A Fresh Start (up)

As a part of my investigation on the differences between the real American culture and the one we see in teenage dramas, I thought that had to post a note about a tradition closely linked with college life: Greek Life. This post is inspired by an article of the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s newspaper.

According to this article, all the clichés we have about fraternities and sororities, such as hazing and alcohol abuse, are mainly exaggerated, at least at UCLA. About hazing, a member of a fraternity affirms that all Greek organizations at UCLA abide by the university’s policy against hazing, their organization’s national hazing policies, and the California State Law. He also adds that “not only do not we haze because it’s not allowed, but also we don’t find it conducive to the morals we stand for.” Concerning the fact that members are supposed to party all the time, this having a bad impact on their grades, he recalls that all the sororities and fraternities have a higher GPA average than the university’s all male and all female GPA average. He thinks that this is due - among other things - to the possibility to be tutored by other members.

More objectively, concerning the recruiting process, it differs for each organization. The 11 sororities have a common recruiting process starting on “Zero Week”: after having registered online, all the candidates attend a mandatory orientation session, then visit the 11 houses on the first two days of recruitment, and, as each day progresses, narrow down their choices. Each day, they are called back to a fewer number of houses. By the end of the process (called “bid night”), they end up having up to two choices. Concerning fraternities, the recruiting differ widely from one another but they all say that they are looking for “diversity and maturity”, whatever these words might mean.

At UCLA, 13% of the student body is currently involved in the Greek System, which is comprised of over 62 organizations.

For my course of entrepreneurship, I had to interview an entrepreneur to understand the major obstacles to overcome when creating a venture. Raphael Labbé, one of the co-founder of U.[Lik], has took the time to share with me the story of U.[Lik] from an entrepreneurial point of view. As many of you know, U.[Lik] allows users to share their tastes by creating their own online library where they can aggregate their ratings of cultural products (music, cinema, arts, people…).

You can find the story here on Tech IT Easy. Be careful, the article is really long, but how can you shorten an entrepreneurial story? Since entrepreneurship is all about mentoring, it has been really great for me to discover Raphael’s entrepreneurial adventure, or “rollercoaster”.

If you want to discover my tastes, visit my lounge on U.[Lik] here. Christmas is approaching, so please also check my wishlist ;-). And good luck to Raphael and Mathieu to build this “cultural Babel” (sorry but this expression rocks!).

I’ve already written about the failure of my company creation but that’s not the kind of thing you get over easily especially when a good friend sends you an email proving that your idea wasn’t crap because… somebody else is developing it, but is doing it much better than you were.

When I created BlogEntreprise, my idea was to tackle a growing niche of the blog market: small businesses and clubs, by allowing them to communicate simply and interactively with their customers, members or prospects without requiring a webmaster. Creating a corporate blog platform was also a way of creating a directory of these blogs, unlike other blog platforms mixing personal and professional blog.  As I said in my previous article on the subject, the main problem was the awful design, and the fact that we had absolutely no money to invest in it. Finding investors would have been impossible as neither my partner nor me were committed full time.

Blog4Trade is doing EXACTLY the same: a directory of corporate blogs, classified in different categories of the corporate world,  with exactly the same positioning (”the first blog platform 100% business”, targeting small businesses), with exactly the same marketing speech about the advantages of a blog for a company and exactly the same features (”blog of the month” on the home page).

But clearly, when you look at the two screenshots in this article, would you rather create a blog on BlogEntreprise on the left or on Blog4Trade on the right? The decision takes less than a second. But what is really hard to swallow is just that all the key success factors were there, except one (design) which would have cost no more than €3000, but it is an amount we didn’t have at the time.

No great idea cost nothing. They always cost something, even if “something” is really low. So you really have to evaluate this “something” before because, how great your idea can be, it won’t be revealed unless you finally get this “something”. Now I will leave my bitterness to wish good luck to Blog4Trade which seems to be a really good platform!

 A lot of my courses are oriented towards entrepreneurship and technology management, so I will use some of them as a raw material for some articles here or on Tech It Easy.

I just published an article on Tech It Easy concerning a process to generate breakthrough innovations, especially in technological companies, by identifying “lead users” on a specific market. If you want to take a look it’s here.

I don’t want to talk here about religion, I just want to talk about faith. From what I saw this week end in San Francisco (and I really don’t know if I can generalize, as SF is such a special place!), American people have a really demonstrative way of showing their faith. And surprisingly, I loved it.

