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In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

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Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#41

Post by jfarmer »

zaidf wrote: post #38
jfarmer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things. [Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.] And that is great. Ma…

need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically brights folks working on new things. This ends up with the boring conclusio…

Huh? I'm not saying anything about inventors or entrepreneurs; I'm saying something about the author's article and why it was unnecessary and unproductive, particularly if it was meant to be a critique of BusinessWeek as well as the entrepreneurs it highlighted.

I have no idea how many entrepreneurs or inventors there are, what the appropriate balance between the two is (if that even matters), whether the world needs more or less of either, etc.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#42

Post by theappfarm »

"Dear America: you can’t have an economy based on narcissism, good intentions, marketing, catering to rich bored people, really excellent webpages, and selling underpants on the internet."

Quite a statement coming from someone working on "problems in quantitative finance." Not sure which adds less value, high frequency trading or (insert any activity on earth here).

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#43

Post by nradov »

dasil003 wrote: post #36
DirtyAndy wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars and trying to at least improve on th…

I think there is still a difference between being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. I have to disagree here. This is a VC/Angel-inspired echo-chamber mindset. I can certainly see a difference between growth businesses and small shops, but it's reall…

In business and technical circles the word 'entrepreneur' means doing something fundamentally new. There is no value judgment implied; entrepreneurs aren't necessarily superior to small-business owners. It's simply a matter of definitions.

Peter F. Drucker has a good explanation of this difference in his classic book "Innovation and Entrepreneurship". http://www.harpercollins.com/books/9780060851132/Innovation_...

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#44

Post by slocklin »

mechanical_fish wrote: post #28
zaidf wrote: post #23

Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an authoritative list that took into account all entrepreneurs across America. Untrue. May be you should attack the magazine that created the list instead of the entrepreneurs? Better yet, create your anti-list of guys you think should be there but never will be because they are too busy doing too many important stuff. Simply cherry picking flaws in a b…

Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible. I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America tod…

I'm sorry, dude: it is not at all easy to meet people as inventive as Farnsworth. Television... compared to making another kind of MEMS accelerometer? And what do these modern inventors do for an encore that compares to inventing what is still the most promising technique in nuclear fusion? Farnsworth was a living god of invention; do not take his name in vain, and compare him to dopes slinging VHDL or whatever.

I agree that inventors labor best in obscurity ... however, these guys were all nominated and carefully selected by Business Week. Some of the top 25 were impressive inventive types, as I realized later: they simply were not mentioned at all in the main article.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#45

Post by slocklin »

jfarmer wrote: post #34
mechanical_fish wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible. I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America tod…

Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things. [Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.] And that is great. Ma…

Gates wrote BASIC at 20 and founded Microsoft in the same year. I thought everyone knew that.

I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design company featured in business week? There was nothing exceptional about her business model or returns.

Re: In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots”

#46

Post by jfarmer »

slocklin wrote: post #45
jfarmer wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things. [Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.] And that is great. Ma…

Gates wrote BASIC at 20 and founded Microsoft in the same year. I thought everyone knew that. I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design compa…

He wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair. Apple had their own version, too, for example, and there's a funny story about Woz not wanting to implement floating-point arithmetic in their version and Apple having to license that technology from Microsoft.

So, it wasn't "Bill Gates wrote BASIC" it was "Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair."

I can imagine you writing a snarky sentence about that. Oh, blah blah, a version of a toy computer language on a toy computer.

I agree that a lot of the other companies featured were more interesting. I think we'd agree on a lot.

I guess one thing we don't agree on is the most productive way to respond to an article like this. I agree the article isn't helpful and that, perhaps, it puts on a pedestal people who don't deserve to be there. Or, in any case, that there are other people doing more interesting things who deserve to be featured instead.

Those people, however, don't deserve to be pissed on just because BusinessWeek decided to write the piece.

My question is this: what was the goal of your article?

From my perspective you went for the cheap shot, the easy laugh, the fart joke. It's ego-gratifying and will get you all over HN, Reddit, and the other usual places, but I'd expect an article exhorting entrepreneurs to do more (or, really, mocking them for not doing enough) to live up to its own standards and bring something new to the table.

For example, I would have been interested in reading a series of articles that goes through company-by-company, outlining their market, their challenges, and two or three things you think they could be doing better.

An article about the "The Top Under-25 Entrepreneurs BusinessWeek Should Have Listed" would have been interesting, too.

Finally, what if you reached out to the entrepreneurs on the list you DID think were interesting and conducted interviews with them? That would have been great!

I realize all of those would have taken a lot of time, effort, and research, but doesn't everything worthwhile?

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