

In which I stomp on some of our glorious “green shoots” - dsplittgerber
http://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2009/10/13/in-which-i-stomp-on-some-of-our-glorious-green-shoots/

======
bonsaitree
It's from Business Week. 'Nuff said. Business Week is to business journalism
what Mariah Carey is to business journalism.

~~~
sireat
Slightly offtopic, Bloomberg just bought Business Week for a song: roughly 2-5
million. It will be interesting to see what changes happen at the magazine.

[http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/20...](http://www.businessweek.com/innovate/FineOnMedia/archives/2009/10/bloomberg_wins.html)

Personally, I always found BW too bland, compared to Forbes.

------
ars
entrepreneur == someone who makes money by running their own business

entrepreneur != someone who invents something revolutionary

The vast vast majority of the people in the world will never invent anything
new.

This is a list of people who found a less-than-common way of making money.

This is NOT a list of people with revolutionary ideas.

~~~
DirtyAndy
Whilst I agree with your logic, I think there is still a difference between
being an entrepreneur and running a fairly standard business. Your definition
would say that someone who buys a franchise or setups up a basic shop is an
entrepreneur - I think few people would see it that way. An entrepreneur need
not be trying to be revolutionary but they should be shooting for the stars
and trying to at least improve on the way the competition does business

One of these people designs logos etc for medical practices, employs 5 people
and has revenues of $225,000. By my calculations that is an average of
$25/hour per person in revenue. That is not pushing the boundaries in revenue
or ideas - that is just another person who has a small business. I'm not
criticising that person in the slightest, that is great for them, but if they
are making a list of top entrepreneurs under 25 then that is pretty sad.

As I think someone else pointed out this is probably more just a case of very
poor journalism.

~~~
lisper
The dictionary definition of entrepreneur is simply "a person who organizes,
operates, and assumes the risk for a business venture." So innovation can be
helpful, especially in achieving a competitive advantage, it is not necessary
(and certainly not sufficient) for successful entrepreneurship.

~~~
rbanffy
If, however, you do exactly what your competition is doing, the only risk you
are taking is the one derived from being less competent than them.

The article's point is that if average is the best this generation can offer
then it's doomed.

~~~
lisper
I think Scott (and you) are confusing _average_ with _boring_. It's true that
you can't be better without being different. But you can be different (and
even be _better_ ) without being (at least overtly) _innovative_. You might
just, for example, provide better customer service than the competition. Or
lower prices. Or greater selection. My point is that to succeed, _all_ you
have to be is _better_. Being _cool_ is _not_ a requirement. (And being too
focused on being cool can therefore actually be detrimental to success.)

~~~
lisper
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=881032>

------
a-priori
Seriously, he needs to get rid of that "snapshots" tooltip. Why do people put
those things on their sites?

~~~
patio11
It has been a few years since my blog was on *.wordpress.com, but my
recollection is that they opted me in when they introduced the feature and it
took me a while to figure out how to turn it off. (Settings -> General, as I
recall.)

~~~
ericlavigne
Appearance -> Extras -> Enable mShots site previews

I am on wordpress now, and just turned mShots off a few minutes ago. I had no
idea this feature was causing anyone problems. Open in new tab still worked
fine for me.

~~~
Luc
It's more of an annoyance when you use your cursor to indicate where in the
text you are while reading. Or when you just park the cursor somewhere and it
happens to be on a link. Quite annoying on articles with a lot of links like
this one.

------
vitaminj
While I agree that most of the entrepreneurs don't have brilliant ideas, I
thought there were two clear standouts:

1) The guy that developed carbon nanotube probes for microscopy applications
(www.cnprobes.com)

2) The guy that hacked away in his basement and created new higher performance
heavy duty machine lubricants (www.greasewarehouse.com)

------
zaidf
Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an
authoritative list that took into account _all_ entrepreneurs across America.
Untrue.

May be you should attack the magazine that created the list instead of the
entrepreneurs? Better yet, create your anti-list of guys you think should be
there but never will be because they are too busy doing too many important
stuff. Simply cherry picking flaws in a bunch of businesses is very easy--even
if I agree with many of your assessments about individual ones.

~~~
mechanical_fish
Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the
press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the
businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are
effectively invisible.

I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort
of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo
Farnsworths in America today. You've just never heard of them. Just as _nobody
in America has heard of Philo Farnsworth_ , except for entrepreneurs who are
looking for bedtime stories to tell their kids.

Farnsworth did his best work in obscurity, in a tiny startup consisting mostly
of himself and his immediate family. He then managed to secure a patent, which
enabled him to get a piece of the action when RCA turned his invention into a
household word. If he had been a little less stubborn and independent RCA
would have succeeded in buying him out completely; if he had been a little
less of a romantic figure ( _the Idaho farmboy turned electronics genius_!)
only historians would know his name.

It's easy to meet people who are as smart and inventive as Farnsworth. They're
designing graphics processors or creating MEMS devices or building robots or
developing vaccines. They're designing the tiny components that make the
iPhone possible. If you run into them on the street in Silicon Valley, they
look just like everyone else. And none of them are famous, because they're not
trying to be famous. Their business doesn't depend on that.

~~~
jfarmer
Also, _none of them are entrepreneurs_ and none of his examples are examples
of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things.

[Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20"
doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company
around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground
makes him an entrepreneur.]

And that is great. Maybe there's something intelligent to say about how we
need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors, or what the difference is, or why
hardly anybody knows two of those three inventors.

Instead he went for the easy article and decided to piss all over everyone.
Gratifying, to be sure, and there's going to be a coterie of people saying,
"Yes, right on. Here are other ways in which all these people suck," but I
think everyone is a little worse off for having an article like this written.

It was mean and no less venal than the entrepreneurs he is criticizing.

