Segmentation and execution matter

My favorite meeting place here in Silicon Valley is any place named “Panera”: the food is fresh (if overpriced), the atmosphere is bright and cheerful, and — most importantly — the Wi-Fi is free.

Even now that Wi-Fi is free at Starbucks, I prefer Panera because they are less cramped and they have things that I actually want to buy to rent the table. There are three I use regularly near my home, in addition to several in San Diego and one in Santa Monica. I was at one last night and will be at a different one tomorrow morning.

Ron Shaich, founder of Panera, was interviewed this morning in the WSJ about how the created Panera and its predecessor, Au Bon Pain. He bootstrapped his first bakery chain, then merged it with a struggling supplier called Au Bon Pain. The merged company IPO'd in 1991.

To have something that was more suitable for suburbia he then acquired a small sandwich chain and renamed it Panera. To pay for the growth, he sold off Au Bon Pain.
So with his Harvard MBA, Shaich turned around and grew two existing concepts through superior execution. Although the competencies were similar, he found it essential to keep the two organizations (and concepts) distinct:

Q. After Au Bon Pain went public in 1991, you decided the company needed a new focus. How come?

A. The very thing that had made Au Bon Pain a success was limiting it. We could go to Rockefeller Center or World Trade Center and offer real food to people that could be served quickly, like turkey with smoked brie. It did extraordinarily well in high-density markets, but it wasn't mass-market.
…
Q. Why did customers like Panera?

A. We changed the environment [of fast dining] away from formica chairs bolted to the floor. And we changed the bread itself. We make fresh dough, every night. We have thousands of bakers. Those details really matter.

Chronic (aka serial) entrepreneurs seem to bore of old challenges and be always chasing the next big thing. But in this case, Shaich shows the importance of keeping the two businesses distinct, and not trying to achieve synergy (or brand extension) by blurring the lines.

Also, in Silicon Valley we tend to think of entrepreneurial advantage in terms of superior technology, IP or other formal entry barriers. In this case, both the Au Bon Pain and Panera concepts were something anyone could have had — the vision is much more incremental than Ray Kroc or Harland Sanders.

The success of Panera Bread Company (PNRA) was a function of willingness to bet on the vision, the ability to execute it consistently — and the ability to generate (or acquire) the capital necessary for expansion. As technology-based industries become more mature and more crowded, these previously underestimated success factors are increasingly important.

Tradeshow tribulations

Perversely, as an entrepreneur one of my favorite parts of the year was going to trade shows. They were a lot of work, the prices and labor restrictions were ridiculous, but it was the one time a year when we could interact with the rest of the world and show our stuff.

This morning, USA Today has a great article on Scott Friedman and his experience at the Consumer Electronics Show last week in Las Vegas. Apparently, Scott was the only one in the building not selling a tablet.

Instead, the CEO of SoulR Products in Southern California was peddling a $80 high-fidelity portable iPod speaker, the "WOWee One.”

What I found particularly interesting is that the article runs through the budget for the company and its product. The company has $200k of founder money and $300k of outside money.

Perhaps more relevant to aspiring entrepreneurs everywhere is the CES budget

• $23k for the 20x30 booth
• $27k for booth construction
• $5k for a consultant
• $20k for other expenses — furnishings, photographer, hiring booth bimbos

This is probably 10x our budget for our last booth in 1993, but that was only a 10x10 at MacWorld Expo San Francisco (back when that was the must-see event.)

I think the article fills in a useful gap for new entrepreneurs, in making concrete the process of using a trade show to promote a new product. Columnist Jefferson Graham deserves kudos for his efforts.

Cleantech entrepreneurs: life without VC?

Cross-posted to Cleantech Business.

Statistics released Friday by the Cleantech Group say that “cleantech” VC investments in 2010 hit a record $7.8 billion, up 28% from the $6.1 billion in 2009 for North America, Europe and Chindia. The N.A. data was even more impressive, up 45% to $5.28 billion. Worldwide, solar continued to account for the largest share of the investments, up 52% from 2009 to $1.83 billion.

Although this sounds encouraging, Iris Kuo of VentureBeat had a different take. First, cleantech VC investment has been declining for the past two quarters. Instead, the capital-intensive have been going to government sources, including BrightSource, Solyndra and Tesla.

However, analysts are just beginning to realize that cleantech businesses may be fundamentally unsuitable for VC investment. A series of clues have emerged in the past 6 months.

Exhibit A was the whole debate started by VC Fred Wilson and his “two venture capital industries” thesis:

The first VC industry is investing in software based businesses. The software VC business has been fundamentally altered by the massive decrease in the cost of building and launching a software based business.…

The second VC industry is investing in cleantech, biotech and other capital intensive tech businesses that have economic models that have not been fundamentally altered. This VC industry operates largely the same way it has operated for the past twenty or thirty years.

The statistics were supported by TechCrunch data from the first 8 months of 2010: an average of $5m for web/ecommerce vs. $31m for cleantech.

