The Book of Eli, Knight And Day, And Other Movies
Jul 17 2010

It’s time for another movie post. I rented The Book of Eli, Hot Tub Time Machine, Cold Souls, and saw Knight and Day in the theater.  A friend of mine made fun of me the other day because I still actually have a Blockbuster card and rent movies the ‘old fashioned’ way.  I know I can probably get them On Demand via Time Warner or some other high tech way, but it’s easier for me to get them from Blockbuster.  Plus I can pick up some sushi take out from a store nearby.  As long as I get them back in 5 days time, it works out well.  Anyway, here are some quick overviews:

The Book of Eli

Set in post apocalyptic earth, the main character, Eli, is played by Denzel Washington.  He is responsible for taking a book – The Book – across the devastated American continent to the west coast where it can be reproduced.  It was an interesting plot and of course Eli is virtually indestructible.  He relies on faith and keen insight to guide him to his destination.  Near the end of his journey a young woman helps him fulfill his destination.  I happened to meet the guy, Armando Kirwin, who led the special effects team for this movie at a monthly event called Nerd Nite.  He was presenting that night, and I chatted with him for a bit before he gave his entertaining talk.  Turns out that Armando might be able to help one of our companies at the Austin Technology Incubator (one of our interns came to the event too) so it was a good random coincidence that we met.  I thought the Book of Eli was a good movie.  Even though the plot was somewhat predictable, it had a surprise ending and of course the special effects were cool.

Hot Tube Time Machine

Your life will be just fine if you never see this movie.  A bunch of older dudes and a teenager travel back to the 80’s when some weird Russian beverage short circuits a hot tub at a hotel the older guys used to stay when they partied.  The 80’s hair styles, clothes, and music was interesting but otherwise this was a very cheesy movie with way too many weird things happening, putting down of women, and unnecessary cursing.

Cold Souls

This movie was a little bit depressing as it’s based on a premise that you can harvest and store your soul.  The main character, who is an actor, is tired of his soul.  It’s weighing him down so he gets it extracted and feels better but empty.  He rents another soul of a Russian poet who happens to be female and his performance as an actor improves.  His soul gets stolen and taken to Russia and is placed inside a woman who wants to be a better actor.  They try to insert some comedic moments (e.g., the way the souls look in the jars after extraction varies from chick peas to prunes, etc.) but it all seemed very serious.  I have often wondered about our souls and how it is that our souls come to be in our bodies or really what unique interaction of neurons in our brains/minds display our unique souls.  Anyway, that’s too existential a topic to go into here…

Knight and Day

This was an entertaining movie with neat special effects.  I heard that Tom Cruise did all of his own stunts in this movie.  The main characters were Tom Cruise and Cameron Diaz.  The film’s plot was fairly predictable with Tom being the good/bad guy and Cameron being the sometimes scared out of her mind, dim witted gal.  In the end, she’s the pro and saves him but in the beginning I sometimes wanted to wonder out loud why she just didn’t get her stuff together and act like a reasonable person.  Anyway, it was fun to watch.  Whenever I see a Tom Cruise movie, I wonder how they shoot the film to make him look as tall as the actresses he usually plays across.

I was reminded of a few other movies I had seen a while back when I saw the previews in in the beginning of the rentals.  My memory of them has mostly faded but a couple of really good ones were:

A Single Man – An intense movie about a man trying to cope with the loss of his longtime partner.  It seemed to be set in the 50’s or 60’s when being gay was not as accepted as it is now.  He tries to find the courage to live and comes close to killing himself several times until a student of his connects with him and gives him hope.  It has a tragic twist ending.  The movie has several flashbacks to the main actor’s time with his partner and does a good job of illustrating the pain/feelings he is struggling with.

Cheri (with Michelle Pfeiffer) – a French courtesan and a young man, who is the son of another courtesan, have an affair and subsequently realize they are in love.  The character played by Michelle has the advantage of age and experience on her side to help her mask her true pain and feelings when the young man gets married because that was what men his age were supposed to do.  He being less experienced in the tumultuous, often painful experience of forbidden, unrealistic love cannot cope and is miserable until he finally kills himself.  A powerful movie.

The Runaways – This movie is based on Joan Jett, famous female rock star, and her first band.  This was also an intense, bizarre movie with more than enough footage about her sexual preferences and drug use.  It’s a deep look inside the life of a rock star and how extra hard it was to make it as a female rock star in that day and age.  It’s impressive that she and her other band members lived, but then again it’s impressive that most members of rock bands live given their stereotypical hard running lifestyles.  I have to say this movie made me cringe a few times but at the same time I was proud of her and her female band members for having the guts to go all the way to fame-dom!

Nature Photography
Jul 10 2010

Photo by Bruce Leander

Tonight I had the honor of being invited to an exclusive look at photos taken by successful bio technology executive, Bruce Leander, at the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center.  I invited my friend Michelle Ewalt (fabulous business/executive coach) to join me, and we both had a really nice time and met some interesting people.  Bruce retired from a full time career in the business/bio tech world a few years ago.

We had Bruce out to the Austin Technology Incubator a while back to talk to our companies about building a great corporate culture.  He has a strong reputation for focusing on company culture thereby making it a critical part of the success of the companies he was involved in.  I wonder if flowers have their own little growing cultures…well we do know that if they are nourished properly and given the right amount of attention, they thrive better than those who aren’t given the same amount of resources and attention.

My good friend Sandy Blanchard, whose photos I have used on several occasions to accentuate my blog posts, also takes fabulous pictures of nature and has some fantastic pictures of flowers.  Maybe one day, she’ll also be able to exhibit her photography in public.

At any rate, it’s always nice to see someone share their passion with the world.  I’m working on sharing one of my passions –  singing – with the world soon…even if it’s only online and not in person.  I have almost finished recording one song, from the 70s I think, with my voice teacher.  It’s not a completely professional recording but just as in the tech world, sometimes the best end products start out with a beautiful hack. 🙂

To the left is a photo taken by Bruce from the Wildflower Center website.