~~~
zaidf
_need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors_

You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there
are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am
guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about
them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically
brights folks working on new things.

This ends up with the boring conclusion that may be we need both inventors +
entrepreneurs. But just because it's boring doesn't mean it isn't accurate.

~~~
jfarmer
Huh? I'm not saying anything about inventors or entrepreneurs; I'm saying
something about the author's article and why it was unnecessary and
unproductive, particularly if it was meant to be a critique of BusinessWeek as
well as the entrepreneurs it highlighted.

I have no idea how many entrepreneurs or inventors there are, what the
appropriate balance between the two is (if that even matters), whether the
world needs more or less of either, etc.

------
shrikant
Jesus what a nay-sayer. I wonder if in early 1999 he would have dismissed
Google saying, "A website to search the Internet? Why? I can just go directly
to what I want!". Sheesh.

~~~
noonespecial
Thanks to the participatory nature of technology these days, its become
fiendishly difficult to predict what's going to produce wealth[1].

It used to be easy, wealth was made by growing something and eating it or
digging something up and banging it into a shape. It got a bit more subtle
when people realized that dragging stuff places (where said stuff was likely
eaten or banged into a shape) could create wealth too.

It got even harder when information became wealth. Mostly at first by letting
people know the best places to drag stuff and the best shapes to bang stuff
into.

Now we are at the place where the idea itself can attract wealth when it goes
viral and millions of people suddenly contribute to it. Facebook, wikipedia,
twitter etc. It might actually be a clue that these are hard to "monetize" yet
are seismic forces in peoples' lives. Wealth and money might finally be
starting to go their separate ways.

I think maybe the author might have a little bit of dig stuff up and bang it
into a shape bias, but I understand how it might be difficult to spot the
wealth creation potential in some of these "new fangled" ventures.

[1] Wealth in the "bettering all human kind" sense, not the "pile of
government printed paper" sense.

~~~
eru
Wealth and money have always gone in slightly different ways. Every positive
externality is wealth by your definition, but I unless its internalized I
don't get paid for it. (And negative externality are basically stealing or
looting.)

To give less abstract examples: I don't get paid for being a good citizen,
voting, reading the newspaper to be informed. And I do not pay for being
angry, putting a lot of strange gases in the atmosphere with my care (yet),
congesting the streets. Or putting systemic risk on the financial world.

There is something to be said for connecting externalities with incentives.
Giving the right incentives makes people's choices more compatible with the
outcomes.

------
edw519
He forgot a few:

1\. A guy who threw daddy's money at the ridiculous idea that people would buy
books without seeing or touching them first.

2\. Two college nerds who thought people would use a TV screen instead of the
yellow pages.

3\. Two more college nerds who thought people would come to their web-site
solely for the purpose of going to someone else's website.

4\. Another college nerd who thought people could be friends without actually
being together.

5\. Some people who thought other people wouldn't mind storing their
electronic mail on someone else's computer.

6\. Some guy pussy-whipped by his girlfriend to trade her beanie babies on the
interwebs.

7\. Some guys who thought people would be willing to send money over the
internet.

8\. A guy who built a place for people to give away their published writings
for free.

9\. A guy who thought people could meet their next SO on the computer in his
apartment.

10\. A guy who thought people could actually communicate something in only 140
characters.

~~~
oink
Yep, those are all grounds for interesting ideas that one could discuss over
coffee for a good while. The entrepreneurs identified in the article that is
being criticized however seem to have very bland businesses (coffee intern
placement doesn't really capture the imagination).

~~~
chaosprophet
Actually internships are quite eye-opening stuff when done at the right place.
So i'd say the internship website was a brilliant idea.

------
dsplittgerber
I think you have to distinguish between nay-saying as a stylistic means and
arguing with his point. I think there is a valid philosophical point to be
made that young entrepreneurs are not daring enough. Aside from the fact that
it's really, really hard not to settle for "easy" execution, society would
probably indeed be better off if people dared to go for more daunting tasks. I
guess you can say: If you want to glorify some people - like BW does -, select
mostly those who try (and most certainly will fail in doing so) the truly
groundbreaking stuff. Those are the ones that society needs to succeed. But
it's all philosophical.

------
Zarkonnen
Aagh, why is there Javascript on the site that breaks "open in new tab"?

------
groaner
Quite a bit of vitriol in there, but it seems it would more appropriately be
directed at lousy journalism rather than bemoaning the state of
entrepreneurship. While the BusinessWeek article claims to evaluate on
"potential for growth," the projected revenue figures sound like PR fluff. I
was left wondering which of the 10 were selected just so they have a nice
round number for their list.

~~~
rbanffy
I think this illustrates why fluffy press-release-transcribing journalism is
so prevalent these days better than a whole collection of BusinessWeek ever
could:

<http://twitpic.com/ds64u>

------
bitwize
_A service where some woman (who isn’t under 25 or very well dressed herself)
plays “queer eye” for a dude over webcam and demeans him into buying her
choice of clothes._

At first I thought this referred to one of those "financial domination" sites
where you pay to be humiliated and ignored by some girl over the internet. Now
_that's_ entrepreneurship, American style!

------
theappfarm
"Dear America: you can’t have an economy based on narcissism, good intentions,
marketing, catering to rich bored people, really excellent webpages, and
selling underpants on the internet."

Quite a statement coming from someone working on "problems in quantitative
finance." Not sure which adds less value, high frequency trading or (insert
any activity on earth here).

------
pg
The only difference between this and a strawman argument is that _Business
Week_ provided the strawman.

