Learning from Google ... and the Marine Corps

In 1998, while still serving on active duty in the U.S. Marine Corps, I co-founded what later became a speech recognition web development company. The following year, I completed my military service, moved to Silicon Valley to join my three partners on a full-time basis, and unwittingly launched myself onto a personal and professional path centered on entrepreneurship and innovation.

You would think that the transition from military life to a high-growth startup at the epicenter of the "Internet Boom" would have been jarring. Ironically, it was not. It took me a while to realize that the Marine Corps and High-Growth Tech Startups share a common culture, and so my military training actually helped to prepare me for the crazy hectic life of a startup leader.

In Corps Business: The 30 Management Principles of the U.S. Marines, author David Freedman seemed to agree with my assessment. His research indicated that Marines are uniquely trained to handle quick decision-making in uncertain situations with limited information. Perhaps more important--and contrary to popular misconceptions about Marines--the Marine Corps fosters a culture of de-centralized decision-making that empowers even the most junior enlisted Marines to make significant critical decisions, often with life-and-death consequences or even international policy ramifications.

Years later, former Google executives Eric Schmidt and Jonathan Rosenberg wrote How Google Works to provide some valuable lessons on how to foster an "Internet Century" culture in a corporate environment. As you can see from their slide presentation below, they focus on the "smart creatives" that are so essential for modern business success.

How Google Works from Eric Schmidt

The environment that enables companies to recruit such talent and allow them to thrive is in many ways the exact same environment that the Marine Corps has been pushing religiously for over two centuries. In this way, perhaps business executives seeking new ideas for how to turn their companies into innovative growth engines should look to both Google and the Corps for some valuable lessons?

Semper fidelis!

Founder Institute presentation

On January 8, 2014,I gave a 30-minute presentation to a group of local Atlanta tech entrepreneurs. This was part of the Founder Institute accelerator program, which is the largest of its kind in the world.

The topic was "Vision and Ideas", so I spoke primarily about aligning a new venture's vision with at least one of the entrepreneur's personal passions. I also worked through a simple tool for conducting a high-level analysis of new business ideas.

The camera work and audio are not perfect, but ... enjoy!

And the slides ...

"Dream Bigger, Change History"

On October 31, 2013, I moderated a roundtable discussion at the Pioneers Festival in Vienna, Austria. The "Explorers Panel" including Ariel Fuchs of SeaOrbiter and Bas Lansdorp of Mars One, both of whom are working on incredibly ambitious entrepreneurial ventures. The Festival was a 3-day celebration of technology innovation, with 50+ speakers, 25+ startups, and 2500+ attendees.

There were some technical glitches that prevented the introduction and conclusion from going exactly as planned, but overall the entire session went quite smoothly.

It consisted of 4 sections:

• Part 1: "Dream Bigger, Change History"
• Part 2: Highlights from my professional life
• Part 3: Panel discussion
• Part 4: Conclusion

Here is the video:

Since the final edit of the public video focused more on me and the panelists than on the constantly changing slides, here is the entire slide presentation:

On Leadership and Space

Whether it is teaching entrepreneurship to students, analyzing leadership with colleagues, or discussing myriad issues with my three kids, I have always found a powerful tool in drawing parallels to popular culture. Points really seem to hit home when viewed through the lens of something that we otherwise feel is benign or simply entertaining.

About a year ago, Alex Knapp, a staff writer for Forbes, wrote three wonderful blog posts about leadership. The posts would have been fine as stand-alone analyses of sound leadership principles. However, what really drove home his points--and made the pieces such an easy read--was his framing the arguments within terms of two popular space media franchises, Star Wars and Star Trek.

Regardless of whether you are a fan of either series, his articles still focus on solid leadership advice.

	Five Leadership Mistakes Of The Galactic Empire
	Five Leadership Lessons From Jean-Luc Picard
	Five Leadership Lessons From James T. Kirk

The Start-Up of You

Last year, two people who I truly respect, Reid Hoffman and Ben Casnocha, published a book called The Start-Up of You. It is a terrific book laying out a new philosophical approach toward careers ... an approach that is entrepreneurial and wired for our global 21st century. I really hope I can pass along some of these innovative ideas to my children (currently 14, 12, and 10). Until then, I will enjoy this recently released summary:

Start-up of You, Visual Summary from Reid Hoffman

Ed Lu & the B612 Foundation

On February 15, 2013, a small asteroid named 2012 DC14 passed extremely close to Earth, garnering global attention. Despite many "boy who cried wolf" accusations in the past, it seemed like this particular fly-by was getting too close for comfort, and people took particular notice of ongoing expert warnings of imminent natural catastrophes from a potential direct impacts.

