Creativity Challenge: The James Bond Casino Caper

Students and entrepreneurs came together Tuesday night to save the world from a deadly asteroid strike. That, at least, was the premise of the tongue-in-cheek event run by Alistair Fee who teaches creative thinking at the Queens University Belfast.

The exclusive event admitted only 30 participants after screening their applications for humor, creativity, and level of interest. Alistair explained the application process “Is a way to bring in only people who really want to participate. When they have applied and dressed up, they come already humming.”

The Setting

Clips and stills from James Bond movies played on the large screens in the School of Design where the event was held. Guests came dressed as their favorite Bond hero or villain. In practice, this meant tuxedos and suits for the men, evening dresses for the ladies.

The mood was lighthearted and convivial. Halfway through the event the guests were asked to fill balloons and send them flying throughout the room.

Participants drank and networked before engaging in the main event. Dividing into fives, they were briefed on doom’s approach and tasked with averting or mitigating the catastrophe.

The Challenge

Forrest Glick interrupted the chatter to inform guests that a meteor had been recently spotted hurtling towards earth. Greenland was its most likely target, threatening rising sea levels, earthquakes and permanent environmental disruption.

Split into teams, the guests collaborated on white boards, brainstorming ideas and debating outcomes.

The solutions proposed ranged from nuclear strikes to miniaturized black holes to melting Greenland to soften the impact.

Throughout the evening Alistair could be seen moving from table to table, offering encouragement and advice. He insisted that guests not focus exclusively on the engineering problems but take into account politics and implementation.

The Point

“In the course of your business or life you will come across situations where you have to make a decision in a short period of time. You will have to collaborate with people you don’t know who know a great deal about something,” explained Alistair after the event.

With the world safe again, participants were eager to talk and take pictures before being unfortunately hustled out of the building by organizers.

Along with Alistair and Forrest Glick the event was organized by Belen Torres-Gill and Tina Seelig.

Entrepreneurial leaders share insights on Global Leadership and Talent Equation

Four Silicon Valley-based global executives joined the “Solving the Global Leadership and Talent Equation" Panel Discussion of the Eweek, sharing insights about the crucial elements of recruiting talents and managing across borders in a global environment.
The event, hosted by Stanford Program on Regions of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, took place Monday at Bechtel Conference Center of Encina Hall. The panelists were Eric Benhamou, Chairman and CEO, Benhamou Global Ventures, David Chao, Co-Founder and General Partner of DCM, Michael Zhao, CEO and President, Array Networks. Kyung Yoon, CEO of Talent Age Associates served as the moderator.
The discussion centered on four topics: global recruitment in general; essential traits of global leaders; mistakes and lessons from previous recruitment; challenges of a global career and solutions.

Global Recruitment in General
To address the challenges for global teams, said Eric Benhamou, “you have to be able to create trust, commitment and shared goals even though you may have difficulty in creating shared experiences.”
To find the right person, good interview skills are significant for both interviewers and interviewees, he continued.
His favorite interview technique is to ask interviewees to talk about specific scenarios and their reaction and solutions to them, e.g. “to describe when you were in a truly stressful situation and how you dealt with it”.
“This is very revealing,” said Eric, especially when you are recruiting people in a culture you are not familiar with and you can only rely on your instinct.
Michael Zhao talked about situations he has to face when interviewing people in China.
“In China, people believe if they don’t become a manager before the age of 30, they are a failure,” said Michael.
So every time when there is an opening of management level in the Chinese operation of his company, there will be hundreds of applicants. “But the problem is that most of them don’t realize they don’t have the skills to be a manager,” said Michael. “We have to convince them they are better being an engineer than serving as a manager.”
David Chao quoted Jack Welch that in big companies 2/3 of the people are failure, meaning 1/3 good people is an acceptable ratio. But for start-ups, it is essential to hire the best people in the very beginning, said David.
He also pointed out that the challenges of hiring the best people for start-ups in other countries. “Silicon Valley has this culture of working for start-ups,” he said, “But in other countries talents just want to work for big companies like Samsuny and Lenovo.”
He stressed that the skill he values most in an employee is the process management skill.

