He talks about entrepreneurship, what they learned in his early days at Paypal, mistakes they made and how that helped shape the decisions he makes today. Peter encourages entrepreneurs to think big: don’t just build a feature or a solution that will have an incremental and small impact on an industry, but build something that will change the world.
He says, “create a business that is so valuable that investors are willing to invest not just a ‘little’, but a significant amount of capital.” In other words, a technology that is so disruptive that it will have an impact on how we live. This isn’t unlike the advice that Vinod Khosler gave on the Techcrunch Disrupt stage earlier the same week. Below is a two-part video that I shot of his keynote, close to 30 minutes in length for both segments.
Eventbrite’s CEO Kevin Hartz talks about success, early days of Eventbrite and what investors look for from early start-up ideas and products. He was one of the keynotes at the September Vatorsplash event in San Francisco.
Kevin even gets specific by letting entrepreneurs know what Sequoia Capital looks for. Advice: they look for outsiders/the unknown, those with special insights into the future, those who want to ‘change the world,’ and those unbound by the heritage of the past.
Imagine if every child were issued a tablet computer? This is the next step beyond Nicholas Negroponte’s “laptop for every child” initiative. Below he speaks with GigaOm’s senior writer Matthew Ingram and Marvell’s Co-Founder Weili Dai on the Mobilize stage in San Francisco this past week.
The idea behind creating a new platform opportunity for developers is that getting tablets in the hands of children can help to fix IT literacy problems around the world, particularly in developing nations.
CloudFlare made a big bang at Techcrunch Disrupt this past week. I had an opportunity to chat with the team on-site. Says their founder, "you can lose up to 2% of visitors of their site if they have to wait to get to your site. A second concern is that you have to ensure your site is secure – in other words, you need tools to keep anything that can harm your own site or visitors of your site at bay."
He adds, “we brought a solution and tools to consumers and small businesses that were previously reserved only for giants with large budgets. We’ve made it so easy to deploy, that you can get it set up in 5 minutes, i.e., a change to your name server settings and you can get all the benefits of CloudFare."
Their average performance boost is 30% and it keeps spam and bots away. They say that they can also help a site run faster by 26%. CloudFlare has had over 6 million unique visitors in the first four months of their private beta.
Since launching at Techcrunch Disrupt, they’re seeing 2.1 new websites sign up a minute, which means at current sign up rates, that they expect, 13,700,000 in October, 5 times traffic increase in just a day. He adds, “we have shown that we can cover our costs and this is something that speaks to a large audience.” Below is community evangelist Damon Billian on more benefits and how CloudFlare works.
Julian Treasure has an interesting talk to get to sound health in 8 steps. He says our increasingly noisy world is gnawing away at our mental health — even costing lives. His 8-step plan includes advice on softening sonic assault (starting with those cheap earbuds) to restore our relationship with sound.
He notes that women listen expansively compared to men and jokes that if men could take one thing away from his talk, it’s to listen more expansively and you’ll transform your relationship.
Noise is killing 200,000 people a year in Europe. He says that there’s a price we pay from music compression; we have to work harder to get the sound and using bad headsets are part of the problem or using them incorrectly. 61% of students have hearing issues related to poor headphones. Quality ‘listening’ means you don’t have to turn the music up so loud.
The last two things I took from his talk and my favorites: Silence is beautiful. He says the Elizabethans described language as Decorated Silence – how great is that? And secondly: Sound Design is the Future. Julian encourages us to design everything around us with sound in mind.
The Acumen Fellowship is a one year program that immerses Fellows in world-class leadership training, field work with social enterprises on the front lines, and a community of change makers and thought leaders.
For 2011, they received over 550 applications from over 65 different countries for 10 positions. While each Fellow comes from a diverse background and brings a unique skill set to the Fellowship, below are some key indicators of a successful Fellow:
* Proven track record of leadership and management responsibilities
* Experience working in emerging markets
* Unrelenting perseverance, personal integrity, and critical thinking skills
* Strong passion and commitment
* 3-7 years of work experience
* Graduate degree preferred
Below is a synopsis of some of the fellows and what they have done and where.
One forgets just how often an email is fired to the wrong person, the wrong team or from the wrong address. One also forgets important things like webcams which remain on, conference call lines that don’t quite hang up entirely, Outlook auto-completes and speaker phones that are not on mute when you think they are. A bunch of industry people were interviewed for the video including myself. It’s quite amusing.