What’s Love Got To Do With It? – Live Life Like You Mean It
Jul 3 2010

“What’s love but a second hand emotion.  Who needs a heart when a heart can be broken.”  So go the lyrics of Tina Turner’s famous song What’s Love Got To Do With It (wikipedia link).  Check it out on YouTube if you haven’t heard it in a while.  I kept thinking of that song when I was reading a book recommended to me by someone, who I’ve come to respect greatly, with decades of experience in the field of psychology.  The book is called Living Like You Mean It: Use the Wisdom and Power of Your Emotions to Get the Life You Really Want (Amazon link) by Ronald J. Frederick, Ph.D.

It’s a valuable book for any manager/leader/entrepreneur to read because it discusses in simple terms how many of us have challenges processing our emotions and using them as tools to get a better understanding of what is happening inside of us and outside of us.  So many of us have been trained not to fully feel our emotions or stop them because we have been judged, place judgment on them, or simply feel we can’t deal with them right now.  We are a bundle of feelings and they surface, just like thoughts, to give us data points to help us navigate this crazy world.   I was speaking to one of our entrepreneurs at the Austin Technology Incubator recently and he said something like “I don’t have time to feel right now.”  I could relate to that statement because when I was running my companies, I put many things on the back burner and one of those things was my feelings.  The same thing happens when you are parenting little kids who take so much of your mental and physical energy…you feel like you have to keep up a front of having it all together so the kids don’t see what you are processing.  But you know what?  Even if they don’t see it, they feel it.  Of course your ‘gut feeling’ is always right there but sometimes we ignore it and defer to the ‘powers that be’ when if we had only listened to it earlier we might have taken action earlier and ended up in a better place earlier.

Dr. Frederick used very powerful examples based on his client’s stories that many people can relate to.   It’s hard to summarize this book, so I’m just going to highlight some key quotes/takeaways:

He says that “in general the spectrum of our emotions is actually made up of eight primary feelings and their related shades and combinations,” which are Anger, Sadness, Happiness, Love, Fear, Guilt-Shame, Surprise, and Disgust. (p. 54-55).  He lumps Guilt-Shame together as one category but makes a distinction that I found very enlightening.  Guilt is feeling bad about something you did and shame is feeling as if you are a bad person.

The fear of feelings is apparently common.  “In fact, most of us are afraid of our feelings.  We’re afraid to feel the full extent of our emotions and afraid of being emotionally alive and present with others.  We’re afraid of being vulnerable, of drawing attention to ourselves, of looking like a fool.  We’re afraid of being overwhelmed, of losing control, of getting out of hand.  We’re afraid of being seen for who we really are.”  So “We distract ourselves, push our feelings aside, stuff them back in, and hope they’ll go away.  But they don’t.  They keep trying to get our attention, to be heard, to be responded to — that’s their nature.  They reemerge as the sense that something is off, odd, or not right; as worry, irritability, restlessness, anxiety, or depression.” (p. xiv-xv).

In the last few years there have been many studies on emotions leading to a better understanding of how the brain works.  “We now know that emotions can play a more powerful role than thoughts in bringing about well-being and lasting change.  Our feelings can arise much faster and be more intense than our thoughts.  At times, no matter what we do to suppress them or how hard we try to control them, they’ll have the edge.  In addition, recent discoveries in the field of neuroplasticity…reveal that emotional experience actually has the power to rewire our brain!” (p. xvii).  “In recent years, technological advances have enabled scientists to understand more precisely just how the brain functions.  Joseph LeDoux, in his fascinating book The Emotional Brain, clearly illustrates how the neural connections that run from the emotional parts of the brain to the thinking parts of the brain are actually much stronger and more numerous than the connections that run in the other direction.  This helps explain why at times emotions are able to overwhelm our thoughts and dominate our thinking and why it can be difficult to control strong emotions through rational thought alone.” (p. 18).

There are so many ways we avoid our feelings that I can’t type them all here but I recognized myself in many of the descriptions including things like “Overthinking issues, getting ‘stuck’ in your head. Having to be in control or being overly self-sufficient (otherwise, your strong facade might crack and allow your emotions to come through).” (p. 78)

The amygdala is a cluster of neural circuitry deep inside our brain and is a storehouse for significant emotional memories.  It also gauges the emotional significance of events and it’s the place where fear originates so it has the ability to overwhelm rational thought and overlook reality.  It has the ability to hijack the brain.  (p. 90).

He discusses letting yourself actually feel the emotion through it’s entirety.  When you don’t, it never gets really dealt with and you keep reliving it instead of letting the emotion come through like a wave to its natural conclusion.  It’s a process and doesn’t happen overnight.  Attaching a label to a feeling (e.g., anger, sadness, etc.) dampens the fear response and decreases emotional distress. (p. 94).  He also gives tools to help you name and process the feeling.

As a business person and a parent, understanding and paying attention to your feelings about situations can help you make better decisions in all aspects of your life.  I know so many entrepreneur’s who look back and wish they had listened to their ‘gut feelings’ during critical times but they were too afraid to do so.  I’ve been there and done that!  The maternal (parental) instinct (based on feelings) is strong and I’m not sure if there have been any studies done but I’m guessing that instinct has saved many a baby’s life.

We shouldn’t be afraid of our feelings because they “1. Impart information.  2. Provide insight.  3. Give us guidance.” (p. 135)

Here’s to your emotional health and well-being!  I’ll end this post with a quote the author has on p. 131 that starts Chapter 7 of his book: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk to bloom.” – Anais Nin.

Interesting Reads and Fortunes
Jun 13 2010

Here are a few interesting things that have hit my in box and show my penchant for Chinese food to read and think about:

Articles, Posts, & Cartoons

Why Change Is So Hard: Self-Control Is Exhaustible – Fast Company.

“People won’t change because they’re too lazy. Well, I’m here to stick up for the lazy people. In fact, I want to argue that what looks like laziness is actually exhaustion. The proof comes from a psychology study that is absolutely fascinating.”

“This brings us back to the point I promised I’d make: That what looks like laziness is often exhaustion. Change wears people out—even well-intentioned people will simply run out of fuel.”

I found the short article interesting from a business and personal perspective.  Organizations and people can handle only so much change/stress that’s why it’s even more amazing to me when entrepreneurial endeavors make it because the speed and quantity of change that a start-up and the people involved experience is enormous.  Burn out happens often and frequently.  I’m a fairly high (and usually efficient) multi-tasker, but when I’m trying to process a lot of change and exerting a lot of self-control, it can feel exhausting which slows me down.  I also see how it affects people/entrepreneurs in the work environment.