Essential Traits of Global Leaders
“In global environment, it is important to emphasize communication skills,” said Eric. “Communication skills refer to not just bridging language difference, but bridging cultural differences. A fast-moving company relies upon rapid and transparent flow of information.”
He thinks that a successful global leader must be able to achieve the transparent flow of information across all the international operations.
Michael also stressed the challenges for global leaders to manage across long distance and different time zones. In this sense, he said, the ability to build trust is highly valued, which means one has to always share information which is supposed to share. “The leaders of our international operations sit thousands of miles away,” he said. “If there is a problem and they don’t speak up, we don’t really know what it is going on.”
David summarized two key traits: passion for hating to lose and flexibility to adapt. He said he appreciated talents who have the ability to always figure out ways to win.
“Also, the market is dynamic. Business models have to change. The leaders need to adjust,” he said

Mistakes and Lessons
Eric cited a mistake he made when choosing the helmsman for a joint venture in China. 3Com, the network equipment company which he invests, built a joint venture in China with Huawei, China’s biggest communication equipment vendor. All the engineers are from Huawei, while the patents are from 3Com.
“This is a very hybrid company,” said Eric. “And we chose a CEO who is on surface a very polished highly global executive, who even speaks a little mandarin.”
But the engineers from Huawei, who are accustomed to the top-down style of Huawei’s founder and CEO, a former general of the Chinese Army, have problem with this CEO’s participative and gentle leadership. His inclusiveness was interpreted as weakness and indecisiveness and gradually the engineers lost respect for the CEO, said Eric. After eight months, Eric replaced this CEO.
Michael gave an example that once he hired a CTO to run his operation in China who is very gifted and a close personal friend to him. “But this just didn’t work out,” he said. “The lesson is a friend is a friend. Don’t overlook their shortcomings.”
David shared his experience when building team for Apple Japan. When he thought about the right person to run Apple in Japan, he thought surely it would be good to get someone who is very experienced in the sector. So he got someone from Toshiba on board. But later it turned out that talents were attracted to work for Apple in Japan because they wanted to run away from Toshiba style, which is very hierarchical.

Challenges of a global career and solutions
“Global leaders usually have to deal with strenuous traveling schedule and continuous hours of work to accommodate the time zones difference,” said the moderator Kyung Yoon. She asked the panelists for advice to strike a balance between career, life and community.
Eric emphasized on the importance of sleep. “When you are sleep-deprived, a lot of bad things happen,” he said.
Michael stressed on efficient planning. “Make sure everything is ready while you are there and you don’t waste time traveling,” he said.
He also said that mental health is just as important as physical health. And his secret to mental health is meditation.
David said that it is impossible to balance everything and people have to recognize that there is some sacrifice that has to be made with an international schedule. He told that with a schedule of traveling internationally for one week out of every five weeks, he wants to continue to do well and spend time with family. “What has been dropped is a lot of friends,” he said. “If I have a normal 9-5 working hours, I will have more time spending on Facebook.”

By Li Lou
Stanford University
M.A. Journalism '09

New Companies, Lots of Jobs

Two large white party tents sat empty in White Plaza for two days – and then on Thursday – they filled with undergraduate students, graduate students and recruiters from 66 fast growing start-ups. In addition to giving away pens, t-shirts, chattering teeth and jolly ranchers all of these recruiters were looking to hand out jobs.

“This is nothing like the career fairs when I was graduating from college,” said Matt Brezina from Xobni, a start-up company that aggregates personal information stored in email systems. “It felt like no one was hiring in 2001 and 2002. Now there are amazing opportunities out there,” he said. Xobni just closed a series A round of financing and is looking to add a handful of developers to its three person team.

“We are growing fast,” said Genelle Hung from ZipLip, a software start-up focused on email archiving. “We currently have 40–50 employees and we plan to double within the next year,” she said. “If you are a solid engineer and you have some business skills you are in high demand right now,” Hung said.

The majority of the companies participating in the fair were young internet related ventures. However there were a few exceptions. KiteShip Corporation, a company that designs “very large free flying sails” for cargo ships in order to reduce their fuel consumption, sponsored a table. So did GE Global Research, the company that “built the systems that brought electricity and light to the world,” according to their company literature.

“It is great to see so many companies out here celebrating and looking for the entrepreneurial spirit,” Hung said. Recruiters and students alike appeared in to be in high spirits from the time the tents opened at 10 am until they closed at 4 pm.

