. A few months later, Waze gets bought for $966 million by Google. A few months after that, Snapchat gets a rumored $3 billion offer from Facebook, which I wrote about in this Lucky7 post on valuations. And then almost a year after receiving that question at Penn, WhatsApp gets a firm acquisition offer of $19 billion from Facebook, one month after Google buys Nest for $3.2 billion.

A quick review of 'The Second Machine Age'

Last year, I recommended Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think as my book pick of the year and wrote an abundantly long review of it. There are thousands of good business ideas in that book for entrepreneurs that are destined to change the world (I also wrote about Elon Musk being my current pick as entrepreneur-of-the-decade as he defines the ethos of this mindset better than anyone I can think of in today's age).

This year, I'm recommending you read The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies as a compliment to Abundance. To choose a word from the title, this is a brilliant book. It is written by two MIT professors that I am fortunate enough to call friends, Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

The impact that just one teacher can have on you

I had a very special experience in the last few weeks of my time as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at McCombs. I reconnected with Rick Byars, who was my MIS333K professor (my undergraduate major at the University of Texas at Austin was MIS), in time for his legendary end-of-semester speech. He invited me to attend and speak for five minutes at the end of it.

To put this in context, when I was in Rick's class back in 1994 it had a huge impact on me. First of all, it was the most practical class I took at U.T. and, as a result, the one I remember the best. It simulates what it is like to be a technology consultant by giving you and your small team a large project to develop, test, and "deploy" by the end of the semester. It is the most time consuming class I took at U.T., by far, but at the end of it you have an incredible feeling of accomplishment. And then, at the end of the semester, Rick surprises you with the article below and his talk about it. You had no idea it was coming, and the shock value is what makes it a very special experience. You can't help but thinking, "Is this for real?! Was this really Rick?".

Who this new generation of aspiring entrepreneurs are and the new Golden Age of tech (part 2 of 3)

We live in very interesting times. It's 2010 and I'm at a family reunion. We've just barely survived the most cataclysmic global financial crisis in the modern history and one of my cousins asks me, "How can tech be doing so well while the rest of the economy is doing so poorly?". I did my best to answer but the question kept eating at me. I remembered Michael Porter's Harvard Business Review article about the Internet being the sixth force - and how it would disrupt all of the previous five forces cited in his famous strategic model.

Fast forward just four years later and a five-year old company, WhatsApp, is bought for $19 billion by Facebook, a company that itself is only ten-years old at the time but worth a mighty $170 billion. Just two years earlier, when Facebook went public, the media was asking for Morgan Stanley's head - and sometimes Mark Zuckerberg's or David Ebersman's (CFO of Facebook) head - for what was perceived at that time as an overpriced IPO. Except that it wasn't... and any investors that held on to their IPO stock should now be very happy campers.

Learnings from four entrepreneurs I interviewed this past semester - Michael Dell, Rod Canion, Matt Chasen, and Dan Graham

I joined the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas at Austin as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the beginning of the 2013-2014 academic year. Yesterday marked my last day in this role. I kicked it off with a speech to the entering MBA class about the top-ten lessons I wished someone had taught me when I was beginning my MBA. I loved serving the University and it's students in this capacity. The entrepreneurial energy on campus is really fantastic and very encouraging for the future of both Austin and our nation at large. There is no doubt a huge trend towards entrepreneurship at most top-ranked universities and U.T. Austin is leading the way in one of the most entrepreneurial cities and states in our nation. Consider that Texas has created 70% of the new jobs in the U.S. since 2005, as reported by BBVA Compass, and you start to tune in a bit more into what is happening here. Compared to when I attended U.T. Austin from 1990-1994, where entrepreneurship was hard to find, every major college at U.T. now has its own entrepreneurial club and initiatives. In my Office Hours, I met with hundreds of students who have either launched their own business while at the University or they are actively planning on doing that at some early point in their career (I didn't become an entrepreneur myself until I was 24 and beginning my MBA, so I tell them I was a "late bloomer").

