There are 2 professors in Stanford and Berkeley are incredibly interesting and appealing to me.
One is Jerry Engel, who teaches entrepreneurship but also has an incredible venture capital program. I doubted about entering the VC industry full time at a certain moment, so I decided to take a course at Berkeley when I was on a ‘career-break’. The program was just amazing (you can find details here) ! I can truly recommend it to everyone, if you’re entering VC world or not. I became pretty good friends with since then, and each encounter is just amazing.
A week after attending his venture capital course, I also knew I wanted to start something from zero again. Not because I don’t love VC. On the contrary. One of the reasons I accepted to become IBBT chairman is because I think we can support building and growing amazing companies, project, products or services from that organisation. That’s also what I find great about VC’s: you can fund, support and build amazing companies. Actually, SonicAngel is build on a new generation of venture capital for emerging artists. At a conference in San Francisco, someone from the audience asked me: ‘So, SonicAngel is like the Y-Combinator for rock bands ?‘ And yes, that’s exactly what it is!
The 2nd Silicon Valley professor I admire is Steve Blank, who also wrote the excellent book ‘4 steps to epiphany‘. At his Stanford course, Steve teaches a lot about customer creation, product engineering, lean startup principles. Steve (and also Jerry for that matter) both started some companies, made a lot of money while selling them, and now are teaching entrepreneurship driven (or driving!) programs. Can you really teach entrepreneurship? Well, he addresses the question too – and compares it to teaching music. ‘Entrepreneurs are like artists‘.
Below the complete video. Steve talks about the bubble, about silicon valley, about the link between real world needs and digital ventures, about raising capital, but I’ll give you my 3 favourite moments:
1. the best entrepreneurs are passionate about solving a problem they truly care about. Entrepreneurs in their heart are like artists. Being an entrepreneur is not like having a job, it’s like having a calling. A true entrepreneur believe that he will create something that truly measures.
2. Silicon Valley is something different. You know how we call a failed entrepreneur? We call it experience! Anywhere else in the world, it’s called failure,you’re embarassed yourself, your family, your community, even your state.
3. if you raise capital under de current bubble, use it fully to scale your business and capture value. Don’t spend it on building or other, but spend it to capture attention and aggresively scale it.
Full video below, my favourite part as of minute 18.
Enjoy,
bart
(Source: GigaOm)
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