“In total I would say about 600 students attended the fair,” said Sunil Parekh ’08 a Biomechanical Engineer major who helped organize the event. “In the morning there were a lot of graduate students because undergraduates don’t get up that early. This afternoon we had a good mix,” he said.

“The turn out has been good. We have met really good people,” said Shiri Azenot from Sharpcast, a company developing software that synchronizes digital media and information.

“I met high quality students and a good amount of engineers,” said Sandi Sayama of RockYou, a widget platform backed by Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Partners, and FirstRound Capital. Sayama collected about 50 resumes over the course of the day.

The event was organized by Business Association of Stanford Entrepreneurial Students (BASES). The student group aims to “build the next generation of entrepreneurs by facilitating networking, discussion, education, and hands-on experience.”

Tom Friedman on being green: "I'm not talking about buying a Prius"

NYT columnist and Discovery Channel reporter Tom Friedman told a packed Memorial Auditorium Friday afternoon that reversing the threat of climate change and introducing green technologies requires a full-scale commitment from private industry, government, and individual consumers.

According to Friedman, Wall Street must drive clean technology innovation. Federal and state governments can prod private industry by regulating energy uses and providing incentives for green research. And individuals must rally for environmentally-friendly policies and make energy independence a personal habit and a national issue. He called it "the biggest industrial project mankind has ever undertaken."

Even more, Friedman said, America must focus its efforts beyond its borders. He characterized efforts to fund R&D for ethanol fuel as "nuts." Rather, the challenge is to create clean technologies that can be piloted in emerging countries like China, India, and Brazil and had at "a China price."

"If you don't have clean power at the China price, you don’t have anything," he said. "If they can’t afford it, it won’t solve anything at all. The real math problem is how we get clean and green down to China's price. Otherwise, you’re just engaged in a hobby."

The first step, he said, is to own the issue. The green agenda should be recast as capitalistic and patriotic rather than smeared as "liberal, tree-hugging, girlie man, sissy, unpatriotic, and vaguely French."

"Eisenhower rallied us with the Red menace, and the next president will have to rally us with a green patriotism," Friedman said.

During the last five years, he said, three events have pushed environmentalism to the mainstream: the 9/11 attacks, Hurricane Katrina, and the Internet revolution that has flattened the world economic landscape. (Hence, his book, The World is Flat. You're welcome, Friedman.)

The threat of terrorism has revealed that our oil addiction feeds Islamic radicalism, Friedman said. He cited his first law of petropolitics: the price of oil inversely affects the pace of freedom in oil producing countries. In other words, the higher cost of oil, the greater the ease with which radical fundamentalists can push their agenda in Middle Eastern countries.

"We’re funding terrorism with our energy purchases," he said. "How stupid is that? We're funding the transformation of an Islam of open ideology to the most harsh, severe, intolerant brand of Islam. We and they will not pay the price until 30 years from now."

Friedman warned that China and India and other emerging superpowers are becoming major consumers of fossil fuels. He pointed to studies that most of the demand for energy will come from the developing world between now and 2020. And the U.S. has little leverage to demand that China and India go clean when it ignores these challenges and when dirty fuels are cheaper.

Finally, Friedman said, the emergence of a national and global consensus on the validity of climate change--tip of the hat to Al Gore--has hastened most Americans to worry about the health of the planet.

"We had daffodils growing in our front yard in Washington this December," he said. "It was like being in the Twilight Zone. I half expected Rod Serling to be out mowing my lawn."

Now, the bad news: If we don't fix this thing in the next 50 years, we're toast, according to Friedman. He mentioned a forecast that, in order to accommodate the growth of India and China and other countries and maintain today's energy levels in the U.S., the world has to eliminate 175 billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere between now and 2056. Here is the science behind this theory. In short, he said, it gets harder to accomplish each day we don't act.

He ended with an allusion to the title of his talk: "Green is the new red white and blue: Will that just be a bumper sticker on Main Street or will that define Main Street? I’m still not sure about that."

