Nesheim Online

SOCIAL ENTREPRENEURSHIP: Have you got it in your soul?

Thursday Afternnon - Cornell University

Class will start shortly and I'll be facing a lot of young men and women with lots of $$$$ on their minds. MBA and graduate school are expensive. BMWs are not cheap, nor school fees. This is in contrast with a special item that popped up today in my email.

Hayley of Mumbai sent me a challenge: Consider becoming a "social entrepreneur." She is doing it where it is needed, facilitating getting young women off the street and educated. Here is the link to the web group: Ashoka Social Entrepreneurs. Check it out.

Thanks, Hayley, and continue the good work!

LOW HANGING FRUIT FOR INDIA AND CHINA: Locals grabbing for quick ROIs

Wednesday Evening - Cornell University

"Look out world, here we come!" The cries of experienced graduate students said it all today: of the ten I saw during three office hours this morning, six were from India, were already experienced with significant startups and were planning on returning to India to do more after graduation. I experienced the same during earlier meetings this week with Chinese students. The wave of ambitious locals is rising daily.

They have a single common mark: each plans to quickly do locally a startup concept that has already succeeded in America. Me-too here is the motto. Hotels, hospitality, VOIP, adult education, semiconductors, all the same over there. Done better with a local spin and enhancement.

Already many such startups have succeeded. Both the elephant and the tiger have produced riches quickly for such entrepreneurs. Expect more. I just hope that others will soon be also emerging as the next world-class brands, from Asia. Time will tell.

BOTTOM LINE: Expect more me-too here startups to grab the low hanging local fruit before rushing to compete on the global playing field.

RIDE THE WAVE, BABY! This is where the action is

Thursday Evening – Over the Pacific approaching the Date Line

In her gentle voice the Singapore Girl just announced to me that the cabin lights will be dimming shortly. My fine dinner was just finished and I’m ready for sleep. Singapore Air is the finest in the world. Go business class and spoil yourself sometime. I’ll flatten the seat, grab the pillow and drift off to dreamland. I have a lot to dream about, reflecting on the exciting days of this trip. It was filled with hard work, surprises and delights.

The photo shows hard working BlueRun Venture partners talking about a deal over breakfast. They all started their days with a workout, an early morning run on the beach. Their mobile phones and Blackberries were in constant use. They met with a half dozen startups daily. Lots of brains and energy at work.

The guy in the dark suit is doing his second meeting with BRV in 24 hours. He is a serial entrepreneur who visited my home in Silicon Valley years ago while doing his first enterprise. This was another delightful surprise. Now he’s surfing the Indian wave, Israeli 1-2-3 style, with his techies in Silicon Valley and his marketing in India. To his right is Vas from BRV who was born in Mumbai, not far from this Marriott hotel where business people gather all hours of the day and night. To Vas’s right is Yossi, from Israel. He is digging into the technical details and drilling down to core issues with his refreshing, brisk style. Otherwise he lives on his mobile phone. During the taxi rides yesterday he was doing work on the phone as a stand-in CEO for a very early stage company in Tel Aviv.

Yossi and I had a late night yesterday after a long day. We finished it devouring giant shrimp marinated in garlic and red sauce, washed down with the local Kingfisher beer. To his right are Pete and John from the States who are digging into several other deals while listening to Vas and Yossi work with the entrepreneur. The banter was constant, constructive and penetrating. A typical morning for new era global venture firm like BlueRun Ventures.

Another surprise popped today up during my airport transfer in Korea. I was calmly walking down the aisle and guess who yells out “Hey John! Are you on our flight?” None other than Eric Young, veteran partner of Canaan Ventures from Silicon Valley. Canaan is the latest in this wave of globalizing venture firms. They have opened in Korea, announced an office in Israel, and rumor has it India will be next. More will be coming from this world-class venture capital firm. Eric and his accompanying colleague had just finished touring startups, Samsung and others riding the wireless and gaming waves. He was thrilled, bubbling with respect for how advanced the companies are in Seoul. Glad I bought some Korean shares!

One more example of a delightful surprise was bumping (literally) into Hayley at the desert brunch at the Marriott. She is an adventurous Aussie with a world-class heart, doing non-government organization work that helps educate street children in Mumbai. Her work partner and she are preparing a plan to raise money for a special NGO that trains young girls with practical skills and heads them into jobs, off the streets where they beg to survive. Sounded like a startup to me, so I listened with fascination over desert as Hayley described the local social scene and her dreams for the new venture. I got her into contact with Vas and reluctantly said goodbye as she departed with a half dozen other expats after their monthly visit to the Lotus brunch evening. They have small pocketbooks but large hearts and gather for the special dinner to share experiences and grow their friendships. I wish them well. They are an important part of the new India, the new Asia.

