We at CEE are guilty as charged and appropriately chastised by TechCrunch’s Penelope Trunk, who is tired of people encouraging women to become entrepreneurs. Read the article here.

In an article for Huffington Post, Rieva Lesonsky credits Generation Y, which she dubs “Generation Entrepreneur,” for a major role in the entrepreneurial comeback of the 2010s. She cites Gen Y Capital Partners among organizations seeking to correct the difficulty Generation Y entrepreneurs often have in finding capital. The company donates $10 million to Generation Y startups, and gives some of its proceeds to Kaizen interviewee Steve Mariotti‘s Network for Teaching Entrepreneurship.

Read more here.

It’s easy to understand the importance of innovators and entrepreneurs to the economy, but it’s much harder to figure out the best ways to encourage more entrepreneurship. In an article for TechCrunch, Vivek Wadhwa explores Start-Up Chile, a program that he calls “Chile’s Grand Innovation Experiment.” Most initiatives to create the next Silicon Valley have failed, Wadhwa argues, because they use a top-down approach that fatally leaves out the most important ingredient — the entrepreneurs themselves. Start-up Chile is therefore unique because, rather than building office parks and partnering with VC’s and universities, it focuses on attracting innovators and entrepreneurs from all over the world to Chile, where they will start their own businesses.

Learn more about how Start-up Chile plans to achieve this goal and watch a video about its first crop of participants here.

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.

An article by Vivek Wadhwa at TechCrunch explains why “VCs follow innovation, they don’t lead.”

The National Venture Capital Association claims in their Venture Impact report that companies like Microsoft and Google “…would not exist today without the funding and guidance provided during their early stages by venture capitalists.”

But what about the entrepreneurs who, as Wadhwa puts it, “risk their life savings, max out their credit cards and put their families in the back seat?”

Read the article here.

Kevin O’Connor is co-founder and former CEO of DoubleClick. DoubleClick is the world’s largest Internet advertising technology company and was recently acquired by Google. Prior to DoubleClick, Mr. O’Connor founded and developed several successful Internet businesses and is now the principal of O’Connor Ventures, a venture capital firm that provides funding for startups. For this interview we met with Mr. O’Connor in Santa Barbara, California to explore his thoughts on Internet entrepreneurship, venture capital, and success in life.

Kaizen: Before you went to college, you were a young man with an experimental turn of mind. Some of those experiments went well—and others didn’t?

O’Connor: Well, there was the one when I tried to build a hot air balloon and it was too windy, so I launched it in our garage and it caught on fire. It was about six o’clock on a Sunday morning, and all the hot ashes flew up in the rafters and almost burned the whole house down and killed the family. So I had to put everything out before anyone woke up.

Kaizen: What was your parents’ reaction to that?

O’Connor: My dad actually helped me build a new one, and we went out and launched it, but it was too windy and it burned up again. But it was outside. He was always very good on that. And the other time, I think I was building a rheostat and it was very, very hot and it caught the carpet on fire. I tried to hide it and somehow my dad always found everything I did. He was totally cool with it; he was fine. He liked the story and he was glad I didn’t kill anyone.

Kaizen: So rather than dampening your experimentalism, they took the risks and—maybe keeping an eye on things the way parents do—encouraged you down that road?

O’Connor: Yep. He never even kept an eye on me. I don’t know why. They were fairly conservative people, but I think my dad had a bit of a hidden wild streak in him.

Kaizen: So by the time you went to college you had years of fun experience with technology and great parental support?

O’Connor: Yep. My dad used to go out with me every garbage night. We’d go out and collect TVs and radios and anything with electronics. He used to help me do that.
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Check out the addictive BBC show Dragons’ Den, in which entrepreneurs make a pitch for investment to five venture capitalists who decide whether to invest their own money in exchange for equity. Aside from the drama, you can learn a lot about presentation skills and what goes into judging whether a business idea will actually work. You can watch several full episodes, such as the one below, online.

Serial entrepreneur and “father of angel investing in New York,”according to Crain’s New York Business, David S. Rose gives a TedTalk on the 10 most important things you need to know before pitching your idea to venture capitalists. Along the way, he also includes 5 tips on making good PowerPoint presentations.

The latest issue of Kaizen features our interview with Kevin O’Connor, co-founder and former CEO of DoubleClick. DoubleClick is the world’s largest Internet advertising technology company and was recently acquired by Google for $3.1 billion. Also featured in Kaizen are reports on a new course coming soon from Professor Asongu, our guest speakers, and projects by students Bridget Markin, Khetsiwe Dlamini, Stacy Moore, and Goran Mamic.

A PDF version of Kaizen is available here. We will soon post the full version of the interview with Mr. O’Connor.

If you would like to receive a complimentary issue of the print version of Kaizen, please email your name and postal address to CEE [at] Rockford.edu.

A study (PDF) by Deloitte and the National Venture Capital Association surveying the opinions of 400 venture capitalists worldwide found that European countries such as Germany and the United Kingdom are emerging as leaders in the life sciences and clean technology fields. Ranking second behind the United States are Japan in telecommunication technology, Taiwan in semi conductor innovation, and India in software development.