Golden Age

Back in the arena: the beginning of data.world

It has been a long time since I wrote anything on my Lucky7 blog and there is good reason for that.  Back in June, I started to brainstorm my next big idea with long-time friends Jon Loyens and Matt Laessig (both of whom were amazing at Bazaarvoice and had moved on to HomeAway).  Bryon Jacob (a 10-year veteran at HomeAway) soon got involved as an idea he had been thinking about was better than anything we came up with and one thing led to another until we founded data.world.

It may feel curious to my regular readers that I would jump back into the arena as the CEO of a company built from scratch.  After all, our investments in startups and venture capital funds have been performing well, including a recent exit with Deep Eddy Vodka being acquired (and us subsequently investing in Clayton Christopher’s VC fund, CAVU).  There are many factors that led to this calling for me:

How I define the soul of entrepreneurs: you change the world (part 3 of 3)

How I define the soul of entrepreneurs: you change the world (part 3 of 3)

You create the future. Others dream about it, some write about it, many read about it. But the rare few actually create it. You are one of those rare people, and you are to be cherished by humanity for being so brave to define the future for all the rest.

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." - George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

You create the jobs. There is no company that anyone goes to work for that didn't have a brave creator at the beginning of it all. Your company can grow beyond you, but no one at your company today would be there if it were not for you giving birth.

You define the soul of the company. It was your unreasonableness, your "craziness", your dream, and, perhaps most importantly, your values that were seeded in its birth. Others can lead and tap into that soul, but if it weren't for you there would have been no soul in the first place.

'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.

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.