Chuck Eesley

San Antonio, TX

2011-08-17T00:33:00.001-04:00

BBQ, AoM, and the Natural Bridge Caverns.

Wifi/Internet access while traveling - why is it so frustrating still?

2011-07-04T17:40:00.001-04:00

In the year 2011, I am baffled at how it is still so difficult to get internet/wifi access while traveling internationally.

My experience in the Singapore airport (not exactly the middle of nowhere) was emblematic of my entire 3 week trip through S.E. asia. I arrive at the Singapore airport and see a sign for free wifi. Great. I open up my phone, find the right connection and . . . I need a username and password. I ask the ticket counter for the username and password and am instructed to go to the information desk. I ask at the information desk and am told to go to the "lost and found". No joke. At the lost and found, after waiting for all the poor people who lost their luggage, I am told that I have to give them my passport (my passport?). After writing down some information from my passport I am handed a sheet of paper with a long string of digits and numbers that is my username and an equally long string of digits that is my password. After inputting all of this I finally get access to the painfully slow wifi network.

I head through security and after getting through open my iPhone again to finish reading my email, only to find that I have to log in again!? At this point, I've spent about 30 minutes on this and it's basically time for me to board anyway.

Bill Gates 2011 TED talk

2011-07-03T22:13:00.000-04:00

Kamakura shrine, Japan

2011-07-02T18:11:00.000-04:00

Interview with NUS Enterprise

2011-07-01T01:32:00.000-04:00

> 1.      In your opinion, why are alumni from some universities much more
> prolific than alumni from most universities when it comes to starting
> companies? E.g. what are some things that MIT and Tsinghua have rightly put
> in place to nurture and engage their students/alumni to bloom into
> successful entrepreneurs? Is it the entrepreneurial and innovative culture
> of these universities, or do other factors come into play?

The first is top quality, cutting-edge research. It is these breakthroughs that form the basis for new products and sometimes, whole new industries. While MIT and Tsinghua have both emphasized basic research, the faculty have also had to find outside, non-government sources of money which gives them some interaction with industry and knowledge of what problems need solved. High-tech entrepreneurship, at it's heart is about using technology to solve real-world problems. Students become exposed to these elements of technology breakthroughs and industry problems in the research lab and in the classroom. The second element, which is important, but hard to replicate is a university that is known for entrepreneurship and so attracts students who have entrepreneurial inclinations. At MIT, the percentage of entrepreneurial alumni who say that they chose to come to MIT because of its entrepreneurial reputation has increased from 12% in the 1960s to 42% in the 1990s. Finally, entrepreneurial universities provide role models to students in the form of successful entrepreneurs who generously come back to campus and give talks or mentor students, explaining to them that they were once sitting where the students are sitting before they created their successful companies. So the most important elements in my mind are cutting-edge research, a reputation for applying technology to solve problems, and entrepreneurial role models.

> 2.      In the context of Q1, then what are some things that universities
> should perhaps be looking at doing (or not doing), if they want their alumni
> to be more entrepreneurial?

Consistent with these three elements, the university should Invest in recruiting entrepreneurial faculty who are doing high quality, cutting-edge R&D in their labs. Recruiting materials sent out to prospective students and admit weekends should include information about successful entrepreneurial alumni. Alumni programs and entrepreneurship classes should seek to engage with recent and older alums to come in and give talks on campus or mentor students and alumni interested in starting companies in their industry. Universities should not be encouraging that everyone needs to be an entrepreneur, but rather to expose students to entrepreneurship so that they can decide whether it's for them. Also, universities should seek to encourage intellectual risk-taking. At MIT, this takes the form of the celebrated culture of "hacking" (clever, benign, and amusing pranks - http://hacks.mit.edu). Universities should also not focus exclusively on faculty spin-offs. Far more startups are created by alumni entrepreneurs.

> 3.      Is there any matrix to measure the impact of alumni
> entrepreneurship?