On Sunday morning I went to Glide Memorial Church, as advised by my travel guide (I’m still such a tourist!), to attend a gospel celebration. But what I found there was a communion of really happy people, only linked to each others by their “faith”, even if they really don’t seem to have the same definition of that. After some amazing gospel songs, a lady in a beautiful and sexy suit (no idea who she was) started to speak next to the reverend about the values of Glide Memorial Church: absolutely everyone is accepted (religion, sexual orientation, ethnicity), as God loves everyone unconditionally. In France, this may sound as a marketing speech, but in SF, when I looked at the crowd gathered there, I promise that it was a concrete proof of what she said: homeless people, traditional American families, people from all nationalities and all ages…. Then a gay man started to speak about the future workshops of the church: “how to be happy as a gay or a lesbian” and spoke about the “management of the difference” in today’s world. It was really good to see that there is such an acceptance, even if I’m sure that I won’t find the same kind of church in the Midwest… So, even if at the beginning I thought that this kind of faith is a bit weird as, in my education, basically if you are Muslim you don’t pray the same God as if you are Christian, I rapidly realized that if faith is aimed at making people happy (even if I don’t agree with that definition), then Glide Memorial Church has probably understood the key message. I sang hand in hand with diverse people, I was hugged many times by people I didn’t know anything about, and at the end I felt like these people had found some kind of comfort in this place, and it made me happy to.

By the way, for all my friends who read that and are getting worried because I’m usually so cynical, don’t worry, Glide Memorial Church is not a cult, or at least I suppose it isn’t since it is mentioned in my travel guide!

I managed to record an extract from one of the gospel song ( I know that I’m an incorrigible gospel fan…), so just enjoy this really short podcast!

This is kind of the paradise for a girl like me. All the logos of the big Internet companies are appearing on all sides of the road… Silicon Valley is definitely my Disneyland

By the way, being there is a great gift for my birthday (and thanks to all of my readers who wished me a happy birthday ;-))… But unfortunately you are now punished by being obliged to watch another one of my awful podcasts… This time, it’s about the HP garage in Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silicon Valley: I think that you can see on the video that I am delighted to be there, even if it’s just the entry of a garage which can’t even be visited

As you can see, this blog is definitely taking a more personal approach; but I will keep on speaking a lot about tech in the weeks to come, probably essentially on Tech IT Easy.

Today was my first day of class, and I have dreamt my whole life to take courses in a prestigious American university mainly because 1) I wanted to feel like a teenage drama actress (I know, I’m too old for that!), and 2) I wanted to be able to compare French and US education, to try to understand why European university are still lagging behind US ones.

Of courses the main point is that a lot of money is needed to attract excellent professors, not only in terms of wages but also in terms of resources. Why would a professor prefer teaching at a campus miles away from Paris rather than teaching at sunny UCLA? Besides, the available resources in terms of research, networking and cross-functional teams cannot even be compared. So I can completely understand HEC’s challenge, and I think that HEC is finally doing pretty well compared to the level of competition.

 But the difference is still striking. Today, when I walked into this class about regulatory environment for small businesses, I had a really bad a priori about it, as I hate dealing with regulatory, accounting and administrative stuff (which is why I made and will probably make again a quite bad entrepreneur). But as soon as the professor started to speak, I didn’t miss a second of it, and it’s almost impossible to miss a second of it. In one hour, he used all the tools a professor can use to capture students’ attention. He spoke about his personal experience as an entrepreneur, he made jokes about the fate of the entrepreneur, about the necessity to support friends from Morgan Stanley showing their paycheck to everyone while the entrepreneur is struggling to make ends meet, he used multimedia stuff (videos), he used sports examples to illustrate legal concepts, he “cold called” students to push them to participate in the discussion…

I realized how great it was when I looked at my notes: the page was almost empty, because I was so concentrated in everything he said that I didn’t even need to take some notes. In a word, American people are really lucky to have an “easier” access to this kind of education.

As you may have noticed, this blog has been going in every directions these past weeks. I created it a few months ago and was willing to wait until my expatriation to launch it, but I couldn’t resist and I started this blog by talking a lot about Internet stuff, as it is the sector I love, and because I was really focused on that those past few months.

But the Internet is not the only thing I would like to talk about; in fact I realize that I would like to be able to write about everything I like, everything that surprises me, everything that scares me. In a word, I would like to talk about my life, because it’s often what blogs written by a unique author are, and life is diverse, fortunately.

I have spent one week and a half in the US now and I can’t manage to catch up with Internet news, so at this moment I can’t say anything great about Internet stuff but I would love to talk about American educational system, about the difficulties of expatriation, about the fact of being immersed in a group of international people… And I will probably go back to tech subjects in a while because I’ve taken courses in Technology Management at UCLA which are really promising. And I’m still working on my thesis about the impact of the Internet on the art market so I will also bring cool stuff about it.  And I know that it is hard to find a consistency between Internet, entrepreneurship, digital art, expatriation and education topics, but the common thing they share is that they are all part of my life…

But I also know that I can’t ask my readers to be interested in everything I like, so I really don’t know what to do

In a word it would be great if you can give some feedback on the subject. Do you think that blogs have to be specialized so that readers know what to expect? Or that if you like a blog it’s because you like the author (:-)) and would be interested in knowing more about him/her on multiple topics?

PLEASE, I really need your comments to figure that out, and it can also bring an interesting discussion about what blogging really is.