The Wharton School

'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.

The state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin

The state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin

SXSW has long come and gone in this beautiful city - that was, like, weeks ago! Like years past, it reached more epic heights this year and companies and investors were spending more on gaining attention than ever before. And with SXSW, the typical, "how is Austin doing at tech entrepreneurship?" question was asked again and again. But out of all of the articles written, the one that I personally heard the most about was this one by PandoDaily: "Will the Austin startup ecosystem ever live up to its promise?"". It stirred me up to read it, no doubt. And it lead me to write this post to share my own thoughts - as an insider - on the state of tech entrepreneurship in Austin.

My return to The Wharton School as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence

My return to The Wharton School as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence

I had the pleasure of visiting The Wharton School recently as a returning Entrepreneur-in-Residence. I found myself more encouraged than ever about the student body and their desire to be entrepreneurs. When I earned my MBA at Wharton, from 1997-1999, I was a bit of an outlier as an entrepreneur in a class of almost all aspiring consultants and bankers. In my class, there were a few entrepreneurs, such as John Lusk and Kyle Harrison, the co-founders of MouseDriver (I recommend reading their book on the experience), and Gregg Spiridellis, the co-founder and CEO of JibJab. John is at it again with Rivet & Sway and Gregg is still running JibJab, an unusually long tenure for any Wharton graduate in my class. Gregg is my most humorous friend and his talent has shown in so many ways at JibJab. But, at Wharton, I was even more strange than John, Kyle, and Gregg. And that is because I was founding and running businesses while I was still in school.