BOTTOM LINE:  Asia is where it is happening. Just as I experienced the semiconductor-lead electronics explosion in the 1960-80 wave. It transformed  Southeast Asia and the world. The new Asian entrepreneurial wave has even more potential. It makes the Davos gathering rather irrelevant. So get involved, get here, at least get some stock or buy one of the ETFs for the hot Asian countries. I have and will continue to do so as much as I can. In the words of a famous general long ago, “I shall return!”

P.S. Attention Taiwan, Brazil and Portugal: I just got word from my publisher that they have contracts signed to translate The Power of Unfair Advantage into complex Chinese (Commonwealth is again the publisher) and Portuguese. And be patient, I’m working on Korean and simple Chinese!

That's it for today. As Arnold would put it: Asta la vista, Baby!"

THIS ELEPHANT CAN RUN: India creates global thinking entrepreneurs

Wednesday Morning – Mumbai Marriott Hotel

I just finished a fine breakfast at this hotel on the beach and watched BlueRun Ventures partners discuss a business plan with a local startup’s founder CEO. The photo shows their informal style, with the discussions taking place in the restaurant of choice for local business people.

We had done our run on the beach earlier this morning, watching the cricket players slash away on the sand and morning young couples snatch the lasts moments of semi-private togetherness as the sun came up.

Invigorated, we meet for breakfast and discussed the TIE event last night. The audience received my “Go Global From Day 1” message with a bit of expected timidity, yet acknowledged the wisdom of expanding to compete beyond the local market. Like China, the potential number of consumers is large but mostly impoverished. So the hot deals are focused on serving the middle and upper income groups. The breakfast entrepreneur who presented has a leapfrog solution for bringing a package of the latest IT services into homes via cable television at sharply lower costs. His business model has product design teams located in both Silicon Valley and India. His plan includes aggressive expansion world-wide. That is the sort of deal BRV is looking for. Another example of a deal that is done is Nevis Networks http://www.nevisnetworks.com/

So I tha nked TIE Mumbai http://www.tiemumbai.org/ for support of the event, signed a lot of books,   accepted my flowers from another of the lovely Indian women and looked forward to my present ion at the local IIT school.

 BRV is seeing a lot of ideas presented daily. Their network of contacts is generating a regular stream of deals worth looking at. Several VC firms have also announced multiple global offices and others will follow, of that I am sure.

Final confirmation of the day was that the top   university is now teaching courses in entrepreneurship within an incubator-teaching center. Others in India are just as active. So expect a lot more from young people who don’t know that Indian startups cannot go global. This is exciting!

BOTTOM LINE: The elephant is running and racing well with the tiger. India's entrepreneurs are popping up as fast as in China. IPOs are raining in like a monsoon on the local stock exchange. The GDP is booming. Yesterday the central bank raised interest rates a bit to keep the boom in check. i bought stock in some local public companies. This elephant can run!

BEIJING IS BUBBLING: Go for it before it bursts!

Beijing - Friday Evening – January 19

        The traffic is crawling below my hotel window, and I mean crawling, but the entrepreneurs and investors in Beijing are in full action, talking up deals in the lobby and all over town. Horns are honking and the hotel is filled to overflowing. Their faces are as red as the lanterns hung all over the city in anticipation of the Chinese New Year. It is exciting, reminding me of early days of setting up the first semiconductor factories in Singapore back in the stone age, in the ‘70s.

        This town may be crowded and bursting at the seams, but it is also filled with very optimistic local entrepreneurs. At the BlueRun Ventures event last night, I compared notes with Danny Lui, serial entrepreneur and private investor, now leading Zero2IPO www.zero2ipo.com in China. He agreed: the deals being made here are hot and heavy, with investors expecting quick returns. It is a buyers market with entrepreneurs setting the valuations very high. The momentum is in their favor.

        Meanwhile the wave of deep pocketed American VCs are arriving. In addition to BlueRun Ventures with their vision of global reaching support for their startups, there is the new Sequoia China fund and more are on their way. John Malloy and Jui Tan of BlueRun said they are competing successfully for good deals and expect to see more in 2006. They said each deal has the potential to go NASDAQ IPO within five years.

        Beijing entrepreneurs are focused on doing startups in China to serve only the local China market market. Exceptions that think global are rare, but they are here. The bulk of my audience last night saw no reason to go worldwide, ever. They will have to take their chances and probably learn in the school of hard knocks that we have entered a new era of venturing. It’s now all about competing globally.

            I took a break from speaking today and spent the time with my China publishing agent, talking to people about translating The Power of Unfair Advantage to simple Chinese. Jackie is an ace. She now has two firms qualified and interested. Meanwhile, I got news that a publisher in Taiwan has jumped on the chance to do the complex Chinese version. So I’ll be back in the Middle Kingdom sooner than I had expected. That is very cool.