In the MIT Founders survey we measure the economic impact in a number of ways including the number of companies currently active, the number of jobs created and the worldwide revenues generated. For MIT, we find that these numbers are 25,800 currently active companies, 3.3 million jobs and almost $2 trillion in annual world revenues. However, these are not the only ways to measure impact. Many entrepreneurs start a company to produce innovative new technology, to change the world in some tangible way, or to improve society through social innovation. All of these are valid and important impacts. There are many ups and downs in starting a company and so it's very important to be doing it for some reason beyond simply to make money. It's the passion that allows you to get through the hard times.

> 4.      In your research findings on trends and patterns in entrepreneurship
> among the alumni of elite research universities, how important is tertiary
> education to an entrepreneur? Is tertiary education the key differentiating
> factor that sets apart a good entrepreneur and a great entrepreneur?

Tertiary education is very important. Don't be fooled by survivor bias and the anecdotal examples of Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg, etc. Research shows that on average for technical founders, Master's degree holders have the highest performance on average. Tertiary education provides skills, a social network, and a backup plan for if your venture fails. I wouldn't call it the key differentiating factor. But being a quick learner certainly helps. Many would agree that the key is probably something more intangible, some optimal combination of initiative, optimism, paranoia, persistence, and smarts. However, research shows that there is no one personality type for the entrepreneur - they come in all shapes, types and sizes.

> 5.      What’s your advice for a team of budding entrepreneurs who has a
> viable business idea but has two more years of university studies to
> complete?

First of all, realize that the idea is only a small, small part of it. Every entrepreneur believes they have a viable business idea. However, even the ones who do often lack the ability to execute on it. My advice would be to talk to as many potential customers (who aren't your friends) as possible and try to really, truly listen to what feedback they are telling you. Try not to hear what you want to hear but what they're actually saying. Try to figure out what the big problems are that someone is willing to pay for. Use your years of university studies to develop your business, hone your independence of thought and your critical thinking skills, to learn as much about your industry and to meet as many people as possible. A university is full of opportunities and open doors. Use it to your full advantage in creating your business. Only leave if you are picking up so much traction in the market that you can't possibly keep up with both schoolwork and your exploding number of customers.

> 6.      How has your tertiary education at Duke and MIT changed or shaped
> your outlook about entrepreneurship?

What I owe to Duke is the ability to break away from the traditional path, to take the initiative and strike out on my own. I learned that there is a way to both do good for society and do well to support your family. To realize that the only way to never work a day in your life is to free yourself to follow your passion and to solve whatever you see to be big, important problems in the world. Time on this Earth is limited. In the words of Steve Jobs, it's not worth it living someone else's life.

From MIT, I learned that entrepreneurship is about more than just being passionate and working crazy hours. That there is a way to be smart about it, or at least to increase your odds of success. In addition, I learned through many late nights of problem sets that even if a problem appears to be impenetrable, that if you chip away at it, little by little, you can make progress and solve even the most complex problems. In many ways, creating a business is nothing more than a series of problems that must be solved as quickly as possible. MIT was a training ground that big problems represent big opportunities when tackled step by step.

> 7.      What is the most interesting experience you had in teaching
> Technology Entrepreneurship in Stanford?

Each year the most fascinating part to me is seeing the creative ideas my students come up with and the incredible feeling it is to see the teams work like crazy at all hours throughout the quarter and then how happy I feel when they thank me for the experience afterwards. I got into teaching because I had a failed startup in my first experience and I wanted to help more of my students to experience the incredible joy of a successful startup, rather than the frustration of a failure. I felt like I could leverage my time more by helping my students to be successful, rather than doing my own startups one at a time. I almost can't believe they pay me to do this!

View of Nagoya from my room

2011-06-29T14:21:00.000-04:00

Shabu Shabu in Tokyo

2011-06-25T09:52:00.000-04:00

Cu Cui Tunnels

2011-06-24T10:31:00.000-04:00

Vietnam War Museum

2011-06-11T07:37:00.000-04:00

Dim Sum in Vietnam

2011-06-11T07:34:00.000-04:00

HP Garage

2011-03-19T21:02:00.000-04:00

Out on my run today, I stopped by the HP Garage and snapped a couple of photos.

Forbes story

2011-03-05T00:06:00.001-05:00

2011-02-24

2011-02-24T21:44:00.000-05:00

Espresso

2011-02-24T21:43:00.000-05:00

A little too much caffeine.

Stanford Alumni Survey

2011-02-05T17:11:00.000-05:00

Funny Lean Startup Parody

2011-02-05T16:36:00.001-05:00

MS&E 10th anniversary

2011-01-26T02:09:00.000-05:00

Water

2010-11-24T00:28:00.006-05:00

The photo above shows a remote village in Oghna, India that changed my life.

In the fall semester of my junior year in college, I went to India through a School for International Training (SIT) program. As part of that trip, I had a "homestay" for 3 nights with a village family. We spoke with the villagers in Hindi and through translators, shared meals with them and helped them to dig an irrigation ditch under the hot sun with rudimentary shovels and tools. We also danced alongside them at night, played with their kids and babies, laughed at the goats and helped them shuck corn. Pretty much we lived the same way people there had been living for thousands of years. Except that their lifestyle and village were under serious threat.

The village needed the irrigation because they had had three years of severe drought. In addition, their river was drying up because of a dam project to provide electricity to a nearby city. Their corn crop was so dry that they were down to only eating one meal per day. But still they would feed us first and refuse to eat until we said that we had enough.

This is why I care about the water issue. Because I've seen first hand what living without sufficient water is like.

When I returned to Duke in the spring quarter, I realized that there were real problems out there. Problems that have solutions. Problems that need people to work on them and that can be solved if only people cared enough to do something. That's why I got involved in the first start-up that I worked like crazy for - Sun Dance Genetics. A professor at Duke, had created a technology that could create drought resistant corn. We had the seeds sent through the UN to drought regions of Africa and India. It was the first time I had a real impact on solving problems in a significant way. And I was hooked ever since . . .

So this year, I'm giving my birthday up.

Dec. 4th, I'm turning 31 years old, and instead of asking for gifts, I'm asking for $31 or more from everyone I know. It's not going to me, though. All of it is going to build freshwater wells for people in developing nations.

A billion people in the world are living without clean water - but how much are they really living? Millions contract deadly diseases from contaminated water. 45,000 people will die this week alone. The lucky ones won't, but still walk hours each day to get dirty water to give to their families.

My birthday wish this year is not for more gifts I don't need; it's to give clean and safe drinking water to some of the billion living without it. I want to make my birthday matter this year.

Please join me. http://mycharitywater.org/chuck

please note: Because of charity: water's unique model, 100% of all donations go directly to direct water projects costs, and each donation is "proved" and tracked to the village it helped when projects are complete.

On my evening jog, moon over the church.

2010-11-12T23:59:00.003-05:00

Entrepreneur Playlist

2010-11-07T20:33:00.005-05:00

Entrepreneur Playlist

2010-11-07T20:33:00.001-05:00

THE NEW DORK - Entrepreneur State of Mind (Jay-Z ft Alicia Keys Spoof) |...

2010-11-07T20:03:00.000-05:00

Cutting Your Teeth: Learning from Entrepreneurial Experience

2010-11-04T20:10:00.016-04:00

I've been working on a paper on serial entrepreneurs with Prof. Edward Roberts at MIT Sloan. I thought I'd share the abstract and a bit of the text below. For those who are interested, the entire paper can be found on my Stanford page along with the rest of my working papers and publications. This paper calls into question the idea that experienced entrepreneurs are always more likely to succeed than first time entrepreneurs.

In this paper, we explore the conditions under which learning at the individual level transfers to new firms. We use novel survey data from entrepreneurs combined with USPTO patent data for their firms to examine performance of startup firms as a measure of outcomes produced by learning acquired from prior founding experience. The results show that performance-enhancing learning varies with shifts in the industry and with the type of experience. Results indicate that at moderate levels of technological novelty prior experience is especially helpful, however, after significant technological changes in the electronics and software industries, this benefit becomes a disadvantage.

Can entrepreneurship be learned? Individuals with prior founding experience are often written about in the popular press and even seen as celebrities. They are frequently pursued by venture capitalists due to their perceived importance for the successful commercialization of new technology through entrepreneurial firms. For example, consider Bob Langer, an MIT Institute professor who has started at least twenty-four companies. Experienced founders are also celebrated as fostering and investing in future generations of entrepreneurs. Larry Bock has founded eleven life sciences companies, including nine that went public. He boasts having founded, co-founded or invested in forty companies with a cumulative market capitalization over $40 billion. However, is prior startup experience always beneficial? For each successful serial entrepreneur, there may be scores of individuals who have a string of failures. What determines these different outcomes? Relative to its importance, relatively little academic attention has been pointed towards experienced founders and the conditions when they outperform first time entrepreneurs (Hsu, 2007).

We take advantage of differences between those entrepreneurs who have and have not had the prior experience of founding a firm. We use the dotcom boom and several periods of significant technological change in the electronics industry to test the impact of these events on the impact of learning on new firms. We illustrate the history of the microprocessor segment of the electronics industry for several reasons. First, it was at the forefront of rapid changes in the industry, driving changes and opportunities in components, peripherals, and much of the electronics ecosystem, including other uses for these emerging microprocessors. This sector is rife with turmoil and high-velocity, fast-paced change, yet with the benefits of hindsight, we select three time periods of particularly dramatic changes and important technological innovations. Second, it is a large, cohesive segment of the industry that is well documented. Finally, MIT played key roles in the development of this area, and we have access to unique data from MIT to use in our analyses. Many MIT alumni entrepreneurs came from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department and the electronics firms they founded are likely to have been influenced by these time periods of rapid change in microprocessors and the broader electronics industry. The three time periods we highlight are the years following 1981 (the introduction of RISC and 32-bit chips), 1988 (the IBM PS/2 and “microprocessor wars”), and 1990 (the introduction of MIPS, 64-bit chips, and the “clone wars”). These time periods clearly highlight the phases of discontinuity and industry ferment characterized by the models of industry evolution (Utterback & Abernathy, 1975).

1981

The early 1980s was the age of significant advances due to “RISC” processors and 32-bit computer. David Patterson and Carlo Sequin, both on the faculty at Berkeley started the RISC Project in 1980, emphasizing pipelining and use of register windows to speed up processing. Their first processor, the RISC-I outperformed every other single chip design at the time while using fewer than half the transistors. RISC was quickly adopted throughout the industry and in the next few years, AT&T Bell Labs, Motorola, DEC, and HP all introduced RISC-based processors. In 1981 and during the next few years, major changes and technological developments took place in the electronics and microprocessors industries. The first PC, the first portable computer and the first workstation were all introduced. When IBM released its first PC, with a 4.77 MHz Intel 8088 processor and Microsoft’s MS-DOS operating system, it ignited rapid growth in the market. The first portable computer, the Osborne I, included a 5-inch display, 64 kilobytes of memory, a modem, and two 5 1/4 – inch floppy disk drives, weighing 24 pounds. Apollo Computer introduced the DN100 as the first workstation, optimized to run graphics-intensive engineering software. The introduction of 32-bit microprocessors also revolutionized the industry. AT&T’s Computer division introduced the first single-chip 32-bit microprocessor in 1981 (BELLMAC-32A). Motorola, National Semiconductor and Intel quickly followed suit. Also of note in 1981, John Hennessy and a team at Stanford started working on the first MIPS processor. We will return to this development and its impact below.

By 1982, the operating speed of computers on the market almost doubled when the Cray XMP was introduced, running 420 million operations per second, or megaflops. Also that year, the Commodore 64 was introduced (with 64KB of RAM) and became the greatest selling single computer model of all time. Also during this time, Apple introduced the Lisa as the first personal computer with a graphical user interface (GUI). In 1984, Apple released the first commercially successful computer with a mouse and GUI, the Macintosh.

1988

By 1988, IBM had introduced its PS/2 computers, making the 3-½ inch floppy disk and a video graphics array standard. The company sold more than 1 million units in the first year and released the OS/2 operating system, allowing a mouse to be used with IBM machines for the first time. By the end of the 1980s, an industry shakeout was underway as prices dropped, volumes shipped hit record numbers and consolidation occurred during the period of time known as the “microprocessor wars”.

