A Fresh Start (up)

 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.

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.

As a “want to be” entrepreneur, I felt quite guilty not to decide to create (again!) a company after my studies. But sometimes working for a company at a junior level is not such a bad choice, especially if the company helps you initiate projects.  Guy Kawasaki’s book The Art of Start confirms that intrapreneurship is possible: “A large number of aspiring entrepreneurs currently work for big companies. Like all entrepreneurs, they dream of creating innovative products or services and wonder if this can be done internally. The answer is yes.”

As I will study intrapreneurship at UCLA (if I finally get the courses I chose, which is everything but sure!), I would be interested in gathering great examples of intrapreneurship (being successes of failures), so did you experience any? How does your company foster intrapreneurship?

I know that a lot of people have already read The E-Myth revisited by Michael E. Gerber and that it is quite an old book, but I have been amazed by the simplicity and the truthfulness of how the author describes the mind of a business owner. I have quite a good experience of very small businesses: I have created one, my mother has created her own fashion shop and my father owns his fishing boat. And what Gerber describes is exactly the mistakes my parents and I have done in our businesses. I have made a more detailed review of this book on Tech It Easy here, and I strongly invite you to read it, but in a few words, the psychological brakes which prevent owners from creating efficient businesses:

- Owners focus on the product rather than on the business (my mother always tells me that her clothes are fantastic so she does not understand why she does not manage to make ends meet).

- Owners build a business based on their talent and personality rather than on processes, which makes impossible to grow the business or to create others on the same model.

- Owners go to work in their business rather than on it.

And to finish, just to show you that this guy is great:

I am one of those people completely obsessed by business, and here is my last obsession: I love Twitter, I have evangelized it among my non-geek friends, I have put their widget on this blog, I defend it against Jaiku or Powce, in a word I am one of the best customers they can expect, and… I have almost never updated my Twitter feed via SMS, which means that I have not made Twitter gain one cent. Apparently, I am not the only one as Twitter seems to be burning $116K /month.

Of course the absence of business model does not make the product bad, but I am afraid that it makes it not viable, unless… it is bought by a bigger company which will either find a business model through synergies with existing activites or just use it as a way to give a modern image to a whole portfolio. In this case, Yahoo! is probably the most likely to be interested.

But in the case of an acquisition, how to value Twitter? I read more and more articles saying that a site generating good traffic can always find a good business model, but is that really true? Of course we can’t value Twitter according to its profit or to its turnover, as it is too restrictive to include the huge potential linked with the rapid adoption. So how can someone value a company without business model?  Do we base the estimate on the number of visitors, the number of users, the number of widgets impressions? But these criteria are not worth anything unless they are monetized at least through advertising, and there is absolutely no proof that Twitter users won’t leave the service if it becomes full of ads (especially widgets).

My thought is that even if Twitter’s strategy is to increase the customer base until acquisition, they will need to find a business model before acquisition as it seems absolutely necessary for the valuation, and if they find it (and a good one), then they would have no good reason to sell. Or the company which will want to acquire Twitter will already have a secret business model in mind and in that case Twitter won’t have any strenght in the negociation.

So what do you think? Do you have an estimate in mind (or read in the press) and based on what?

I just went back from the FEVAD (French e-commerce federation) conference at Four Seasons Hotel George V (gorgeous). The 2 debates were quite interesting, and I have kept in mind a few things, sorry if they are a mess.

About the Internet in general:

- Internet brands are becoming a “patchwork”; it is stupid to try to gather a brand image in one and the same place (meaning that distribution becomes far more relevant than destination);

- The consumer in an information trader: there is no absolutely reliable information on the web (prices for example evolve all the time), so users now deal with statistical significance to get their information. 

About e-commerce:

- Multichannel is everywhere, the term “pure player” is really old fashioned (best example: Pixmania opening offline stores)

- Jean-Emile Rosenblum (Pixmania founder) said that the fast development of ecommerce in other European countries is due to the right to sell at a loss, which is not allowed in France. Of course I understand this interdiction is a pain for major players which would like to use it as an investment on prices to grasp market shares, but I think this is why the French market is so buoyant: small companies still can enter the e-commerce market without fearing that Amazon would launch a price war, as it has done in other European countries.

About advertising:

- When talking about advertising on Google, we differentiate natural search (free) from sponsored links (paid). But this differenciation is not relevant anymore because there are so many sites on the French market that this is becoming harder and harder to grasp good positions in Google natural search, which implies hiring more employees to improve the natural search of a website. So at the end, natural search is all but free for e-merchants. For example, 20% of Pixmania employees are dedicated to improve Pixmania ranking in Google main result page!

And to finish, congrats to Jacques Antoine Granjon, who won the FEVAD award, for being such a great and simple guy. He is one of the first entrepreneur to say without any complex nor arrogance: “we have all the market, we are doing fine, we have no particular threats, and we don’t need any investment” ! 

As you may have noticed it if you have taken a look at my Linkedin profile, I am currently doing an internship at eBay finishing at the beginning of July.

On Friday morning I was wondering: why am I so happy to go to work today? Of course people are really cool, I have an amazing manager, eBay is a very dynamic company… but it is not sufficient, there must be something else. Why do I always defend so vigorously my company when somebody highlights its shortcomings?

Then this week-end I read Guy Kawasaki’s book, The Art of Start. He basically says that great companies are created to make meaning, to change the world, to make the world a better place. eBay is exactly that: it has been created on the assumption that people are naturally good and honest, and that they can be trusted.

So when I go to work every morning I have the feeling of doing something good, the feeling of helping create an efficient marketplace, based on people’s honesty, relying on a strong community of passionate people. I have the impression that the development of eBay’s ecosystem is not only right because it generates additional profit but also because it helps people to create a trading activity more easily, giving them access to millions of customers around the world without supporting high fixed costs. And I can’t help feeling proud of what I am doing when I hear from an entrepreneurial success, or people having met great other people (and sometimes the love of their life!) thanks to eBay.

Guy Kawasaki is definitely right: making meaning is key when you create a company.

And you, do you have the impression that your company is making meaning? Why do you like it if it doesn’t?

I have a great passion for innovation mechanisms, and I try to understand how to achieve payback through innovation. It raises a lot of challenges (cultural, social, organizational…) and it seems that it is quite hard to get the perfect mix of all those criteria. I will speak about all these challenges in more details in other articles, but I wanted to start with the obvious: how to choose the right model to manage your innovation project? How to deal with your ecosystem?

I have based my thoughts on a really good book (even if it is a bit too academical for me) : Payback (James P. Andrew, Harold L. Sirkin). It gives a clear vision of the three different innovation models: integration, orchestration, licensing. I have shared these thoughts and examples with Tech IT Easy’s readers here.

As you may know it if you have read the page “About this blog and myself“, I will work in January in the investment fund of a French entrepreneur (Nate Cohen) in Miami.

Nate and his partner Yonathan Arfi have had the amazing idea of giving French artists access to the American market, thanks to their knowledge of French expatriates. With their company ARCO Prod, they have already managed Gad Elmaleh’s and Julien Clerc’s tours, and are now in the middle of Patrick Bruel’s tour, which has been a huge success in Los Angeles and San Francisco.

So if you are in Miami on Tuesday, on New York on Thursday or in Washington on Friday and want to spend a really cool night, go there to buy your tickets online!

Here is an amateur video of the show in Los Angeles: