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One of the problems with higher education

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30 Random Surprising Facts

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Twitter Has a New User: The Pope

On Monday, the Vatican announced that the 85-year-old pontiff would begin posting messages on Twitter next week under the handle @pontifex, a term for pope that means bridge-builder in Latin. Within hours, he had more than 250,000 followers. (read more)

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SEARCHING FOR TECH TALENT IN CHINA

Stephen Bell, a venture capitalist who co-founded Trilogy VC, is betting he will find the next Mark Zuckerberg in China. He tours the country’s top universities in search of fledgling entrepreneurs, offering financing to students “who often have just a kernel of an idea,” Ron Gluckman reports in DealBook. Mr. Bell has more than $2 million a year to invest, with plans to offer financing to 15 to 30 start-ups, DealBook says. It is a highly unusual strategy in China, especially as some fear the market may be overheated. But Mr. Bell says, “I only need to hit one home run among a hundred, and I’m doing fine.” (read more)

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Inside Elon Musk's Mars Math

"I do in fact know that this sounds crazy," Elon Musk tweeted this week. “But if humanity wishes to become a multi-planet species, then we must figure out how to move millions of people to Mars."

Like any big, bold idea, Musk's plan for colonizing Mars strikes you at first glance as indeed crazy, and it also probably makes your head spin a bit. How on earth, you are probably wondering, could we possibly do that? But let's suspend disbelief for a moment and assume Musk is able to build a reusable rocket that can efficiently shuttle colonists to the Red Planet. The question is: what then? 

Musk, who told Bloomberg "I want to die on Mars," is concerned with the question of how to make a Mars colony self-sustaining. That would require 80,000 volunteers, Musk said in a recent speech to the Royal Aeronautical Society. Then Musk qualified that number on Twitter. We will need 80,000 volunteer colonists per year, he argued, in order to eventually reach a population in the millions. (read more)

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Looking to Industry for the Next Digital Disruption

SAN RAMON, Calif. — When Sharoda Paul finished a postdoctoral fellowship last year at the Palo Alto Research Center, she did what most of her peers do — considered a job at a big Silicon Valley company, in her case, Google. But instead, Ms. Paul, a 31-year-old expert in social computing, went to work for General Electric.

Ms. Paul is one of more than 250 engineers recruited in the last year and a half to G.E.’s new software center here, in the East Bay of San Francisco. The company plans to increase that work force of computer scientists and software developers to 400, and to invest $1 billion in the center by 2015. The buildup is part of G.E’s big bet on what it calls the “industrial Internet,” bringing digital intelligence to the physical world of industry as never before. (read more)

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Hatching Ideas, and Companies, by the Dozens at M.I.T.

HOW do you take particles in a test tube, or components in a tiny chip, and turn them into a $100 million company?

Dr. Robert Langer, 64, knows how. Since the 1980s, his Langer Lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has spun out companies whose products treat cancer, diabetes, heart disease and schizophrenia, among other diseases, and even thicken hair. (read more)

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In Europe, Putting the Adventure Into Venture Capital

The life of a European venture capitalist is usually pretty civilized, punctuated by trips to the converted warehouses of London’s trendy Silicon Roundabout neighborhood or Berlin’s stately Prenzlauer Berg district, where entrepreneurs swap ideas in Vietnamese restaurants and faux-dive coffee shops. Dmitry Chikhachev of Moscow-based Runa Capital lives a less posh existence. Visiting cloud-computing software provider Jelastic, one of his investments, means a flight to Kiev, Ukraine’s dusty capital, followed by a 100-mile drive on post-Soviet roads to the provincial town of Zhytomyr—a city best known for its museum of Cosmonaut memorabilia. There, Chikhachev subsists on Ukrainian staples like potato dumplings and cabbage rolls as he helps Jelastic, founded in 2010 by a Russian-Ukrainian programmer duo, expand its business. “There are hundreds of hidden gems far from big cities,” says Chikhachev. “The regional market of startups is only starting to be tapped.”(read more)

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Q: Who’ll win in 2016? A: Twitter’s darling

  The 2012 presidential election? Come on already. It’s such old news by now.

We have analyzed to death the reasons why America re-elected President Barack Obama. Time to move on, America.

OK, I’m semi-kidding. But I am fascinated by what may await the political process in four years. Looking ahead to 2016, the winner will be the candidate who most embraces social media, principally Twitter, and harnesses its communications power. (read more)

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How much education does an entrepreneur need?

Richard Branson has spoken to Fox Business about the importance of entrepreneurs getting out there and doing it, instead of heading off to business school.

In his interview the Virgin Group Founder urged young business minds to spend their money wisely when starting out: “I’m not so sure it makes any sense for people to spend three or four years of their life going through business school. The money that is spent doing that could be used to start a business and get out there in the real world.