Entrepreneurial Fog – A gapingvoid cartoon.  As an entrepreneur who has had a very interesting set of experiences in her life, many of Hugh’s cartoons resonate with me.  I did a couple of posts a while back on some of his cartoons called Love and Entrepreneurs Part 1 and Part 2.

“Army Generals talk about “The Fog of War.”  No matter how good your preparation is, it all means little once the actual fighting starts.”

It seems to me that many things in life are foggy and one characteristic trait of entrepreneurs and great leaders is that they are comfortable with the fog…well maybe not comfortable with it but have the wherewithal not to let it completely overwhelm them like in some scary, horror flick.

Passing it On – A post by my favorite VC blogger, Fred Wilson about one of their firms junior investment professionals, Andrew, that is moving on after his two year stint, teaching their new professional Christina about “proceeds by class of stock.”  The teacher in me liked this post.  Although I’ve only officially taught a short time in my career (i.e., a handful of undergraduate classes in entrepreneurship), I’ve always liked to teach people things.  It must be in the blood because my grandfather and my mother were both professors at different times during their careers.  It’s always an amazing/rewarding moment when you see a student/employee/person ‘get’ something for the first time or you see them applying skills they may or may not have realized they learned from the class.  I sometimes hear from my former students via facebook and it’s really hard to explain the feeling you get when they mention how things they learned are still helping them today.  I really did want to comment on that post, but I think I’ll have to refer back to the ‘laziness/exhaustion’ article I mention above…when I finally had a few minutes, I felt the time to comment had passed.

Fortunes

A while back I did a series of posts based on fortunes from fortune cookies I had received and one post almost resulted in me being mentioned in a New York Times article.  As I was searching for the  links to my previous posts on the topic, I discovered one I did on November 2, 2008 called Business Is Like War; Easy To Begin But Hard To Stop where the fortune actually said “Love is like war; easy to begin but hard to stop.” I compared Love and Business in an actual table format!  How…how…business like of me.  The end result was most businesses and marriages fail (as people tend to define failure – something ceasing to exist) in some form or fashion.  This is when I sometimes look back on what I’ve written and realize I forget that I actually wrote it.  Those words seem to describe the disillusionment I was entering into or maybe it was the illusion I was waking up from at the time and that was over a year and a half ago.  Weird.  Anyway, here are some fortunes I or others have recently had the fortune of receiving.  Like some others, I think that the fortune cookie industry has run out of fortunes and has decided to move into giving mere random statements:

You are a fun-loving person and will find much happiness.

Life is like playing the violin in the public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

Love is the greatest gift of all.

You will be showered with good luck.

Be careful or your true idiocy will shine through. (I’m half joking on this one because someone I was sitting next to got something similar to this, but I can’t remember the exact words but the gist was the same.)

Chocolate covered raisins cure all ailments! (Yes, I made that one up because I’m about go eat some)

I’ll blame it on the entrepreneurial fog and change exhaustion as to why I’m not interested in doing full posts where I create compare/contrast tables on any of the aforementioned fortunes. 🙂

Magellan International School – First Year
Jun 4 2010

The first year of the new Magellan International School (MIS), founded by the father of my kids (Erin Defosse), is almost over.  And it was a really great year!  I always believed in the vision of the school when Erin first told me he wanted to start it.  It has been a phenomenal entrepreneurial success and it was wonderful to see the kids at their end of school year performance speaking in Spanish.  I remember when I first met Erin how impressed I was that he was fluent in Spanish and often told him he should use the language more often since it was such an asset.  I can understand about 60% of what people say in Spanish now.  During my recent trip to Portugal (See post 1 and post 2) and Spain (will do a post soon) I was able to get by with my limited Spanish in Spain.  Portuguese has some similar words to Spanish so I could pick up some of what people were talking about.  I wish I knew other language other than English, but I don’t.  My parents know two other languages but they don’t really have the opportunity to use those languages much since they aren’t commonly spoken.

I couldn’t argue with giving our kids the gift of another language and only hope they will take every opportunity to use it when they grow older.  My son has already helped me on occasion communicate with someone who only speaks Spanish.  It makes me so happy that he can help me translate!

Erin and the head of school, Marisa Leon, have done an amazing job getting the school off the ground.  I remember meeting/interviewing Marisa in a Thai restaurant in downtown Austin, Texas and knowing immediately that she was the right person to head the school.  She has a great mixture of the ability to communicate with parents and children which is so important in a school.  I trust her and my kid’s other teachers completely with our kids.

MIS started the school year with about 45 students and ended with about 65.  Next school year is anticipated to start with 100+ students!   Plus, next year the students will start learning Mandarin!  The amount of work it takes to get something like a successful, private school going is tremendous.  Although I wasn’t involved in the day to day of getting the school off the ground, I did play a supporting role even if people didn’t see or know what I did, and I don’t believe it’s my place to say how and what I did as well as the sacrifices/compromises we made as a family to make it happen.  All entrepreneurial endeavors require strategic resource allocations (time, money, etc.), but I can say confidently that I did gave birth to the two kids who inspired him to build the school…and I think that is a visible contribution that counts for something. 🙂

Although Erin and I are no longer married, I have always believed in his ability to make the school successful.  Our kids are very happy there and the teachers are all world class and caring.  They have worked with us during our family transition and have kept the kids as their number one priority which means the world to me.  When my kids are happy, I’m happy or shall I say happier than I would be otherwise!

So if you want to give your kids the gift of another language as well as a wonderful learning environment that uses the International Baccalaureate Primary Years Programme (coordinated by my daughter’s teacher Ms. Alexandra Castro) and Singapore Math teaching methods, check out the Magellan International School!

Entrepreneurship in Portugal
Jun 1 2010

I went to Portugal with 4 other colleagues (3 of us presented) to help give a workshop on incubation management and on-shoring opportunities for Portuguese technology companies to the US.  The UTEN program is also run through IC2 which the Austin Technology Incubator (where I work) is also under.

[Boat photo: Taken in Porto. These were the types of boats that people used to transfer port wine to different parts of the Europe and the world.  The bridge in the background I believe was built using the same material used to build the Eiffel tower.]

In my previous post on culture, food, and technology, I discussed a little bit about the culture which is very different than the US culture, and I believe culture plays an important role in entrepreneurship.  I don’t have a lot of time to write this up since I’m in Barcelona, Spain and will be heading outside soon to enjoy the weather, listen to people & pigeons, read, and write before I head back tomorrow so I’ll keep it brief:

The people we interacted with (incubator managers, professors, technology transfer officers) were all eager to learn how to help make their country more supportive of entrepreneurship.  Their government has allocated money to support programs like ours not just with UT Austin but also universities like MIT, Harvard, Cambridge, and Carnegie Mellon to help them in this mission.  We were there giving a workshop on incubation management that included exercises on negotiations, case studies, due diligence best practices when selecting companies, how to mentor companies, etc.

The cultural norms of late lunches, late dinners, arriving fashionably late, siestas and sometimes waiting for things to happen versus making things happen doesn’t always mesh with the capitalistc entrepreneurship traits we are so used to in the US.  The people in the roles above have a challenge ahead of them to help not just the entrepreneurs but the entities playing supportive roles to move faster and connect the dots in different ways than they are used to.  Many of them are so energized about their potential roles in making this happen and have made significant progress!  It’s hard for them, the government, and even us to appreciate how far they have come in the last few years and how much hard work is ahead of them.

[Man cooking photo:  This was taken in Porto outside of the restaurant I mentioned in the food, culture, technology post I mentioned above.  This entrepreneur was cooking sardines and bell peppers on the streets.]

The companies that are in their incubators today are not just technology related as most of us in the US understand them.  They include innovation in textiles, marine biology, foods, etc.  It will be fascinating to see how and if they can get the few entrepreneurs in their country who have made money on traditional businesses to take the risk on technology investments.

There are very few business angel investors and as I mentioned most of them are not used to investing.  Their wealth is also typically not as great as the investors in the US.  The venture capital market is virtually non-existent and I think most of the venture capitalists have home bases in other places in Europe or the US and will occasionally invest in a Portuguese company.

Overall I was impressed with the people, the program, and the vision.  I was so glad I had the opportunity to go and contribute to the success of the program. There are so many moving parts including a government under economic stress, as are other countries in Europe, but the fact that they have intelligently identified an opportunity to invest in knowledge enhancement in the world of entrepreneurship (dear to my heart) is in my opinion a very wise, long term strategic decision!

Portuguese Food, Culture, and Technology
May 29 2010

I’m still in Portugal and luck has shined on me.  The weather has been great, the people have been great, and the experience has been new and adventurous.  I’ll do a post on my Portuguese incubator, tech transfer, and entrepreneurial experience next but part of that has to do with the culture and possibly the food.  In the interest of time, here are some highlights because I don’t have time to make the bullets work with the pictures:

The food is good but not the best in the world.  They are known for their salted cod dishes, and I think I tried cod twice.  I’m not a big fan of cod.  The joke is that they have 1001 cod based dishes. However, the best meal and wine I had was at a restaurant called Fernando in the city of Porto recommended by one of my colleagues and we did have to bust the bank (our per diem for meal reimbursements was long overshot) on this meal but it was worth it.  The grilled prawns were probably the best I had ever had.  The red wine that another one of my colleagues selected was outstanding.  The multiple ways they prepared the huge crab were delicious.  I even took a picture of it and it’s the one accompanying this blog post.

The customer service is over the top.  We in the US think we have good customer service but outside of maybe Nordstrom’s you don’t see this kind of customer service.  They go out of their way to make sure that you have what you want.  The best example is that the restaurant I mentioned above gave another of my colleagues a free bottle of the white wine he liked.  They also let me try what they called a different kind of shrimp which was really a barnacle (I have pics of that too) despite me making a funny face at how weird they looked.  Another example is a shop owner opening up especially for us to look at her knick knacks and port.  A third is the Director of the Digital Media incubator spending the late afternoon with me to find some things for my kid’s school and good port!  Her name is Fatima which I found a little coincidental because the girl Santiago falls in love with in the desert in The Alchemist (which I just wrote about) is called Fatima.  Barely a touch was exchanged between them, yet they both knew.  The book ends with Santiago finding his treasure and then going back to be with her.  I know it is a fable, unrealistic romance, but us humans (especially us girl humans) fall for that kind of stuff.  My whole point is (please excuse that aforementioned little reverie) is that you feel very much included in this culture.

I was disappointed that I never made it to a port/wine cellar in Porto.  I hear they are lovely, but that doesn’t mean I didn’t get to try several ports and wines.  I tried their famous Vinho Verde (green wine) and even though I don’t usually like white wines, I liked it.  One of my colleagues recommended a type of white port tonic drink (can’t recall the name) that was really nice and refreshing.  I am going to bring some port home!

They love their sports teams (i.e., football/soccer) and the gear is expensive but my son wanted a Portugal team shirt so what is a mom to do but buy one! 🙂   Their loyalties on the different soccer teams are fierce in different regions in Portugal so be careful what you say.

It’s been over a decade since I’ve traveled for business to Europe and technology has come a long way from internet connection, to Wi-Fi, to Skype.  I can use Skype on my iPhone to call my kids for something like 2.1 cents per minute compared to $2 per minute if I used my regular plan.  Of course I have to be in a free Wi-Fi spot and it’s not always clear but to me that is amazing.  I’m sure I’ll still get phone charges because people have called and texted me and I don’t have a plan (and it wasn’t worth upgrading for the time I’d be here because international plans aren’t cheap).  However Wi-Fi is in places I never thought it would be.  I find this particularly cool because Wi-Fi Alliance has been headquartered at the Austin Technology Incubator for a few years now.  The hotel I’m about to check out of has ethernet connection to the Internet but the microphone on my laptop isn’t configured/working so I can call out on Skype but people can’t hear me.  Sigh.

The people still smoke a lot here.

They don’t take American Express in most places except for the hotels.  Ah well.  I guess I could have left home without it.

Now, I’m off to Spain…

Turning Metal Into Gold – The Alchemist
May 23 2010

One of my favorite fables is written by Paulo Coehlo.   It’s called  The Alchemist  (Amazon Link) A Fable about Following Your Dream and it was required reading in my class when I taught entrepreneurship at The University of Texas at Austin McCombs School of Business.  It is about a shepherd boy who has a dream one night of finding a chest full of treasure.  After meeting a gypsy and a king, he decides to trade in his sheep and follow his dream.  Along the way he faces many challenges, gets in a rut, meets interesting people, never gives up, meets the love his life who waits for him, and eventually finds his treasure.  When I first read the story the parallels to entrepreneurship struck me.   Entrepreneurs often have to blindly follow their vision when others around them think they might be a little off their rocker.  Entrepreneurship requires a lot of faith, hard work, and luck.

The reason I’m re-reading and writing about the book now (in an airport; finishing up in a hotel) is because I was on my way to Portugal for a business trip.  It happens to be Entrepreneurship week in Portugal this week, and I was selected to go as part of a team to give a workshop on entrepreneurship to Portuguese technology transfer and incubator officers.   I have traveled to many places but not Portugal and I’m excited about the opportunity.  So far Porto seems to be a very beautiful city.  On the way back, I’ll be spending a few days in Spain to visit my cousin Ashan Pillai (wikipedia link), a prominent viola player.  Not only does he have his own wikipedia page, he also has a great website.  The shepherd boy named Santiago (which also happens to be my son’s middle name) is from Spain and he travels to Egypt to find his treasure and discovers it’s not there!?  It’s somewhere else and the book describes his journey where he does eventually find it.

Do you feel like you are on a journey…an impossible one sometimes?  I sometimes do….an interesting journey to find my treasure whether it be riches, love, or the tangible/intangible impact I can leave on the world.

One of the biggest takeaways from this book that I always hoped my students would think about is when you take a chance to follow your dreams “the world conspires to help you.”  Have you ever noticed that sometimes when you are making a hard decision or pursuing a dream, a project, or a task and you feel ‘in the zone’ that things seem to become easier and people seem to show up at the right time to help you out?  Some people call it coincidence or luck…which it is but it also makes you wonder.  A few quotes/statements I like from the book are:

About the world’s greatest lie:  “It’s this: that at a certain point in our lives, we lose control of what’s happening to us, and our lives become controlled by fate.  That’s the world’s greatest lie.”

“The secret of happiness is to see all the marvels of the world, and never to forget the drops of oil on the spoon [that you are holding].”

“My heart is afraid that it will have to suffer,” the boy told the alchemist one night as they looked up at the moonless sky. “Tell your heart that the fear of suffering is worse than the suffering itself.  And that no heart has ever suffered when it goes in search of its dreams.”

Of course like anything in this world the heart must be balanced with the head to keep things in order and to make progress but a company (or a person) without a heart, a dream, or a vision will not go very far.  This is why I believe the Founder of a company should stay with the company as long as possible because they often represent the heart, which we all know is necessary for a human to survive.

For the skeptics out there (myself included), The Alchemist is after all just a fable and Santiago didn’t have a wife or kids while galavanting across the desert.  Those are pretty big responsibilities.  However, many famous fables, Biblical or otherwise, have inspired people to do many great things!  So take it with a grain of sand…like the ones in the vast desert that lay between you and your treasure.

The Life of Books
May 10 2010

I’ve been asked several times by people what business books I read, and honestly I don’t read too many of them.  This could partly explain why I’m not a millionaire yet.  Maybe I have ADD (which many entrepreneurs purport to having in some form or fashion), but a book really has to get my attention and ones presented in fable or story form seem much easier for me to read. I used to devour books (mostly fiction), but with all I have going on, I’m lucky if I can get through one book every few months.  However, as things have started to settle down a little bit in my life (knock on wood), I’m trying to read more books.

Fred Wilson did a post a while back listing the books he recommends for entrepreneurs (e.g., Atlas Shrugged, Shakespeare) which resulted in a guy named Zachary Burt creating a wiki for people to list recommended books for entrepreneurs.  Siddhartha, by Herman Hesse, is on this list and one of my favorites.  I used to give all my Intro to Entrepreneurship students a copy of Siddhartha as a good-bye gift.  It’s one of the few books I’ve re-read at different times during my life and each time I take away something slightly different and more.

I wrote a post a few weeks ago about a book I read during a much needed break called The Happiness Hypothesis and I just finished Outliers by Malcom Gladwell.  I plan to write about books more often on this blog and highlight any connections I see between the content of the book to entrepreneurship and parenting.  The books will range from business related, to fiction, to classics, to possibly space exploration but I believe you can learn something from one book that later can help you assimilate (consciously or un) something you experience in the real world or read in another book.  I also plan to update the design of this blog and add a page listing book recommendations.

If you have any books you think I should add to my pile, please let me know in the comments or by emailing me.  I will be linking to Amazon for books I read and for full disclosure, if you happen to buy a book from that link, I will eventually get a small dollar % of that purchase.  To date in the three plus years I’ve been blogging, I have yet to receive a check from Amazon so I don’t anticipate writing about books will be a lucrative endeavor!

Scar Tissue and Entrepreneurship
May 6 2010

This quote was in an article that hit my in box today:  “I write one page of masterpiece to ninety-one pages of shit,” Hemingway confided to F. Scott Fitzgerald in 1934. “I try to put the shit in the wastebasket.” The quote was in an email that was referencing a post done by Copyblogger called Ernest Hemingway’s Top 5 Tips for Writing Well and is mentioned in his book Ernest Hemingway on Writing (Amazon link).

For some reason it reminded me of times when people talk about scar tissue as badges of honor in the world of technology entrepreneurship.  A lot of shit happens behind the scenes of a start-up company.  One in 10 make it big and most of the rest of them have some modicum of success or get to 2nd base or fail.  But in those other 9, a lot of practicing, a lot of learning, a lot of scarring occurs that make the next iterations closer to masterpieces.  Many successful entrepreneurs (and investors for that matter) I’ve met have a few ‘bad deals’ or shall we say deals that didn’t go as well as they would have liked under their belts.  The masterpieces are created because of the ‘pages of shit.’  Without those pages, experiences, and scars the masterpiece’s wouldn’t have happened.  This is true in music, writing, entrepreneurship, sports, etc.