1990

By 1991, John Hennessy had left Stanford to start MIPS Computer Systems and had begun shipping the R4000 processor. It was the industry’s first 64-bit microprocessor (he later returned to become University President). MIPS increased computing speed by overcoming a major obstacle to pipelining that required interlocks to be in place to process multiple-clock cycle instructions. The MIPS design prevented the pipeline of loading data from being delayed by eliminating interlocking through enabling all instructions to take only one clock cycle. Similar to the way that 32-bit chips revolutionized the industry in the early 1980s, MIPS and 64-bit chips drove revolutions in electronics during the early 1990s. In 1990, Motorola announced the 32-bit 25 MHz 68040 processor, incorporating 1.2 million transistors. In that same year, Intel introduced the 486 microprocessor, running at 33 MHz and 27 million instructions per second (MIPS). Surpassing it shortly afterwards, in 1991 Intel introduced the first processor to use 0.8-micron technology, the 486 running at 50 MHz and 41 MIPS. IBM introduced the POWER architecture in 1990 and by 1991, the first single-chip PowerPC derivatives were on the market in high volumes. DEC launched the Alpha 21064 in 1992, referring to it as the world’s fastest processor at 200 MHz and 64-bit RISC design. The Intel Pentium chip was first launched the next spring, but initially only ran at 66 MHz. Finally, it was also around this time that the “clone wars” began as Advanced Micro Devices brought down prices by settling a lawsuit with Intel and retaining rights to clone the 386 and 486 chips.

Data and Sample

We use a novel survey administered in 2001 to all 105,928 alumni from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to generate a sample of firms where we have detailed information on founders as well as on firm performance. An alumni survey is particularly appropriate because it enables gathering data from a well-defined population of comparable individuals.

This survey generated 43,668 responses. Out of 7,798 alumni who had indicated that they had founded a company, 2,111 founders completed more detailed surveys in 2003, representing a response rate of 25.6%. In previously published work the authors show t-tests of the null hypothesis that the average (observed) characteristics of the responders and non-responders are the same statistically, for both the 2001 and 2003 surveys. Industries covered include aerospace, architecture, biomedical, chemicals, consumer products, consulting, electronics, energy, finance, law, machine tools, publishing, software, telecommunications, other services, as well as other manufacturing. Each founder reported information on firms that he or she had founded or attempted to found up to the date of the survey. This new database was further updated to 2006 data from the records of Compustat (for public companies), United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), and Dun & Bradstreet (private companies).[3] A total of 3,156 alumni had indicated that they had started multiple companies, of whom 960 completed the survey for a multi-founder response rate of 30.4%. A total of 1,107 single-firm founders responded to the survey giving a 21.8% response rate out of the 5,086 single-firm alumni founders. The results of this survey have been reported on previously (Hsu, Roberts, & Eesley, 2007).

[1] In April 1981, Byte Magazine Editor in Chief Chris Morgan mentioned the Osborne I in an article on "Future Trends in Personal Computing." He wrote: "I recently had an opportunity to see the Osborne I in action. I was impressed with its compactness: it will fit under an airplane seat. (Adam Osborne is currently seeking approval from the FAA to operate the unit on board a plane.) One quibble: the screen may be too small for some people´s taste."

[2] The Lisa´s slow speed and high price ($10,000) led to its ultimate failure. The Lisa ran on a Motorola 68000 microprocessor and came equipped with 1 megabyte of RAM, a 12-inch black-and-white monitor, dual 5 1/4-inch floppy disk drives and a 5 megabyte Profile hard drive. The Xerox Star — which included a system called Smalltalk that involved a mouse, windows, and pop-up menus — inspired the Lisa´s designers.

[3] Successful matches were found for 80% of the company names in the D&B database. A firm is included in the Dun & Bradstreet database when it needs to obtain a credit rating.

Huang Engineering Center

2010-11-02T02:13:00.000-04:00

Lake Lagunita

2010-11-01T02:20:00.000-04:00

My favorite running spot recently. You can see the Stanford Dish off in the distance.