Silicon Vikings

Pitching has become a popular theme in bootcamps, seminars, and workshops. Everyone has advice to offer – mostly on how to do better slides, what size fonts to use, how many slides, how many minutes, how to use graphics, how to hook your audience, how to project your voice into the room, and more, and more, and more … The ability to be a good story teller is important, and entrepreneurs do need to perfect their skills in pitch delivery. However, there is an aspect of telling a good story that precedes great delivery: HAVING A GREAT STORY TO TELL.

You may already have started to experience “MOOC fatigue” but new developments, and growing number of articles in the popular and academic press, keep coming, and there is still no indication that this trend will slow any time soon. In fact, there is now a fair bit out “MOOC backlash,” especially among professors who now are getting increasingly concerned about the impact MOOCs may have on their teaching careers, and this reaction is reflected in the current literature. But Europe, including the Nordic region, does not yet seem to have come to the “MOOC concern stage”, at least in any significant way, although it might come if Europe/Nordics follow US developments, perhaps with a 12-month or so lag. I also suspect that we will see growing discussion in the Nordic region in the next year about both opportunities, including for (regional) collaboration, as well as potential concerns that MOOCs may bring to the region’s professors

Answer: People who want entrepreneurial success!

Recently I was a guest at Artiman Ventures Concept Spring event at the Santa Clara Marriott. It featured some keynote speakers followed by wine tasting and dinner.

It was entertaining and edifying in every way – and I am not just talking about the 1983 Bordeaux!

I especially enjoyed a talk by one of the speakers, Tom Miller. Tom offered some insights gained by working at companies big and small. His talk centered on three critical success factors for (entrepreneurial) success. I would like to share them and offer some commentary.

In order of occurrence:

1. Honesty

Entrepreneurs need honesty to realistically assess the “facts on the ground” and make adjustments when necessary. Be vigilant – there is a tension between the optimism, which comes “with the territory” for entrepreneurs, and a need for really brutal honesty. As entrepreneurs we need optimism for daily survival, but we need to dig deep and be uncompromisingly honest to assess company progress. Drinking our own Kool-Aid is a certain path to disaster.

2. Industry … or Don’t Be a Bee Watcher!

Industry is all about DO-ing; but doing is all about results. Measure outcomes, not hours spent. It doesn’t matter how many hours you spent hunting dinner if you never caught the prey. (For more about this see our previous blog post – Hacking the 80-hour Workweek

The opposite of do-ing is “bee-watching”. To illustrate Tom recited – by rote – the following excerpt from Dr Seuss:

“Oh, the jobs people work at! Out west near Hawtch-Hawtch there’s a Hawtch-Hawtcher bee watcher, his job is to watch. Is to keep both his eyes on the lazy town bee, a bee that is watched will work harder you see. So he watched and he watched, but in spite of his watch that bee didn’t work any harder not mawtch. So then somebody said “Our old bee-watching man just isn’t bee watching as hard as he can, he ought to be watched by another Hawtch-Hawtcher! The thing that we need is a bee-watcher-watcher!”. Well, the bee-watcher-watcher watched the bee-watcher. He didn’t watch well so another Hawtch-Hawtcher had to come in as a watch-watcher-watcher! And now all the Hawtchers who live in Hawtch-Hawtch are watching on watch watcher watchering watch, watch watching the watcher who’s watching that bee. You’re not a Hawtch-Watcher you’re lucky you see!”

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Brad Furber and Startupbootcamp are arranging a series of cool events. You can become a fly-on-the-wall during a live "Term Sheet Battle" where real people negotiate with real money.

The GDC Nordic Gaming Breakfast Seminar on Tuesday the 26th of March,organized by Innovation Center Denmark, Innovation Norway, Tekes, FinPro, Enterprise Estonia, and Silicon Vikings and hosted by K&L Gates in San Francisco, were visited by many Nordic game founders that attended the GDC 2013 in San Francisco.

Over the last two weeks I have attended two, 2-day summits here in Silicon Valley that both addressed a variety of issues and developments at the intersection of learning, innovation, technology, jobs/work. The fascinating discussions at these summits led me to reflect on what the potential role might be of MOOCs—e.g. Massive Open Online Courses (a topic I have covered in various previous blog posts)—or MOOC-like courses and online learning experiences, in a broader, industrial context. A recent MOOC-related development in Europe around SAP and a number of other players further piqued my interest in this topic

This special blog post contains a very interesting talk that Ann Winblad gave at ICD on February 5 when the Danish Minister of Trade and Industry, Pia Olsen Dyhr, came to visit Silicon Valley. When I met Ann recently and talked to hear about her presentation she said yes to my request to post her talk at our Silicon Vikings website so that many more people could have a chance to read her remarks.

Work life balance in the US, especially Silicon Valley, tilts a different way than it does for Europeans. Europe has its six weeks+ of vacation; in the US, two weeks is common, which people mostly don’t even take. Silicon Valley culture celebrates the workaholic, the all-nighter, the 80-hour workweek. What’s a Euro entrepreneur – with a spouse and kids – to do?

The Silicon Vikings event on Thursday the 21st of February, hosted by K&L Gates at Embarcadero Center, brought many Nordic guests that wanted to get a better understanding of the legislation, taxation, and banking procedures in USA.

This post revisits some issues I have touched upon—more lightly—in past blog posts, on both Nordic and Silicon Valley academic research, and Nordic-Silicon Valley research collaboration, and what these various projects and programs could mean for Nordic entrepreneurs, including edupreneurs who focus on education and learning markets. I am pleased to see continuing, and seemingly growing, collaboration of this kind between the two regions, but so far I think that most entrepreneurs in the Nordic region have failed to recognize or take advantage of these projects, program and networks being built by both Nordic and Silicon Valley researchers.