Just think about how many baskets Michael Jordan must have missed in order to make as many as he did.  Unfortunately, in the world of start-up businesses we can’t physically (time, money, etc.) get up to bat or shoot at the basket that many times.  So we have to get through the pages of shit and heal fast so we can hopefully create some masterpieces.

Idea to Product Competition April 2010
Apr 29 2010

With about 1,000 things to juggle I can’t seem to find the time to write blog posts, let alone read which spurs some of my ideas on what to write about.  After I get home get the kids fed, bathed, homework-ed, piano-ed, put to bed and caught up on emails, it’s almost 10:00 pm and I’m sapped or is that zapped…oh whatever.  So here’s a copy of what I wrote for the Austin Technology Incubator blog on the Idea to Product Competition I judged last weekend:

Idea to Product Competition April 2010

I had the privilege of serving as a judge in the final rounds of the Idea to Product (I2P) competition this past Saturday, April 24, 2010.  I always enjoy judging this competition and seeing how many interesting technology concepts the students either invent or enhance based on an existing technology.  This year marks the 10 year anniversary of I2P and I remember being part of the early discussions when the competition was forming.

The Idea to Product® UT Competition is an early-stage technology commercialization plan competition, hosted by the Murchison Chair of Free Enterprise, which was started at UT in 2001.  In the Idea to Product® Competition students create links between emerging technologies and market needs required to support later stages of commercialization. The I2P® Program educates students about creating viable products and services from technology, and has served as a stepping stone for entrepreneurship. Previous teams have produced work that has increased research funding, licensing of technology, and creation of new ventures. The competition has also served as a commercialization forum for faculty and members of the community.  Faculty have been able to consider societal needs of technology and members of the community have been given an early preview of cutting-edge technology. The competition is sponsored by the Cockrell School of Engineering, the College of Natural Sciences, several engineering departments, along with several student organizations.  Supporters of the event include the National Science Foundation, NCIIA, MOOT CORP, the Austin Technology Incubator, the Office of Technology Commercialization, Fish & Richardson, P.C., and the Herb Kelleher Center for Entrepreneurship.

The winners of this year’s University of Texas competition (the global competition happens later in the year) were:

1. Digital Proctor
2. CoolCore Technologies
3. SpectraPhase

It was a really tough decision choosing the top 3 because in all the years I’ve been judging the competition, these were some of the best presentations I had seen.  It was obvious the students worked very hard and were probably up many a late night!  Check out the http://www.ideatoproduct.org/ut/ site to see videos of the presentations.

Digital Proctor helps online universities assess whether someone might be cheating using unique keystroke identification technology.  They even have paying customers!  CoolCore Technologies has access to technology that rapidly reduces therapeutic hypothermia after a heart attack, stroke, or traumatic brain injury.  Most brain damage is done within 90 minutes of an incident and cooling down the body can significantly reduce death and long term brain damage.  SpectraPhase has technology that is a real-time glucose monitoring catheter for inpatient care usage.  It gives continuous, ultra-high accuracy readout of changes in patient blood glucose levels.

We at ATI wish them great luck in pursuing commercialization of their technologies (if they choose to do so)!  I2P is a great way for students to get feedback on the commercial viability of their technology and product ideas, and I look forward to serving as a judge again.

Encouragement
Apr 17 2010

Back late last year (November 21, 2009 to be exact) this quote fell into my in box from Jeffrey Fry’s daily quote email list: “The spirited horse, which will try to win the race of its own accord, will run even faster if encouraged.”  –Ovid. I think I’ve met Jeffrey (also an entrepreneur) twice, but we’ve exchanged several emails about our life’s journey’s.

That quote hit me for some reason.  And I just now realized that quote came in almost exactly a year after I stood at the Entrepreneurial Ledge (I wrote that post on November 20, 2008 with tears in my eyes) after having heard that the first company I founded had gone out of business.  I subsequently heard that the assets had been sold to a manufacturing company and some of the people went to work for that company so the technology in some form has survived.  I know that some people might find it cheesy or maybe even ‘girly’ to be so affected by such news because after all, it’s just a company.  But to me it was like a baby.  The people were important to me and I cared about them.  I have heard many of my entrepreneur friends refer to their businesses as their baby.  They equate the experience to one of giving birth to and nurturing it as best they can.  Starting a business is a wild financial, emotional, and physical ride very much akin to rearing kids!

At any rate, after letting that quote sit in my Outlook Inbox for a few days or weeks…I can’t really recall, I sent the following email to my fellow Director’s at the Austin Technology Incubator.

I think this [encouragement] is an important part of what we do.  As an entrepreneur (spirited horse) you have so many forces trying to bring you down, being critical, double guessing you, etc. that even the slightest amount of encouragement can keep you going and running faster.

Because our incentives are not set up like most investors/VCs, we can be liberal with our encouragement which I think is a huge intangible benefit we offer towards the success of our companies/entrepreneurs.

Giving someone (or a group) positive energy helps them see things they might not have been able to see or better said makes it easier for them to see things because they don’t feel threatened by criticism/limits.  I’d say a good example of this is what’s happening with [XYZ Company] with their big business model change.  But I can point to a few more companies as well who when encouraged and highlighted have increased their odds of success.

But that’s just me.  I believe in energy flows/vibrations at the sub atomic level and if you’ve noticed scientists have been proving and writing about this phenomenon.  And as someone who broke her arm at the age of 13 riding a big, black ex-race horse (whose name I think was Jude) who was inadvertently encouraged to run faster by another horse, I speak from experience.

I do believe that encouraging someone can go a long way to the success of that individual and/or the company.  Of course, encouragement has to be tempered with reality.  I don’t believe in the “let’s all win a medal for lifting a cup to our mouths” encouragement that some kids are subjected to because I think that sets them up for huge disappointment later.  As we all know, we don’t get medals just for showing up to work.  In fact, I like playing board games with my kids because someone has to lose and they have to realize that sometimes you win and sometimes you lose and in many cases the person who wins is determined by who draws the first card (e.g., Candy-land)! Plus when one of them starts to say ‘that’s not fair,’ it’s prime teaching time to let them know many things don’t seem fair in this world but they just have to deal with it.