“Living in the jungle and learning to survive is so very important, you’ll learn so much more than you would going to business school. The most successful people that I know didn’t go to business school.” (read more)

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Why Everyone Wants to Fire the Founder

With all of Facebook's struggles since its initial public offering, I suppose it's not surprising that there were whispers over the summer that Mark Zuckerberg should be replaced as chief executive. But spare me. There is no one on Earth who is as qualified to run Facebook.

While things have started to look up for Facebook of late, this conversation is part of a familiar pattern. Bankers, investors and consultants are often outrageously quick to pull the trigger on founders of fast-growth companies. We all get intoxicated by hyper-growth, and expectations can get out of control, which is why smart, fast-growth entrepreneurs temper those fantasies. But it can be hard when the publicity machines are trying to turn the entrepreneur into some kind of Superman. (read more)

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Corporate VCs Here to Stay This Time, Study Says

Venture capital investment by corporations has had its ups and downs over the last 50 years but there are signs it is again resurgent.

Companies from Citrix Systems to Nike are looking to get close to start-ups and a relative newcomer to the venture scene, Google Ventures, was the top investor in venture-backed companies in the third quarter.

Now comes a report from the Boston Consulting Group, a global management consultant, declaring that the trend is real and lasting.

“Venture investing appears well on its way to establishing a firm foothold in the corporate world as companies look to nascent companies not just to generate financial returns but also to complement their R&D efforts, penetrate fast-growing emerging markets, and gain early access to potentially disruptive technologies and business models,” the report says. (read more)

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New York Start-Ups Become Officemates in Hurricane Sandy Aftermath

As the city of New York struggles to get back online in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, many companies and start-ups are trying to regain their footing and restart operations.

We’re taking over the Hearst cafeteria twitter.com/jonsteinberg/s…

— Jon Steinberg (@jonsteinberg) October 31, 2012

The problem is, much of Lower Manhattan, where many are located, is still without power and Internet. But entrepreneurs, engineers and developers aren’t letting that stop them. They are camping out in one another’s apartments and offices in an attempt to still get a day’s work done. Of course, any place with a humming Wi-Fi connection, whether a coffee shop or an Apple Store, seems to be drawing displaced workers eager to get back into the swing of things. But camaraderie spurred by the storm seemed to knit the New York start-up scene together a bit tighter. (read more)

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CEO Ooga Labs, Stan Chudnovsky

"Don’t make my mistake!

So you’re going to take a cube job with slow Microsoft, bureaucratic Oracle, or with some boring financial company?

C’mon! Do you want spend all of your life wearing modest habits of charcoal grey, driving your Volvo on the salty roads of the drab East Coast, paying 50% of your earnings to taxes, and hanging out with narrow minded people, congratulating yourselves on improving a feature of a widget of version 12.1b.4 of some software, or maybe improving the financial return of some rich bald dude in Greenwich, CT by 0.2% above the S&P Index?

Has no one taken you aside and said, “Wait! You’re about to waste 10 years of your life figuring out the path you chose out of college is crap!”

No one did to me either when I went to Princeton, and it took me until I was 31 to get my ass out to San Francisco and do tech start ups. Don’t make my mistake. Save yourself now. Even if you don’t work for me. I mean it.

Out here, you think about the future. Out here, you are surrounded by colorful, dynamic technologists and entrepreneurs who are really making a difference, pushing the edge.

Most people think that working for a big or known company will give them good experience. That’s kind of like saying learning to sit still for dental surgery is good experience. Sure, it’s an experience, but there are life paths where you don’t have to have dental surgery, or work for a big company, to have the best life. In fact, I would argue that you learn the wrong things working for a big company, and that it’s actually not good experience. A good experience is when you really make something happen in the world. Big companies teach you how to work through layers of bureaucracy and how to solve problems in very risk-averse ways — in short, how to make something happen in their organization. A big company is not the safe career choice. It’s the risky choice. It risks your mind and your life.

Oh, and one more thing. Initially, your friends and family may not understand why you didn’t take that “safe” cube-job with the company whose name they know, but in two years they will understand. They will love using the websites you build, and they will talk often with their friends about it. They will see you having a vibrant life, pushing the edge of what’s happening, and they’ll be proud to know you.

Take a few minutes and reconsider your first “starting point” out of college. It sets up a direction that takes some time to change. Aim yourself in the right direction. Again, you don’t have to come to Ooga Labs, just get to the Bay Area and join a startup. You will never regret it."

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In London, Nimble Start-Ups Offer Alternatives to Stodgy Banks

LONDON — When Hiroki Takeuchi joined McKinsey & Company in 2008, he had a front-row seat to the upheaval in finance.

After the collapse of Lehman Brothers, Mr. Takeuchi, a 26-year-old Oxford graduate, worked with some of the world’s biggest banks trying to figure out how to adjust to new regulations and a changed market. Then he quit. (read more)