Stanford Technology Showcase is a museum of Stanford research successes

As part of the E-week festivities, the Stanford Office of Technology Licensing (OTL) hosted a showcase Wednesday night of Stanford tech research that has found success with real world applications. Held in the atrium of the Packard Electrical Engineering Building (right next to Bytes Cafe, one of the more delicious places to eat on campus) the showcase contained about 10 small exhibits that demonstrated how Stanford tech research is applied in the market.

According to the sign at the front of the atrium, the OTL helps Stanford students and professors turn their research into "tangible products" to give the inventor and the university income.

Soon after the forum on social entrepreneurship and world problems let out a steady stream of students and faculty came in and went directly to the tables that held the Chinese food. This became mainly a social and networking event, but visitors did make their way across the atrium and looked at many of the products that help fund the university.

The most popular exhibit was the FM sound synthesizer, invented by Prof. John Chowning in 1971, which mixed two pure tones together in order to get a 3rd (different) tone. OTL spent 4 years trying to get American companies interested in the technology, but in 1975 gave Japan based Yamaha Corp. the exclusive licensing. Yamaha used this to develop their 1983 DX synthesizer (which gave 80's music a whole new dimension), and in the 90's the FM sound chip was the sound generator installed in millions of PC's. This is OTL's second largest source of royalties.

When I was in front of the Genscan exhibit, a woman next to me remarked, "Wow." So I had better include it. According to the exhibit, "Genscan is a popular software tool to aid scientists around the world in the task of gene mapping and sequencing for both human and plant genomics." Invented by Professor Christoper Burge, it was one of the first technologies OTL offered as a "ready-to-sign" license, which used set conditions but resulted in discount financial terms for the licensee.

Also on the genome front was the Direct Multiplex Genotyping on Genomic DNA, created by the Stanford Genome Technology Center. This device helps with genome and DNA detection, and was licensed to ParAllele (a startup founded by the inventors) in 2001. ParAllele was acquired in 2005 by Affymetrix.

There were also a few communications technologies on display. One was the Deformable Grating Modulator, invented in 1991 by then Professor David Bloom. He started Echelle Inc. to develop the technology, which helps light beam displays. This is applicable for HDTV's, home theater systems, and handheld communication devices. Strangely, when I did a google search for the Echelle url, I only found that now it is a cosmetic company in Alabama. Weird. But according to the exhibit, the technology is being used currently by Sony for some of its HDTV's.

There was also an exhibit about the fiber optic amplifier, invented in the early 1980's by Professors H. John Shaw and Michel Digonnet, that "enables light signals to be transmitted over long distances, allowing data and voice transmissions to be sent over fiber optic cables." There have been over 150 inventions from this fiber optic research, which was sponsored by Litton Systems (which was acquired by Northrup Grunman).

Another exhibit was by the current dean of the Engineering Dept., Jim Plummer. In 1976 he invented the Insulated Gate Bipolar Transistor, whose application obviously is to help semiconductors switch large currents (on a small scale model like the washing machine, or for big power plants).

The final tech exhibit that caught my eye was the Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM) research by Professor Calvin Quate in the mid-1980's. This led to more than 40 technologies, and is a way to image very small things (even a single atom). It has found uses in semiconductors, materials research, and life sciences.

Global Problems and Entrepreneuship: Bottom Up or Top Down?

A full panel of Stanford academics and successful entrepreneurs unanimously affirmed optimism about the potential of entrepreneurial thinking in solving global problems, but disagreed about the importance of strong institutions in facilitating innovation.

Entrepreneurs and those interested in entrepreneurship tend to arrive early it seems. At 4:10 PM, 20 minutes before the start of E-Week's "The Role of Entrepreneurship in Solving the World Problems," students, professors, conference attendees and the occasional wayward blogger were already being asked to fill in rows to the middle to make way for more attendees.

John Hennessy, Stanford's high-rolling President, set the stage reminding us that the sort of global problems on the day's agenda are normally approached with big bureaucracy and not innovative thinking.

Tom Byers, the Faculty Director of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program bounded up to begin moderating, introducing a panel of six, which including his brother, Brook Byers, a General Partner at venture capital firm Kleiner, Perkins, Caulfield and Byers.

Panelists' preoccupation with the importance on harnessing entrepreneurial spirit in the developing world to showed itself from the starting gun as Byers and Paul Yock, director of Stanford's Biodesign Program, stressed the importance of innovations in medical technologies in making health care delivery more efficient.