Enter Ed Lu. He is a former NASA astronaut, who I had the pleasure of meeting during our 2012 Sea-Space Summit at Google's headquarters in Silicon Valley. He is dedicating his life to saving our planet from rogue asteroids.

Ed knows that we currently have the technology to divert any asteroid heading directly toward Earth. The challenge is giving ourselves enough of a warning. Therefore, in true entrepreneurial fashion, he helped launched the B612 Foundation. Named after the title character's asteroid home in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince, the Foundation has plans for a modern asteroid early-warning system based on a single infrared space telescope placed in orbit around the sun. Their "Sentinel Mission" would identify and map any potentially threatening asteroids.

To customize an oft-quoted phrase, "If the dinosaurs had had Ed Lu, the B612 Foundation, and the Sentinel Mission, they would probably still be around." Let's hope modern homo sapiens take advantage of our good luck.

Gary Vaynerchuk

In April 2011, I had the privilege of spending a few days with 1,000+ fellow entrepreneurs and "world changers" on a cruise ship during a unique experience called "Summit at Sea". It was a huge life-changing experience for me, and it gave me the courage to continue following my passions as a social entrepreneur. Not only did I meet some amazing people with incredible talents, but I also listened to several motivational--and entertaining--presentations by various awesome speakers.

One of the most hilarious talks was given by Gary Vaynerchuk, whose brazen delivery of heart-felt insights brought down the house. During the presentation shown below, delivered a couple of years before I saw him in person, he talks about one of the key messages I try passing on to every entrepreneur I meet (as well as my kids): to be happy in life, you have to pursue your passions. It is a valuable lesson to learn ... and apply.

Martin Jetpack

Following up my previous post about Jetlev, here's a land-based version called the Martin Jetpack. While it is not yet commercially available, it won't be long ...

Jetlev

Jetlev has got to be one of the coolest new toys/techologies in a while! Hopefully I'll get to try one in 2013.

MSN "News on Main"

Over the years, I have been interviewed many times for print, web, and broadcast news outlets. Perhaps I have become jaded, but I am not easily impressed with the end product from most media or journalists. It is rare to end with a piece that is factually accurate, visually compelling, entertaining, and informative. Of all the stories I have appeared in, my recent experience with MSN's News of Main is probably my favorite. They were extremely professional from start to finish, the crew they sent to conduct the onsite interviews was a pleasure to work with, and their finished product was well-structured and edited. Below are the two stories they ran, one focused on me personally and one focused on OceanGate as a startup venture.

Guy Kawasaki's "10/20/30 Rule"

I can't believe I haven't already posted this before, but regardless here is Guy Kawasaki presenting his classic "10/20/30 Rule" blog post:

Excellent Video: Making Money Online

A while back, someone sent me this excellent video of a talk by David Heinemeier Hansson, the creator of Ruby on Rails and a partner at 37 Signals. Although he focuses on Web-based businesses, there are some terrific lessons learned for all entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs Are "Risk Aware"

When I relocated from Silicon Valley to the DC area in December 2001, I was thrust into a wild period of "culture shock," going from one extreme on the entrepreneurship scale almost to the other. The experience--coupled with my ongoing travels and work with entrepreneurs from around the world--has helped me appreciate more some of the intricacies of this unique but critical sliver of an economy's machinery. Most specifically, I have been intrigued by the gap between non-entrepreneurs' perception of entrepreneurs and the actual reality, especially on one critical point: risk.

The "conventional wisdom" -- at least outside the world of entrepreneurs -- is that entrepreneurs are "risk lovers" or at the very least have a high tolerance for risk. However, my own experience has been that almost every successful entrepreneur I have met is more concerned with managing, mitigating, or timing risk, and only embraces risk as an essential component of an ongoing "risk-reward" analysis.

Yes, entrepreneurs have the genetic make-up to work with risk on a daily basis--not everyone has the stomach for that in their own lives. However, to say that this translates into being a "risk lover" or taking crazy/unnecessary risks is a bit of a jump. Instead, I would propose that entrepreneurs are simply more "risk aware" than most non-entrepreneurs.

For more on this topic, check out this interesting discussion.