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sunny skies
Apr. 12th, 2008 09:38 amIt appears I got a sunburn yesterday... while sitting in partial shade. Ooops.
I'd gone to skool business-class style- tailored shirt and skirt, hose and heels. There was a job fair and open house for geography, and while I wasn't actually job hunting (more skimming the options) it wouldn't have done to go looking like a slob. I had a thin american apparel cap-sleeve top on underneath the button-down shirt, and I had a couple of hours before a guy from Intel was giving a talk about WiMax and LTE. So I found a slightly shady spot on the mall, shed the button down, kicked off the heels, and gleefully sprawled in the grass to read some homework and watch the kids at play.
Also, puppies.
I didn't mind when the animal puppies came over to say hi, and I didn't even mind when the cute shirtless soccer playing boys occasionally got perilously close. But a poor hapless puppy decided it would be a lovely time to try and flirt with a random girl doing homework. *sigh* Hopefully he had better luck elsewhere.
The demographics of the 4g talk were interesting. Audience of about 60 people: about 20 were women. 5 attendees were white (two of whom were women.) The clear demographic winner was the indian/pakistani/bangladeshi/arab contingent, though there were a handful of asians scattered about. And one black guy.
....
Thursday's talk was from the President of Johns Hopkins on entrepreneurship. It was actually a pretty amusing talk. He looked out across the room and said 'First off, you've got to realize that most of you will never invent anything. It requires seeing things beyond what you *expect* to see. Don't believe me? I've got a video to show you.'
[So, the goal when watching this video is to try and determine how many times the team in the white shirts passes the ball to each other. And yes, Brody used the licensed version.]
Duly chastened, we settled in for the rest of the talk. High points:
'Inventions are like babies... you never can know at the beginning if your baby is going to grow up to be a nobel laureate, or live in a homeless shelter.'
'when good management collides with bad busines, the bad business always wins'
You have to define your personal objectives at the outset. Are you in it for the money? to win a nobel prize? tenure? (you can't have all three. sometimes, you can't have any. but you have to have a clear goal.)
Brody's 10 Rules for Entrepreneurship:
I'd gone to skool business-class style- tailored shirt and skirt, hose and heels. There was a job fair and open house for geography, and while I wasn't actually job hunting (more skimming the options) it wouldn't have done to go looking like a slob. I had a thin american apparel cap-sleeve top on underneath the button-down shirt, and I had a couple of hours before a guy from Intel was giving a talk about WiMax and LTE. So I found a slightly shady spot on the mall, shed the button down, kicked off the heels, and gleefully sprawled in the grass to read some homework and watch the kids at play.
Also, puppies.
I didn't mind when the animal puppies came over to say hi, and I didn't even mind when the cute shirtless soccer playing boys occasionally got perilously close. But a poor hapless puppy decided it would be a lovely time to try and flirt with a random girl doing homework. *sigh* Hopefully he had better luck elsewhere.
The demographics of the 4g talk were interesting. Audience of about 60 people: about 20 were women. 5 attendees were white (two of whom were women.) The clear demographic winner was the indian/pakistani/bangladeshi/arab contingent, though there were a handful of asians scattered about. And one black guy.
....
Thursday's talk was from the President of Johns Hopkins on entrepreneurship. It was actually a pretty amusing talk. He looked out across the room and said 'First off, you've got to realize that most of you will never invent anything. It requires seeing things beyond what you *expect* to see. Don't believe me? I've got a video to show you.'
[So, the goal when watching this video is to try and determine how many times the team in the white shirts passes the ball to each other. And yes, Brody used the licensed version.]
Duly chastened, we settled in for the rest of the talk. High points:
'Inventions are like babies... you never can know at the beginning if your baby is going to grow up to be a nobel laureate, or live in a homeless shelter.'
'when good management collides with bad busines, the bad business always wins'
You have to define your personal objectives at the outset. Are you in it for the money? to win a nobel prize? tenure? (you can't have all three. sometimes, you can't have any. but you have to have a clear goal.)
Brody's 10 Rules for Entrepreneurship:
1- Know your exit strategy. The merry-go-round has got to end eventually. How are you going to get off?
2- Time is money. You need low cost of development, fast time to product, quick path to regulatory approval.
3- Selling is too expensive. Develop something that doesn't need a huge sales force.
4- Have a barrier to entry. Otherwise someone bigger with deeper pockets will just do it better and faster.
5- Have a clearly superior product. If you have to spend years and millions on trials to prove it- no good.
6- First mover advantage. Go for major innovation, not incremental improvements to the status quo.
7- Don't serve two masters. You can't run a startup and also be a full-time professor. Commit.
8- Avoid inventors paranoia. (The belief that if they aren't doing it, its not important.)
9- the Sutton law of Startups: go where the money is.
10- BE LUCKY.
