The Founders Institute

June 29, 2011

nobody is going to steal your stupid idea

UPDATE: I left the FI after 5 weeks of the program

This week I started a 4 month program at the Founders Institute (FI) in Palo Alto run by Adeo Ressi and I am loving it. The aim of the FI is to create meaningful and enduring technology companies. It provides expert training, robust feedback and support from an awesome network of highly successful CEOs and Founders. I have not blogged here about OBeeDee yet, but in the next post I will explain all about the company and how the FI is helping to refine and develop the concept.

I really like the way the course is delivered in a no nonsense tough love way. Its direct and to the point, but at the same time inspiring. Every evening members of the class are pulled forward, sat in the hot seat and given 1 minute to pitch their concept. The feedback is tough, at times amusing, but also incredibly valuable. Right now the class is quite big and only 13 people dropped out after the first session and so not everyone has had the chance to pitch yet. There are some interesting ideas coming out from those that have and one which I really like is Grub Crawl. I suggested to the Founders that they organized a Grub Crawl in Palo Alto one evening for all of the FI members, so hopefully will able to blog about it later.

I have read a lot about the explosion of incubator and accelerators in the SF Bay area and some are critical and think it points to the bubble that we are in. Maybe it does, but my personal experience of the FI so far is that they have a winning formula and help create an ecosystem that leads to more jobs and promotes innovation. I don’t see how anyone can find fault with this especially as governments all over the world spend millions trying to achieve the same.

Great People + World Class Training + Aligned Incentives = Exponentially Better Chance of Success

The Arab Spring

May 30, 2011

I decided to go a bit off topic with this post. Due to my past career, studying Arabic and the culture of the region I have developed a keen interest in the Middle East. I used to be very well informed on the area as I had access to a lot of information and many personal contacts, but now living in America I am seeing things through a very different set of lenses. The mainstream coverage of the region from this part of the world is shallow, mildly racist and naive. That are some excellent commentators, but hidden amongst the vast majority of fluff. Thankfully I have the best available news software in my pocket – Twitter.

The ‘Arab Spring’ is now running into the summer and will continue through to the winter. The Arabs are changing their world, demonstrating, fighting and dying for freedoms they have not known. There seems to be a new found sense of pride and independence coming from the Arab street. The revolution has spread and will not be contained by borders and cannot be shaped from Washington, London or Tel Aviv. The West’s failure to support this movement in its infancy has lost us most of our surviving credit.

In the very near future an new intifada will begin in Palestine. Not one in which suicide bombers and masked gunmen attack the borders of Israel, but unarmed civilians in their 1000’s will protest and try to cross these disputed lines. If the people of Egypt and Tunisia and Yemen and Libya and Syria – and the next revolutions (Jordan? Bahrain? Morocco?) – can fight for freedom and dignity, why shouldn’t the Palestinians? If the Israelis have to shoot down a mere few hundred demonstrators who tried – and in some cases succeeded – in crossing the Israeli border almost two weeks ago, what will they do if confronted by thousands or a million? How the West reacts to this somewhat inevitable event will shape how we might maintain any sort of credibility.

The tectonic plates of normality are shifting and shuddering. A few months ago I would have said that Saudi Arabia would remain unchanged, but now even this bastion of conservatism and repression seems unlikely to survive. A quick search on twitter reveals Saudi women protesting their right to drive, something that would have seem unimaginable 6 months ago. We feel insulated from the troubles of this region living so far away, but with our dependency on oil we are very soon to receive a very rude awakening. I fear that our need to keep oil at a price that our economies can cope with will force the West to play the short game and ultimately alienate ourselves even further from our Arab cousins.

Creative Geniuses

May 22, 2011 — 3 Comments

I was driving listening to my friends CD yesterday and decided I wanted to write a post about how brilliant I thought he was. Marco Marconi lives in Italy and is a jazz pianist and for some reason his music just makes me smile. He played at our wedding, but due to the overwhelming nature of the day, I did not really get to listen to him. Since then I have listened to his 2 CDs many times and cannot get over how brilliant an artist he is. Here is a great video of him playing at the Cheltenham Jazz Festival.

Another pair of fantastic artists are my friends Amy and Andy who live a few miles away from Marco in Umbria. They run a wedding photography business, but they are far more than you average photographers. Their pictures are pure art and make it capable to show your wedding photos to people and they actually enjoy looking at them. 

Amy, Andy and Marco all live in the most beautiful part of the world. In my opinion they are some of the wealthiest people I know. Not because they have lots of money, but because they love what they do and are brilliant at it. They have fantastic families and enjoy amazing way of life that is so different to life on the West Coast of America. They work just as hard as anyone here, if not harder, but in a very different way.

I consider them all creative geniuses and hope that I am one day able to see Marco perform live again and will keep hoping back to Amy and Andy’s website and Facebook page to see their latest images. Without people like this the world would be a much duller place. They run a very different type of startup to the ones here, but its great that they do.

Privacy and Location Based Services

May 20, 2011

Privacy is a major concern for the majority of consumers regarding Location Based Services (LBS). Microsoft’s own LBS research found that just over 50 percent of consumers are “very concerned” about their identities being stolen via LBS. Whether this risk actually exists is debatable, but it is important to recognize that it is a major barrier to adoption of this technology.

A few months ago I was at dinner with a large group and we were talking about Foursquare. One of the guys who I had not met before argued passionately that broadcasting your location was dangerous, your house would be broken in to, your identity stolen and your insurance invalid for using LBS. When I pointed out that none of those things had happened to me and there were quite a few people using these services, so it can’t be that bad, he responded by saying “there were quite a few people in the Nazi party”. It was at this point I decided to change the conversation topic and avoid him for the rest of the evening. It does highlight however how passionately some people fear LBS.

Startups and Marketers have an uphill battle when trying to drive adoption of these services outside of the tech community. Data security and privacy needs to be taken very seriously especially due to the legislation that surrounds this topic.  Winning consumer trust may take time and some large carrots to be dangled, but ultimately it should prove to be a very exciting space to operate in.