But the right amount of encouragement, with a nice side helping of humorous perspective, can help someone (e.g., an entrepreneur) immensely especially during times when it seems like the rest of their world (investors, board members, employees, family) is pulling them down or doesn’t see or feel what they do.  I think the mere act of believing in someone, helping them focus on their strengths, and being there for them during a tough time, can have a huge impact on their ability to reach their full potential.

As usual the gorgeous photo is by my good friend Sandy Blanchard. When I look at it, I see a flower that was encouraged by the right amounts of sun, rain, and nutrients to open up and present such stunning beauty to the world…

3 Day Startup in Austin – April 2010
Apr 11 2010

This weekend the Austin Technology Incubator is hosting 3 Day Startup (3DS).  Bart Bohn, Wireless/IT Director, is the guy at ATI who facilitates and oversees this really cool event.  3DS is where 40+ University of Texas at Austin students from all different colleges get locked in to ATI and have to come up with a business.  They work hard to flesh out ideas, build pitches, create prototypes, and sell their ideas.  I dropped by yesterday (Saturday) late afternoon and stayed through evening to see what companies were forming and to ask questions and give them some advice.  It’s great to feel the energy in the building as these budding and wannabe entrepreneurs use their creative juices to come up with what could be viable business opportunities.  Some were interesting and others were well let’s just say a bit off the mark.

Tonight (Sunday) they presented their ideas in front of a panel of investors and entrepreneurs to get additional feedback.  I was really impressed with the progress some of these teams made in their presentations from last night to tonight.  Some of them were awake for close to 60 hours!  I was never one for all nighters.  In fact, I only pulled an all nighter once in my entire undergrad and grad years and it wasn’t even for a class.  It was for some dumb consulting challenge in graduate school where about 1/3 of the night I was laying on the sofa exhausted and annoyed that we were working on something that seemed futile.  I always figured that if by 2 or 3 a.m., I didn’t know the material, I wasn’t going to know it, and I just hoped that the answers would come to me when test time rolled around.  Fortunately, enough them usually did because I wasn’t a crammer and usually paced my studying.

For a more official post on 3DS, check out the ATI blog post at ATI Hosts Spring 3 Day Startup 2010 for Student Entrepreneurs.

The Happiness Hypothesis
Apr 3 2010

I actually finished a book from beginning to end when I went out of town for a much needed week long break a couple of weeks ago.  This may not seem much to many of you but to me, I haven’t been able to concentrate (or have the time) to finish any book in a few years it seems like.  The book I read is called The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom (Amazon Link) by Joseph Haidt.  Many of us search for happiness and never find it or are looking in the wrong places.  We’ve all heard the saying that happiness comes from within.  Well that’s partially true according to Haidt but there are so many other factors.

He performed extensive research and referenced many of the great thinkers, psychologists, philosophers, doctors, etc. to come to some conclusions of his own.  I think many entrepreneurs are happy when they are able to see the tangible results of their efforts, but many think they will be happy if only they were to accomplish this one thing.  But as we all know, there’s always the next thing, and we as a species have a hard time enjoying where we are and what we have accomplished.  We have a hard time being happy with who we are because we compare ourselves to others.

The author directs you a couple of times to the website  http://www.authentichappiness.sas.upenn.edu/Default.aspx run by Dr. Martin Seligman, founder of Positive Psychology at University of Pennsylvania, so you can assess your own level of happiness. “Positive Psychology is a new branch of psychology which focuses on the empirical study of such things as positive emotions, strengths-based character, and healthy institutions. His research has demonstrated that it is possible to be happier — to feel more satisfied, to be more engaged with life, find more meaning, have higher hopes, and probably even laugh and smile more, regardless of one’s circumstances. Positive psychology interventions can also lastingly decrease depression symptoms. The research underlying these rigorously tested interventions is presented in the July/August edition of the American Psychologist, the journal of the American Psychology Association.”  You have to register to do the surveys.

Here is the review of the book by Publisher’s Weekly from the Amazon site.

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak, lamented St. Paul, and this engrossing scientific interpretation of traditional lore backs him up with hard data. Citing Plato, Buddha and modern brain science, psychologist Haidt notes the mind is like an “elephant” of automatic desires and impulses atop which conscious intention is an ineffectual “rider.” Haidt sifts Eastern and Western religious and philosophical traditions for other nuggets of wisdom to substantiate—and sometimes critique—with the findings of neurology and cognitive psychology. The Buddhist-Stoic injunction to cast off worldly attachments in pursuit of happiness, for example, is backed up by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s studies into pleasure. And Nietzsche’s contention that what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger is considered against research into post-traumatic growth. An exponent of the “positive psychology” movement, Haidt also offers practical advice on finding happiness and meaning. Riches don’t matter much, he observes, but close relationships, quiet surroundings and short commutes help a lot, while meditation, cognitive psychotherapy and Prozac are equally valid remedies for constitutional unhappiness. Haidt sometimes seems reductionist, but his is an erudite, fluently written, stimulating reassessment of age-old issues. (Jan.)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Since a couple of weeks have now passed since I read it and life has gotten in the way, the details are no longer clear to me but some of the things I remember are:

• I found it odd/irritating that most of the experiments referenced (e.g., monkey’s taken away from their mother and put in cages with wire frame mothers, babies being left alone to cry, etc.) were done by men.  Freud, Spock and others thought babies should be sent to a baby farm away from their parents.   There were a couple of women (Anna Freud) who also bought into some of this stuff, but I wonder if she had children at the time.  I guess to me it seems obvious that happiness is partially influenced by your relationship with your parents/family and the amount of support/love you get from them.  If your primary caregivers don’t accept you for who you are and don’t provide an environment where you are encouraged to discover your passion, it can make finding that inner happiness harder.  There are those who make it to the top of the proverbial ladder who are still unhappy.