BOTTOM LINE: Beware of bubbles but meanwhile drink the champagne before it runs out. And aim for the gold medal, not the bronze. Go global from day one. If you miss the bronze there is no medal.

            Tomorrow I’ll tour the Forbidden City and visit the Great Wall. The weather is 40F to 19F and reminds me of a balmy day in my old home state of Minnesota. Now if only I had a personal helicopter waiting to take me beyond the traffic congestion below . . . Ah the dreams of the proverbial engineer!

Come to Mumbai to talk with me on Tuesday, January 24.
Join us! We'll have some startup fun!
http://www.tiemumbai.org/

SEOUL IS HOT! Awesome, Dude.

This city is rocking! People have mobile cameras that make those in American look stone age. My favorite had super high resolution screen that I watched as it displayed streaming television and then a movie. The GSM car systems show you the fastest route from here to there, live. Taxis with sensors are used to detect rates of traffic flow that are analysed and route routes are plotted and transmitted. Laptops are paper thin and light as a feather. Screen resolutions are high definition television quality. If you want to predict where the world is going with mobile devices, stop in and look at Seoul. It’s way cool, believe me.

Monday evening I saw my first elevator contest in Seoul. Thanks to creative Cornell students, contestants leaped through a mock elevator door and did their three minute pitches. See the photo to believe me. Lots of energy and several creative ideas. Try this at your local entrepreneurial meetings. First prize won a meeting with a local venture capitalist.

My evening presentation was politely received in quiet Asian style. While I received positive comments in return, I was again confronted with how tricky it is to explain unfair advantage to a newcomer. Well, that simply means some re-write of my presentations for tomorrow. So keep working on your own understanding and then you’ll be well ahead of the competition.

I'm looking forward to the Wednesday evening presentation at the BlueRun Ventures event in Seoul. www.brv.com . I'll tell you all about it.

ASIAN STARTUPS HAVE SPECIAL NEEDS: The devil is in the details

I'll be in Seoul, Beijing and Mumbai from January 15 to 26 speaking to entrepreneurs like you. Come talk and listen to others eager to find, fund and do world-class new enterprises. I'll post the details later this week.

As I ponder the trip, I have come to realize I must address each country's entrepreneurs special needs. It sounds simple to copy how Silicon Valley does their amazing new enterprise process. But applying the methods triggers some sensitive problems in each country. I spent a very long night debating this with a Norwegian in Oslo during a celebration of entrepreneurs a few months ago. She made me think about the modifications needed. It is hard to generalize, but some things are obvious.

Managers in Asia are missing. The ones that know what they are doing in the intensely marketing driven competitive battles of global competition. I have read studies that say in China there are less than 4 to 5 thousand managers who are competent, able to do what world-class companies -- startups and public corporations -- need done to be global winners. The cure here is simple, but is still hard to do: learn to recruit the finest and do not compromise. Like taking medicine, or training for an Olympic event, that requires commitment, fortitude, training and a lot more. But you have to do it. (See my blog 2005 December 7).

Asia has very special issues to ponder and integrate into your bplan if you are starting there. I'll share with you some of my findings. Koreans start with an inferiority complex: we are a small country so we have to start small. Well guess what: I hear that in every country outside the United States! I amazes me. My recommended cure: convert to thinking world-wide, global, from day one. Okay, you might start selling in a small country, or in a small market (China's GDP is slightly smaller than Italy's), but hey, this is the age of WTO, globalization, world-wide competition. So plan to spread out -- fast -- from day one. Bake it into your bplan.

Serious investors tell me that theft is a hot topic for Asian startups to deal with. World-class venture capitalists have said they will not fund startups in some countries in Asia because investors are convinced the startups' precious intellectual property will be ripped off, quickly. That makes other markets more attractive to start selling in. Here is my tip: Plan to enter the sensitive markets later when your brand is more secure, you are on your third new product launch, and you are on your way to becoming the gorilla of the new market.

Me-too, quicker, faster, better, cheaper is a disease. innovation at the standard of Silicon Valley is missing. The me-too disease has spread around the world. It is the most common form of bplan I get in emails from countries around the globe. For instance, India caught me-too disease for service centers (outsourcing). China for light manufacturing (outsourcing). Taiwan for semiconductors (foundries). And so on. The trouble is that the me-too companies quickly find a 10 percent cheaper competitor popping up locally and sales begin to slow down. Indian service centers are seeing that impact them more and more. The cure here is clear: learn to innovate. Move up the value added ladder. Take big risks designing and launching new products. Things no one else has ever done before.

Wrap it together and what do you have? A clear need to learn how to build unfair advantages. The engine that make Silicon Valley awesome. The power that you need to empower you to greatness. Others have. Why not you?