Archive for the ‘Entrepreneurship’ Category

Ray Stata’s Latest Venture: Lyric Semiconductor

Tuesday, August 31st, 2010

Stata Ventures, Kaizen interviewee Ray Stata’s venture capital vehicle, recently provided funding to technology startup Lyric Semiconductor. Lyric is developing probability chip technology. Traditional chips use binary “yes/no” switches, but probability chips “can accept inputs and calculate outputs that are between 0 and 1, directly representing probabilities, or levels of certainty.” Some of the commercial applications of this technology include: better error correction and faster operation for portable flash drives; better prediction of consumer behavior for websites like Amazon (and better product recommendations for customers); and faster, cheaper large scale data processing.

Read more about Lyric at the New York Times and VentureBeat.

Read our interview with Ray Stata.

Watch a video interview with co-founder and CEO of Lyric, Ben Vigoda, who explains probability chips:

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NFTE Program in Demand in Today’s Economy

Monday, August 16th, 2010

An article in New York Daily News covers the increasing demand for the Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship’s (NFTE) courses in our faltering economy. NFTE was founded by Kaizen interviewee Steve Mariotti, who states, “Kids are aware of how fragile a job is and they begin to think about how they could create a job if they had to.” The article also profiles several young graduates of the program who have become entrepreneurial success stories.

Shown above, NFTE graduate Steve Gordon, 18-year-old founder of TatooID.

Read the article here.

Read our full-length interview with Steve Mariotti.

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Kevin O’Connor’s Latest Venture: FindTheBest

Tuesday, August 10th, 2010

Venture capitalist Kevin O’Connor, interviewed in the April 2009 issue [PDF] of Kaizen, is now co-founder and CEO of FindTheBest.com. FindTheBest, as described by Mr. O’Connor, “was created out of my desire to organize part of the Internet, filter out the excessive junk and present information in a simple, comparable way.”

He explains further: “I could find endless amounts of information on any subject but when I had a complicated decision to make, I found myself wasting hours, or even days, compiling information I could compare. Or, I found sites offering their “top 10” recommendations, only to discover they were secretly getting “kickbacks” from the sites they were recommending.”

His solution, FindTheBest, is now in beta version.  It allows the user to compare search results (similarly to travel websites like Expedia), and to narrow down the results by various criteria (much like browsing Amazon). Like Wikipedia, users can also contribute to the site, updating existing areas or creating new listings in which they have expertise.

Check out FindTheBest.com

Read Kevin O’Connor’s introduction to FindTheBest.

Read the full-length interview with Kevin O’Connor.

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The Power of One Entrepreneur

Monday, August 9th, 2010

The Institute for Justice has an inspiring series of five reports on the beneficial effects of entrepreneurship on the entrepreneurs themselves and on their communities. The reports also highlight the entrepreneurs’ struggles against unnecessary regulations. Says the author of one report: “If the impact of this one entrepreneur in a relatively small Mississippi community can be as wide and deep as documented in this report, imagine the transformation entire communities of unhampered entrepreneurs could create in America’s largest cities where hope and opportunity are in such great demand.”

Read the Power of One Entrepreneur series here.

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The Entrepreneur as Misfit

Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Dan PallottaWe know that the entrepreneur takes on the financial risk of her venture, but Dan Pallotta at Harvard Business Review reminds us that the entrepreneur takes psychological risks as well. By seeing the world differently than others and acting on her vision — by embracing the inner misfit — the entrepreneur must be willing to make herself vulnerable. This vulnerability, says Pallotta, “is the most poignant quality in every entrepreneur I know.”

Read the rest of this excellent post at Harvard Business Review.

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Iceland: Economic Recovery Through Entrepreneurship

Monday, July 26th, 2010

Iceland took first place in INSEAD’s Global Innovation Index (PDF) this year. Last year it won an award for best entrepreneurship movement. Iceland’s strengths, therefore, in entrepreneurship and innovation could help the country recover from its recent banking collapse. Read more at the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship.

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NFTE Wins Award for Best Math Curriculum

Monday, July 19th, 2010

The Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship (NFTE) recently won a Distinguished Achievement Award from the Association of Educational Publishers for NFTE’s mathematics curriculum “Entrepreneurship: Owning Your Future”. From the announcement: “Written by NFTE Founder Steve Mariotti, the curriculum teaches fundamentals of mathematics as well as comprehensive guide to developing a business plan. It focuses on critical basic business skills including business communications, negotiating, business ethics, social responsibility, time management, and goal setting.” We interviewed Mr. Mariotti for the August 2009 issue of Kaizen (PDF). Read the full-length interview here.

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Great List of Entrepreneurship Resources

Tuesday, July 13th, 2010

Y Combinator, a company that provides seed funding to startups, has an excellent, in-depth list of entrepreneurship resources. Topics include how to start a business, why to start one in a bad economy, mistakes to avoid, and how to create wealth.

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Entrepreneurship in Brazil

Thursday, June 24th, 2010

Entrepreneurship is becoming more popular in Brazil, despite the relative difficulty of starting a business there and the complexity of the country’s tax system.

Read more about the conditions driving Brazil’s entrepreneurship boom at the Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship Blog.

And not only that, Brazil has the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016.

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Online Education Entrepreneur: Salman Khan

Tuesday, June 8th, 2010

The Khan Academy YouTube channel is the most popular source for free online educational videos, beating out even MIT. Salman Khan, the man behind it all, is a self-appointed teacher who tries to “deliver things the way I wish they were delivered to me.” He has made over 1,400 videos so far, most of them consisting only of his voice and crude illustrations. He now has a non-profit organization, also called Khan Academy, that is devoted to “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere.”

Read more about Mr. Khan at the Chronicle of Higher Education.

Also, watch the short PBS feature on Mr. Khan below:

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