A call to action for CEOs: You must sell

There is no more effective selling tool in a company’s organization than the company’s CEO. However, this tool is not used nearly as often or effectively as it should be. And that is because of the CEO themselves.

CEOs must adopt the regular practice of selflessly serving the rest of the organization. They must realize that their selling megaphone is larger than any other. This is not because they are better than anyone else in the organization. Everyone in the organization is just playing their role to their best ability. It is because the CEO possesses the company’s highest executive title, and the title signals several important distinctions:

Learnings from three entrepreneurs and one VC I interviewed this past semester

I joined the McCombs Business School at the University of Texas at Austin as Entrepreneur-in-Residence this past semester. I kicked it off with a speech to the entering MBA class about the top-ten lessons I wished someone had taught me when I was beginning my MBA. I have very much enjoyed my first semester in this capacity and the entrepreneurial energy on campus is really fantastic. There is no doubt a huge trend towards entrepreneurship at most top-ranked universities and U.T. Austin is leading the way in one of the most entrepreneurial cities and states in our nation. Consider that Texas has created 70% of the new jobs in the U.S. since 2005, as reported by BBVA Compass, and you start to tune in a bit more into what is happening here. Compared to when I attended U.T. Austin from 1990-1994, where entrepreneurship was hard to find, every major college at U.T. now has its own entrepreneurial club and initiatives. In my Office Hours, I have met with over a hundred students who have either launched their own business while at the University or they are actively planning on doing that at some early point in their career (I didn't become an entrepreneur myself until I was 24 and beginning my MBA, so I tell them I was a "late bloomer").

What I learned from my top three Lucky7 posts in 2013 … and my biggest busts

December 5th marked my first year of blogging personally (I had previously been a corporate blogger for 7 years at Bazaarvoice). I began blogging primarily as a service to entrepreneurs - a form of giving back to the community that I believe is the greatest force for change. I named my blog Lucky7 as a tribute to my amazing mother, who passed away last year. My first Lucky7 post on December 5, 2012 was a revisit of my manifesto to Bootstrap Austin on March 15, 2005. Looking back, it was clear I deeply cared about the development of our entrepreneurial community in Austin. That caring - and passion - drove a year of many highs in 2013. I've been actively investing in startups since December of last year with my wife, Debra, and I formally chose this as a career a few months ago, forming Hurt Family Investments. We've made 14 startup investments so far, 9 of them Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) companies. I've also joined the Advisory Board of 6 additional companies, all of them SaaS. Out of the 20 startups we are involved in, 16 are headquartered in Austin.

At age 46, he started his first company and it failed miserably… but then, on his second…!

At age 46, he started his first company and it failed miserably… but then, on his second…!

For all of us Austin fans, I'm talking about Cotter Cunningham, the founder and CEO of RetailMeNot. Last night, Cotter was one of our keynote speakers, along with Mark Cuban, at the University of Texas for Longhorn Startup Demo Day (the event was just fantastic, by the way, and Josh Baer, Ben Dyer, and Bob Metcalfe deserve a huge round of applause for it).

As of today, RetailMeNot is worth $1.33 billion as a public company (it went public in July and just filed for a follow-on offering). It is just four years old - for a value creation of $333 million per year. Who says Austin can't do B2C now? HomeAway is another one of our five tech IPOs in the last five years. It is worth $3.4 billion today as a public company (it went public in 2011). It is just nine years old. Yes, we haven't produced a Facebook or Twitter size outcome - there needs to be a higher volume of failures (entrepreneurial experiements) to do that, but don't forget we did produce a Dell, a National Instruments, and a Whole Foods.

(Mostly) Unplug this Thanksgiving for your family's sake

In 1974, Harry Chapin performed "Cat's in the Cradle" (buy it). As you think about easing into the long Thanksgiving weekend, I would love for you to read the lyrics to this important song. According to Wikipedia, Harry said the song was about his own relationship with his son, Josh, admitting, "Frankly, this song scares me to death." And remember that this song was written long before the days of iPhones, Androids, PCs, social media, and the Internet, which all allow you to live virtually while something important is happening right in front of you, "in real life".