

The Secret of Successful Entrepreneurs - rafaelc
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2010/07/the-secret-of-successful-entrepreneurs/

======
thaumaturgy
This is such a pile of bullshit.

I'm nearly salivating in anticipation of deconstructing it. But, before I do,
there's a worthwhile TED talk I saw recently [1] that makes a similar point
(but doesn't fail at it): <http://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman.html>

So, yes, I do agree to some extent that there are some liabilities involved in
homogeneity of social networks. However, relating that to a criticism of
"meritocracy", or relating it to innovativeness, or imagining that the world
would somehow be better off if talented people didn't surround themselves with
other talented people ... that's just dumb.

> ...the best and brightest (as measured by their SAT scores and GPA)...

Way to open, man. I took the PSAT when I was in the seventh grade, as part of
a controlled social experiment, and supposedly scored OK on it (I was only
given percentile scores relative to high school seniors). So I suppose my SAT
score would've been OK if I'd ever bothered to take it, but my GPA was 3.0 at
best. I'd hesitate to consider myself "best" or "brightest", but I'm not dumb
by a long shot. This metric manages to simultaneously ignore bright, motivated
people who do not follow traditional paths of success, while including people
who do follow traditional paths of success who are nowhere near best or
brightest.

> ...we naturally construct our social network so that it consists mostly of
> people like us. (Sociologists refer to this failing as the self-similarity
> principle.)

This is a failing? No, it's how people construct _support_ networks.

One of my hats is as a programmer. I've had a terrible, time-consuming,
neverending project lately. If I get to feeling the need to decompress over
this -- or to get help wrangling it -- I am not going to go chat up a lady in
a bar. I want to find another programmer instead. Lawyers find lawyers,
doctors find doctors, mechanics find mechanics, etc.

This guy is failing to see a social network as anything other than an
information stream, a way of exposing yourself to as many new ideas and
experiences as possible. While that's one aspect of it, it is not the totality
of a social network.

And, hell, if my friends are anything to go on, most people maintain at least
two completely different social networks anyway: one for each of their active
interests.

> _The executives were invited to a cocktail mixer, where they were encouraged
> to network with new people. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of
> executives at the event said their primary goal was to meet “as many
> different as people as possible” and “expand their social network”.
> Unfortunately, that’s not what happened._

First off, he's wrong about that article (which I do not have access to except
in abstract, dammit). From the abstract: "There was no evidence of homophily
(attraction to similar others) in the average encounter, although it did
operate for some guests at some points in the mixer."

Second, he's wrong in his analysis of it. Also from the abstract: "They were
much more likely to encounter their pre-mixer friends, even though they
overwhelmingly stated before the event that their goal was to meet new
people." Well, duh. While I might _say_ that I'm attending an event to meet
new people, if I run into someone there that I already know, I'm going to
spend some time with them. If I haven't seen them in a while, I'm going to
catch up with them.

You know what else I'm going to hope for? _An introduction._ My social network
rarely, rarely expands by meeting random people without any common ground and
then making friends with them. More likely, it expands in a degrees-of-
separation way: one friend introduces me to someone they know, who I don't
know, and so on and so forth. I think this is painfully obvious to anyone
that's ever attended a party with friends.

> _What they found was that people tended to interact with the people who were
> most like them, so that investment bankers chatted with other investment
> bankers, and marketers talked with other marketers, and accountants
> interacted with other accountants._

It surely couldn't be because they had an easy common ground to launch
conversations from.

> _Instead of mixing with new people, the leaders made small talk with those
> from similar backgrounds; the smallness of their social world got
> reinforced._

What? So these subjects attend a party, which contains other friends and
acquaintances of theirs, and they meet people, and it's somehow reasonable to
conclude that,

a: meeting new people did not expand their social network;

and b: that they had small social networks anyway, because of a pigeonhole
view of one social event they attended?

> _According to Ingram and Morris, the only successful networker at the event
> was the bartender._

Bullshit. I'm sure that bartender has really gone on to keep in touch with
anyone from that party. Assuming that the author's interpretation of this
experiment is correct -- a tenuous assumption at best, considering the
abstract -- the experiment would be a failure of selection bias, where the
only metric for "success" is talking superficially to lots of different
people, in a setting where nobody is motivated to talk to lots of different
people.

> _He noticed that most entrepreneurs had a rather homogenous collection of
> contacts. They might have lots of friends, but all of their friends came
> from the same place and were interested in the same things._

I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with the massive demands of
entrepreneurship. Assuming that the average entrepreneur needs funding to be
successful, then of course the majority of entrepreneurs are going to know
investors and other "money" people, or other resourceful individuals. Are we
really trying to equate the social networks of entrepreneurs to, say, travel
agents here?

> _...an elaborate metric of innovation ... the number of patents they’d
> invented and ... all their trademarks._

 _smirk_

> _If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are
> inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people
> like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey._

OK, stop. Just, stop. People idolize celebrities because they are powerful,
wealthy, famous, or otherwise successful in some metric that appeals to the
desires of the average person. I seriously, seriously doubt that any survey
would rank "creativity" in the top 10 reasons that such people were idolized,
and I certainly don't think that Bill Gates deserves to be described as a
pillar of "creativity". Branson, for another of the examples, has been quite
open about his strategies, tactics, and the desires that drive him, and plain
ol' stubbornness would probably rate a lot higher in a description of his
personality than "creative".

And by the way, just what sort of creativity are we talking about here? This
guy seems to be trying to draw a parallel between creativity and his
definition of success, but there are an awful lot of really creative artists
in music, sculpture, photography, and art that are pretty close to broke.

If creativity is the primary driver for this notion of success, why aren't
these artists all millionaires? Could it possibly be that there's something
else that qualifies as the "secret of successful entrepreneurs"? I think so!