• I resonated with the example he used of the elephant and the rider.  My favorite animals is the elephant and I used to collect images of them.  According to Haidt, we forget that as humans we are both the elephant and the rider.  As rational thinking beings we believe we are the rider controlling everything but if that elephant (base, primal, survival) decides it wants/needs something, there really is not much the rider can do other than find ways to train the elephant to move in another direction.  The elephant can be responding to fear, love, soul starvation, body starvation, boredom, etc. but the rational rider has to think of the long term effects of reacting to those urges and guides the elephant to safer ground.  As a flawed species, we don’t always do the right thing, our elephant desires are much stronger than we are and we fall off.  But then we must get back up on the elephant and try again, because if we don’t the elephant runs a muck and tramples a bunch of people in its way.

• A study done on 4 year olds and marshmallows is an indicator of a person’s ability to achieve and in some way feel more happiness.  I, of course, asked my kids the question and they passed.  The study has a grown up in a room with a 4 year old and the grown up shows the 4 year old a plate with one marshmallow and another with two marshmallows.  The grown up tells the 4 year old that he/she is going to leave the room for a little bit.  If the 4 year old waits until the grown up gets back, the 4 year old can have two marshmallows.  If he/she can’t wait, then he/she could ring a bill bringing back the grown up who would give them the one marshmallow.  Those 4 year olds who could wait, did better overall in education, test scores, etc. and by exercising self restraint tended to be happier individuals.  I’m not quite sure the direct tie, but when I asked my kids if they would wait, they both said they would so I temporarily felt a little relief as a potentially good mom.  🙂

• The big takeaway is that people usually can’t or don’t make significant changes in thinking or relating to people if they can’t train or convince the elephant why it’s better or at least cause the elephant to react in disgust to something.  Trying to convince the rational rider why it’s important to lose weight if he/she is fat is intellectually easy, but until the elephant is trained/convinced/physically disgusted it usually is a moot exercise to attempt to lose weight just based on rational thinking alone.

At any rate, it was a really good, though provoking read.  I started two other books The Art of Choosing (Amazon Link) by Sheena Iyengar and Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon Link) by Malcolm Gladwell which I plan to blog about soon.  The Art of Choosing (like The Happiness Hypothesis) were my uncle’s books and I had to leave them with him when I came back home so I’ll have to get my hands on a copy so I can finish it.

May you be well.  May you be happy.  May you be free from suffering.  These phrases are part of the loving kindness meditation. Here’s another Amazon link to The Happiness Hypothesis.

Healthcare Reform or Debacle?
Mar 28 2010

Last week I was out of town for a much needed break and as pretty much everyone knows much of the week was all about US health care reform or as people have been calling it Obamacare.   I ended up seeing more of the health care bill passing/signing spectacle than I normally would because I was with family members who like to keep up with every detail when it comes to things like this.  I usually don’t have time or the interest in understanding more than a broad brush of what is happening.  I know I probably shouldn’t admit that but daily life gets in the way and I’m one of the fortunate people that happens to have good health insurance right now.  In this case, I’m actually a bit disheartened in how things were handled and are being handled.  Long time readers of my blog know that I supported Obama in the election and am still amazed at what he’s been able to accomplish.  He is a very intelligent, charismatic man.

Yes, I’m glad that small business owners will get a tax credit for offering health insurance.  Yes, I’m glad that people who could not afford and did not have insurance in the past will now have an option.  Yes, I’m glad they will share some of the financial burden that all of us taxpayers have covered to date.  Yes, I’m glad that children with pre-existing conditions cannot be denied health care coverage.  At one point when we didn’t have access to employer based coverage except via COBRA (which was way too expensive), I shopped around for coverage.  Because of a minor observation that a doctor had made during a doctor visit for my then 18 month old son, one insurance company denied him coverage.  I had to find another company to cover him.  It was ridiculous!

What I’m not happy about is how this bill came to pass.  I have several very good Republican friends and if I was in their shoes I would feel very upset with how the bill got passed.  My friends aren’t the type that yell things at congress people.  They aren’t the crazies who try to physically hurt people.  They are smart, caring people.  And if they don’t buy in, get, approve, or understand the bill then I think this was a hollow victory.

In my opinion when you are trying to implement a change of this nature that has huge financial AND emotional implications, it’s the leader’s job to get buy in and understanding from all sides.  When one side is completely opposed, you’ve set yourself up for a long uphill battle, wasted energy, wasted money, and bi-partisan messes.  As unpopular as the war is now, at the time it had bi-partisan support.  As broken as I think the welfare, affirmative action, social security, and medicare programs are now, they (as far as I know, and I readily admit I could be wrong) had support (even if minimal) from both sides.

One thing I think most bills are missing that pass Congress is an “out clause.”  How do we get out of something that isn’t working anymore?  How do we get out of the war?  Some of the billions of dollars being spent on the war could be (in my opinion) better used on the home front including health care reform.  How do we get out of, change, or just drop programs like the ones I mentioned above that are no longer working as designed because people have learned to game the system?  I think all of the programs (just like this health care reform will initially provide) provided great value at the time they were implemented and helped hundreds of thousands of people, but now they aren’t working as designed and there is no easy out clause.

I believe in people.  I believe in the men and women who are the one’s that get things done on a daily basis in this country.  It doesn’t matter if they are Democrats or Republicans.  In the case of health care reform, I think from a “change management” perspective we have set ourselves up for a very challenging road.  There is a huge process in managing change and this is a big one.  Many changes implemented in corporations fail, many mergers & acquisitions fail precisely because everyone underestimates the amount of change that really needs to happen to make something work. People are all different and we fundamentally don’t like change.  The insurance companies, the patients, the doctors, the hospitals, etc. will all have to change.  We want to feel like we’ve bought in and understand the change before changing our behaviors.  If we don’t feel we’ve been given that respect, we will dig in our heels and resist.

Overall, I’m glad the bill passed because it has now taken the discussion on health care to a different level. After all the lawyers get in & out, I am hopeful that everyone will plainly see how it will help millions of Americans as well as understand how we will pay for it.  I don’t fully understand how we will pay for it just as I don’t fully understand how we continue to pay for an unpopular war.  However, I think Obama and the Democrat members of Congress should have had the foresight to realize that the energy drain and distraction that the nation is now facing will take its toll…especially now when we should be allocating some of that energy on educating our kids and creating jobs to maintain our leadership position in the world.