Yock noted that on an international level lifestyle diseases like cardiovascular ailments will soon become the greatest killers. Since, developed world technologies for treating cardiovascular disease are so expensive, he said, its also important to look at and learn from how those technologies get redeveloped in an international setting.

Kavita Ramdas, founder of the Global Fund for Women, agreed.

"The creation of new technology by definition must be done across counties," she said.

"The US should be putting in to place policies that will allow it to be a happy countries among other happy countries not those that will continue to make it a superpower."

The conversation shifted to energy. KR Sridhar, the CEO of Bloom Energy, a solid state fuel cell company (that, incidentally, Brook Byers' firm is invested in), stressed the importance of innovations that increase energy efficiency and provide above all for individual initiative.

For a small farmer in Bangladesh, he said, the process should be as follows.

"I have a box. That box generates electricity. I can sell it. If I want clean water I buy it from the lady next door. Everyone is an entrepreneur."

"But you need someone to enforce property rights!" said Chip Blacker, director of Stanford Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies.

At Blacker's admission that he is a Democrat because he believes in strengthening global governance, Sridhar shot back to muffled applause.

"I am neither a Democrat nor a Republican. I am a capitalists who believes you can do good and make good," Sridhar said.

Blacker responded that he does not believe that entrepreneurship should be associated with Americaness, at the same time policy architecture plays a big role.

"Why has entrepreneurship been so successful in this country? he asked. "Can you say regulatory policy? The system rewards people for taking risks."

Global Entrepreneurship: Stanford Trailblazers in China

Stanford, Feb. 26 — E-Week crossed the International Date Line today, as three Stanford graduates discussed what entrepreneurship is like in China.

To an audience of over 150 people, including such notables as Chairman of Stanford's Board of Trustees Burt McMurtry,
the panelists for "Global Entrepreneurship: Stanford Trailblazers in China" spent much of the two hours stressing the differences in the business environment between China and the US, including the role of government and local partners in creating successful Chinese ventures.

"On one hand, there's the picture of China as being a black box. On the other hand, there's a picture of China that's China being just another territory. Both of those views have proven to be very problematic," said Derek Ling, who received a master's degree from Stanford in 1995 and founded Chinese social networking service Tianji.com.

The panelists agreed that China can be a complicated place for entreprenuers where much that is assumed in the US cannot be taken for granted.

"If the US is like a zoo, China is more like a jungle," said WebEx Communications co-founder Min Zhu, drawing laughter from the audience for a creative metaphor that captured how unexpected problems can arise across the Pacific.

One of the things entrepreneurs have to deal with in China at all levels is the government, panelists said. Calling that part of business "B2G"- in a play off of B2B, which stands for business-to-business- several of the speakers spoke about the importance of maintaining a good working relationship with the government.

"If you're tight with a son of a minister, you can do great business that no one can touch," Ling said. "But if you don't have that, it's probably better to stay away [from that business]."

Unlike in the US where people tend to stay with companies for a while, there's a large turn-over of workers in Chinese IT ventures, the panelists said. "There's a mercenary attitude there," Hong said of people who work in IT companies in China. He added that many Chinese IT companies "need to learn" how to handle this problem, suggesting that one solution may be to "hire faster than attrition."

But there were also similarities between China and Silicon Valley. Don't expect to make millions overnight, the panelists warned. "Only the ones who last longer than the other people, they will win," Zhu said.

Survival in China, like in the US, also needs good salesmanship, Zhu added. "You need a great vision, and you need to sell your dream continuously."

While the panelists agreed with each other on most points, there was some disagreement over which Chinese city is the best place for start-ups. Zhu, in particular, touted alternatives to Beijing and Shanghai, pointing instead to places like Hangzhou- the city 180 km southwest of Shanghai where he founded his company Cybernaut in 2005.

Though the panelists all have some roots at Stanford, they took different paths. Ling, for example, studied philosophy here, while his fellow panelists were in the sciences.

What they did share, however, was an appreciation of Silicon Valley and what they learned from their time here.

"There's some magic in Silicon Valley that works very well," said Jack Hong, principal and founder of SN38, an incubation fund focusing on social-networking start-ups in China and the US. "That's why I came back here in '06 for business school."