> _Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak
> ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts - we’re not going
> to really understand the nature of achievement._

This article has not convinced me that examining social networks has led to
any insights in the "nature of achievement".

Finally, to swing my Great Hammer of Justice, let's travel back to the quoted
bit at the top of the article:

> _...and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich
> the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch’s lament in “The Revolt of
> the Elites” — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its
> critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and
> preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging._

This is completely and totally backwards. When smart, talented, ambitious
people huddle together, great things happen; by gathering together, they are
able to tackle together all of the obstacles that make great things difficult.
[2] This has been borne out over, and over, and over again in history.
Redmond, Silicon Valley, Detroit, England, India, Rome, Greece ...

Taking talented people and somehow "encouraging" them to spread out and
associate themselves with as many diverse other people as possible _is the
very definition of homogeneity_.

I am so relieved that poorly-thought-out, unresearched screeds like this are a
dime-a-dozen these days, and that by this time tomorrow, nobody is likely to
be discussing this article at all. [3]

[1]: I've just discovered that I'm capable of having TED on in the background
on one computer, and concentrating on coding on another computer, while
keeping reasonable track of the video. This is really neat to me.

[2]: In fact, is this not the primary motivation for every single co-working
space and other common environments shared by like-minded people who want to
be more effective?

[3]: With general respect due the author, who appears to have written some
otherwise worthwhile stuff.

~~~
kunley
You came with an elaborate points, but you seem to forget the main problem
that the author seemed to scratch surface of:

Smart people, just like other people, have ego. And when they get driven by
it, they suck.

Now please reread your points.

~~~
thaumaturgy
> _And when they get driven by it, they suck._

I don't agree with this. As Randian of me as this will sound, I do think that
ego is one of the drivers of many remarkable people. An easy example to trot
out would be Steve Jobs.

------
tommynazareth
The real force at work here is the desire to explore and experience new
things. Entropic networks arise when we welcome new challenges in our lives
and embrace uncomfortable experiences.

Certainly, having a diverse network is a point of leverage for entrepreneurs,
but the that network is caused by the same motivations that drive
entrepreneurship, rather than being an impetus for success.

~~~
edo
I think you hit the mark here. An entropic network is not so much the cause of
success, as it is the effect of the entrepreneurial mentality that encourages
exploration beyond a personal comfort-zone. This is the mind-set so often
highlighted in great entrepreneurs; the ability, self-confidence and maybe
even playfulness to break through boundaries and adventurously explore the
unknown.

~~~
tommynazareth
And maybe even disregard for social norms ;)

------
aristidb
Counting patents is a flawed way to measure innovation. The results of the
study seem less trustworthy as a result.

------
dvvarf
This is the Ruef paper if anyone is interested.
<http://www.jstor.org/stable/1519766>

The study of social networks is incredibly fascinating, but the discipline is
definitely in a nascent state. I think one of the biggest issues is that there
is operational definition of a social tie. If you a create a network of people
that a person has interacted with over a lifetime, it will likely look very
different from the network of people the same person has interacted with over
the last 30 days.

That's just one of the big problems to solve in the discipline. Since it's not
a perfect science, it's going to be hard to provide "just the facts."

------
mindcrime
Something about this article rubs me the wrong way, despite the fact that I
agree with a number of things the author says. I think he's right on about the
importance of diverse social-networks, and the value of weak ties. And I think
this stuff is pretty well established now, so no surprise there.

But what this has to do with meritocracy and the identification of the "best
and brightest" is a little questionable. These factors should correlate - to
some extent - with being successful, regardless of whether or not an
individual is one of his so-called "best and brightest" who went to Harvard or
whatever.

If he had just said "If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, then make it
a point to build a diverse network of connections with people of different
backgrounds and interests" then I'd be saying "right on." But the harping
about GPAs and SAT scores and Harvard just seemed to muddle the article up and
distract from the point.

------
api
I've started to wonder if the whole "creative class mega-cities" phenomenon is
a mistake for a similar reason.

~~~
thaumaturgy
It is not. It should be encouraged.

------
Ardit20
Wow, an entire opinion piece, making countless of conclusions, offering
countless of speculations, basing it all on some study, the citation of which
of course is not given. It would have not been hard, name and date would have
sufficed perhaps.

I say b __ __*. We all talk to strangers. A lawyer meets countless of clients
who are not from the same background he is, think criminal lawyer, or
negligence, or the guy who writes wills, or deals with trusts, not necessarily
the commercial lawyer. So too a doctor's patients are as diverse a people as
they can be. I think too enterprenours. Their customers could not be more
diverse. We all chat to random strangers once in a while, we all meet complete
strangers in very diverse settings.

I am not saying that people do not get together with people who have same
interests. I do not however think that is all such people do, that their
entire universe is "same tired thoughts".

Its nonsense. I hate opinion pieces. More facts please. Please just tell us
the cold hard facts with possibly no commenting whatsoever. I have my friends
to do the commenting, the best of which is of course my brain, and seeing as I
have had my brain for 22 years it must be a tired and old same brain, so
perhaps I should try and find a new brain.

~~~
keefe
[http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else-
Means...](http://www.amazon.com/Linked-Everything-Connected-Else-
Means/dp/0452284392)

He was just joining up with the CS dept at ND when I was doing my msc there
and I got to see him speak a few times. This is part of a general trend, we
naturally appear to keep small social circles on average with a few "hubs"
providing most of the connections to others. This is actually a pattern in
distributions throughout the natural world, it's really an interesting topic
to study.

------
rubashov
> It skims the cream from every race and class and population

Interestingly, it turns out poor "cream" whites and Asians are excluded from
elite private institutions. Other races get preference for being poor, but
only rich white kids get into Harvard.

[http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_divers...](http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_diversity_punishes_asians.html)

