Chapter 91 Section 4 Entrepreneurial Incubator

Silicon Valley provides funds and real topics for Stanford people, making it easy for students to find suitable entrepreneurial topics, coupled with a relaxed environment that gives green light to the entrepreneurial actions of professors and students, good education enables very young students to cope various challenges in the future.Now everything is ready, only the east wind is owed.This Dongfeng is the last support of the school.I read a story about President Kennedy and Von Karman, the father of American missiles (Qian Xuesen's mentor).In the early 1960s, von Karman was awarded the Presidential Award of the United States, which is a higher honor than the Nobel Prize in the eyes of Americans.When von Karman walked down the stairs of the White House accompanied by President Kennedy, the elderly scientist staggered and almost fell, and President Kennedy immediately stepped forward to help him.At this time, von Karman said a meaningful sentence: "Young man, when a person is going down, he does not need to be supported, but when he is going up, he just needs you to help him."

Stanford University has undoubtedly done a very good job of nurturing student entrepreneurship.Its direct help to entrepreneurial professors and students is to build bridges between them and the industry.Stanford has a dedicated office to help current students who want to start a business contact successful alumni in Silicon Valley or entrepreneurs and investors who have contacts with Stanford to find investment. Google's Page and Brin found their first investment in this way. In 1998, shortly after developing the Google search engine, the two founders quickly used up all the money they had in their own pockets and all the money they could borrow on their credit cards.They themselves had tried hard to find angel investment, but because they were just two ordinary doctoral students at that time, they were not noticeable among the entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley at that time, and it was not smooth to find money at the beginning.At this time, they contacted the founder of Sun Company, Andy Baker Torsen, through the school's office to help students start their own businesses.Although Beck Torsen was born in computer technology, he is not familiar with search engine technology, and he has never used Google search before.But because they were introduced by his alma mater, Andy met these two young men who were only in their mid-twenties despite his busy schedule.According to Page, Andy was very busy, so he asked them to meet at the company before going to work. He and Brin took their server to Andy's office. Andy searched for some things on the spot, was very satisfied, and immediately wrote ten A check for $10,000 was given to them.This is how Google started as a company.Although the money was used up in a short time, the advertising effect of the money was far more than the one hundred thousand dollars.Later, some investors heard that the founder of Sun Company and industry leaders had invested in Google, so they believed in Google's level.Among the earliest investors in Google, there were angel investors who did not understand technology at all, such as basketball star O'Neill, movie star and later California Governor Schwarzenegger.These people made a fortune along with Baker Torsen through an angel investment group.

It is conceivable that if Page and Brin were not Stanford graduate students but from some other school, it would be difficult for them to have the opportunity to directly sell their invention to an industry leader.You can imagine, in China, is it possible for an ordinary graduate student from Tsinghua University or Peking University to meet Ren Zhengfei, the founder of Huawei, directly through the school. It is amazing that Stanford can do this. Although all universities in the world have an official alumni contact organization, many of them are useless.However, many famous universities in the United States, including institutions like Stanford University, actually and frequently contact alumni, especially alumni with successful careers.They will have special personnel to regularly go to various places to inform the outstanding alumni there of the situation of the school, not only to share the development achievements of the school, but also to report the difficulties encountered by the school.In the latter case, many wealthy alumni will help out.And Stanford expresses its heartfelt gratitude and high respect to its generous donors.It is precisely because of the close connection that the alumni continue to help the school after leaving the school, including helping their juniors and sisters start their own businesses.

Stanford University has a very famous venture capital forum (Stanford Entrepreneurship Corner).Although it looks a bit like China's English Corner from its name, it is actually a forum where industry and famous university professors take turns to give lectures.People who often come here include many famous venture capitalists, such as KPCB's John Dole, industry leaders, such as Google's CEO Schmidt and founder Page, Facebook's founder Zubinberg and Harvard businessmen. Many distinguished professors at the college and the Stanford Graduate School of Business.In this way, Stanford teachers and students have the opportunity to get in touch with world-class investors and industry leaders.This not only allows everyone to have the opportunity to find investment channels, but also to get entrepreneurial guidance from famous investors and industry leaders, and the realm of entrepreneurship has been greatly improved.

Every university in the United States has more or less graduates who can successfully start various small companies, but it is rare to turn a small company into a multinational company that dominates an industry.Among the leading companies in this information industry, companies founded by Stanford University alumni may account for a small half.There are many reasons that prevent an entrepreneur from becoming an industry leader.Two of them have to be noted. The first is that we are too ambitious: We have mentioned this item many times before, so I won’t repeat it here.The second is that if you get rich, you will be safe: Many people start companies with the idea of ​​making a profit instead of doing a career. These people are not high enough to start a business.And this kind of state cannot be learned from the classroom. Only by frequently discussing with world-class figures can a person's state be improved qualitatively, and he can stand on the shoulders of giants.There is no second university in the world that allows any ordinary student to keep in touch with leaders in industry and business.

Another specific measure that Stanford University has taken to encourage entrepreneurship is its tolerance for using service inventions to start businesses.When we introduced Cisco earlier, we mentioned that the inventions of the founders of Cisco are entirely job inventions that take advantage of the convenience of work. In many universities and laboratories, patent owners, that is, employers, strictly prohibit the use of job inventions to start personal companies.Stanford University is relatively open-minded in this regard. As long as everyone can frankly negotiate the distribution of future benefits, it even encourages its students and professors to use their positions to start businesses. Generally, Stanford requires very little equity.The MIPS company founded by Hennessy we mentioned earlier, including Google, all use Stanford's technology, and Stanford holds a small share.Just as lower tax rates can stimulate the economy, Stanford's small stake is a win-win in the long run because it encourages entrepreneurship.As gratitude to their alma mater, almost all successful entrepreneurs have generously donated huge amounts to Stanford.

In addition to providing entrepreneurs with convenient entrepreneurial conditions, the second biggest help of Stanford University is to create an entrepreneurial atmosphere and tradition.Many universities try to emulate Stanford University to encourage students to start their own businesses, and then get long-term returns from successful entrepreneurship, but they have not created an entrepreneurial atmosphere on the whole.The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has always been committed to cultivating engineering leaders, and has successfully trained a large number of industrial executives, but the number of students who run their own companies is far less than that of Stanford.Many venture capitalists have been wandering around the campus of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, hoping to find good project investment, but the effect is mediocre.Caltech has a series of required courses designed to prepare leaders in industry, but most graduates go into academia instead.These prestigious universities lack an entrepreneurial atmosphere.Harvard Business School requires everyone to propose and formulate a business plan, and provides funding for the top few students to start a business. Although some small companies have been fostered in this way, none of them have become a leader in an industry, let alone create a new industry.Therefore, over the years, no matter whether it is a famous engineering university like MIT or a famous business school like Harvard Business School, it has not been able to repeat the miracle of Stanford.

The entrepreneurial atmosphere is very important.In a university with an entrepreneurial atmosphere, entrepreneurship is an active behavior. Out of their special interest in a technology and its commercial application, entrepreneurs regard its realization as their ideal. This motivation is indispensable for the success of entrepreneurship. be lacked.Conversely, if you rely solely on others to promote entrepreneurship, you will rarely succeed.Only by actively starting a business can entrepreneurs find good entrepreneurial problems from personal practice and strive for them.On the contrary, even if you have a good topic, you will give up halfway.I have participated in a project introduction meeting held by a famous engineering university in Silicon Valley for venture capitalists. In order to encourage students to start their own businesses, the school stipulates that students in groups must complete an invention and design before graduation. Some very good and innovative inventions have been produced.But most of these inventions are made by students as a requirement for completing professor tasks or taking a degree, and students don't want to make money from these inventions at all.Therefore, when they choose topics, although many topics are good, they can only sell the technology, and they cannot start a company at all.Even if there are some good topics, because they have nothing to do with their future careers, the students have not carefully considered many complicated and specific issues of commercialization, so they are ignorant of the questions from venture capitalists.With no entrepreneurial zeal, almost all students leave school with the work done halfway once they complete their degree requirements.In the second year, new students repeat the futile work done by their seniors.Of course, this kind of training has greatly improved the ability of students, but it has little effect on entrepreneurship.

People imagine that business school students should be passionate about entrepreneurship, but they are not.Although many business schools create various entrepreneurial conditions for their students, their successful entrepreneurial cases are not as many as those of engineering students.I participated in the venture capital evaluation of some student entrepreneurial projects of a famous business school.Perhaps because of the reason for studying business, the topics they put forward are all very big, but many of them are either exaggerated or have no actual content.One of them is similar to building a community online, designing greeting cards, T-shirts, souvenirs and stamps (note: stamps designed by yourself are allowed in the United States) and communicating through the community.The company's profit model is to cut a piece of profit from mutual paid authorization (License).I can't say that this topic is useless, and its proposers must have done a lot of research.However, I don't see any technical and commercial characteristics that can prevent others from entering this field to compete.What's more, its market size is much smaller than what they proposed.The second very representative project is a big and incredible project called Internet 3.0.I asked them whether the definition of Internet 2.0 is clear so far, and they were noncommittal.We asked them what benefits this Internet 3.0 can bring to users, and they were also noncommittal.Finally, we asked them why they chose this topic. They believed that, first, companies such as Yahoo and Google are already in a dominant position in the current Internet field, and it is difficult to shake them. Only by proposing an advanced concept can they defeat Yahoo and Google Wait.Second, the topic is big enough that venture capital might be interested.We asked them how much research they had done before this, and found that they had indeed done a lot of research, and they read a lot of reference materials, in the library and on the Internet.But their project is tantamount to working behind closed doors.The third representative project is to move various technologies and business models that already exist in the United States to China and India, and most of the proposers are Chinese and Indian students.For example, some people moved Ebay to China a few years ago and eBay was very successful. They proposed to move YouTube to China and India (there were not so many video sites in China at that time). Some of these projects were actually funded later, but this This kind of imitation and transformation project did not succeed later, because you can imitate others and imitate, there is no threshold.The most interesting thing is that a student from the Middle East thought it was the quickest way to make money by reselling oil. Even his classmates laughed and said that apart from you, we have no such opportunity.Readers may have seen the problems here. These are all projects that students racked their brains to complete their studies. They are completely different from Sun workstations, Cisco routers, Yahoo websites, and Google search engines, which originated from the scientific research practice of entrepreneurs. .

The environment can affect people.In an environment where entrepreneurship is common at Stanford, a doctoral student in a computer science department or an electrical engineering department may sometimes feel embarrassed if he does not want to start his own business.And there is nothing shameful about failing a startup.The database laboratory of the Department of Computer Science where Page originally worked has produced countless students who started companies, and the doctoral students in the future will be obsessed with the business of starting a company as soon as they enter.This is not the case in most universities, including MIT. Instructors hope that students only focus on academics, while doctoral students are proud to enter academia.For example, at the Johns Hopkins Center for Language and Speech Processing (CLSP) where I used to work, all the doctoral graduates before me went to the laboratories of universities and large companies (such as IBM, AT&T and Microsoft laboratories). Those who go to work in the real industry, let alone set up a company.When I came to Google, I was an outlier among all my seniors.However, since I arrived at Google, later people found that this path is also very good. In the future, all doctoral graduates will come to Google for interviews. Every year, some people come to Google. This is what the atmosphere does.On the other hand, people also choose the environment.When many students choose a school, they also take a fancy to the fact that Stanford can start a business in the future while guarding Silicon Valley.

Although not every Stanforder can start a business and not everyone can be a leader, many of them can be good collaborators and followers.Page once said at Stanford's Entrepreneurship Forum that one of the keys to entrepreneurship is to find like-minded people.It was relatively easy to find followers to start a business with at Stanford.First of all, most of the students who enter Stanford are willing to work in small companies that have just been established, while many graduates of famous universities in the east are not willing.Secondly, due to Stanford's tight internal and external loose environment, students have a relatively wide circle of communication, and it is easy to build a complementary entrepreneurial team (Founding team).However, in a university that completely pursues credits, everyone can get to know most of their classmates or colleagues in the same laboratory, and the complementarity between friends is not strong. New technologies and new business models are born all over the world, but turning them into products and a new industry requires an incubator like Stanford University.Han Yu said that a thousand-mile horse often exists, but a bole does not often exist, so he never saw a thousand-mile horse.Similarly, all countries in the world have inventions and creations, but there is only one Stanford, so the miracle of Silicon Valley is rare. Many countries in the world are learning from the experience of Silicon Valley and setting up their own science and technology parks.Although some regions claim to be the "Silicon Valley of China" and have driven the development of the regional information industry and provided many employment opportunities, they have not bred such pioneering companies as Cisco and Yahoo.There are many reasons for this, one of which is the lack of an incubator for new companies and even new industries like Stanford University.