Exhibit B was the decision of Kleiner Perkins to pull back from cleantech investing and go back to its roots in IT. Of all the major Silicon Valley VCs, KPCB had made the most aggressive bet on cleantech — particularly green energy. This is the firm that in 2007 made a partner out of a former presidential candidate and Nobel Prize winner.

Exhibit C are the observations of one of the most respected IT industry executives, analysts, inventor and entrepreneurs: Bob Metcalfe (MIT ’69), inventor of Ethernet and founder of 3Com. Having finished a decade as a venture general partner, last month Metcalfe said that the VC model (so far) does not fit cleantech:

Q: What did you learn from your investing in clean-tech, or as you call it, enertech?

A: I’m still in the process of learning – this is complicated stuff. But I learned that the innovation environment in the energy space is not there yet. The problems we see are a mismatch between the asset class called venture capital and the innovation opportunities in energy – it takes too much capital and it takes too much time. But I claim that’s only because the innovation environment in energy hasn’t developed, say, the way it has in pharma. Drugs take a lot of money and a long time, but there’s a lot of venture capital activity in drug discovery. That’s because the drug-discovery business has grown into being able to exploit the venture capital model. The partnerships that big pharma has with drug companies in stage one, stage two, stage three [clinical trials] allow venture capitalists to do what they do and get the returns that they need. The energy space has not quite developed, but it will.

This entire debate was anticipated by Prof. Martin Kenney of UC Davis, the editor of Understanding Silicon Valley — perhaps the leading academic expert on Silicon Valley and a longtime expert on hightech VC.

In July 2009, Kenney wrote a book chapter entitled “Venture Capital Investment in the Greentech Industries: A Provocative Essay” that will be published in the Handbook of Research on Energy Entrepreneurship. He notes a number of warning signs:

1. investors have been pouring money into green energy without being able to get it back from IPOs;
2. market growth may be slow, since “clean” technologies are competing with established (and cheaper or better) incumbents;
3. the cleantech bubble investing bubble parallels the Internet bubble;
4. thus far, the most successful cleantech businesses have been self-funded: either bootstrapped (e.g. Danish wind turbines) or internal green ventures from existing multinationals like Siemens and Sanyo.

Kenney tries to offer a positive scenario, suggesting that VCs could learn and adapt like they have in biotech. However, in the past 18 months have been signs that biotech VC may be facing similar problems (if the returns to pharma R&D are becoming less certain).

While the scale of investment in energy is enormous, the VCs have various reasons to actually favor larger deals (and often pension funds throwing money at them to invest). While VC worked great during the 1990s with relatively small investments followed by quick exits via IPO or acquisition, but both are much harder in renewable energy.

The first problem is the time scale. If (as Zider’s 1998 classic HBR article suggests) VCs seek a 10x liquidity event after 5 years (to cover their losers), then doubling the delay to 10 years cuts the IRR by more than half (and the NPV even more than that). For a 10 year exit — and ignoring the increased risk of failure — the same IRR would require a 100x return.

The other problem is that the size of the investment reduces (if not eliminates) the opportunity to exit via acquisition. A 10x return via acquisition was common for $50m dot-com investments, but such exits are going to be much rarer with $500m invested; a 100x return is going to be out of the question.

If VC can’t find a way to make money off cleantech investments, then cleantech entrepreneurs are going to have a hard time bringing their businesses to scale. Without VC, new businesses will have a hard time competing with self-funded multinational incumbents — or government-funded enterprises in large centrally-planned economies.

Biz plan contests: more are better?

The LA Times this morning ran a story on the business plan competition at the USC Greif Center for Entrepreneurship. On the front page of the business section (which today is not its own section) and with an obligatory picture of the latest winner, on one level the story was a fairly conventional reporter’s response to a college press release.

However, what caught my eye is that USC is not content to have one business plan competition, but seems to have four: the (original?) Greif competition, a New Media competition (“Crunch”?) at the Annenberg School of Communication, a newer New Media competition planned for the business school, and then a competition at the Viterbi engineering school

I know at SJSU, we’ve tried to make our business plan competition be an all-campus event, and that seems to be the philosophy at Stanford and MIT too.

There are occasional exceptions. When I was researching tech entrepreneurship programs at the top 25 business and engineering schools in the US, I noticed that Purdue has a separate Life Sciences Business Plan Competition.

There are pros and cons of each approach: The bigger all-campus competitions should be able to offer bigger prizes: MIT now offers $100k to its top winner, as well as more visibility. The smaller contests are probably going to be capped at around $10k top prize money (the three winners at Greif were awarded $12,500 each.)

On the other hand, the more focused competitions will be easier to judge, because the competitors are more homogeneous and it’s easier to get judges who can span this narrower domain. The size of the competition is kept more manageable. And perhaps more importantly, I think the organizers and judges can provide better feedback to the contestants.

The LA Times article notes — as any contestant or organizer would tell you — that the value of competing goes beyond the money to include the practice, the feedback and the connections made. My hunch is that where a campus can support multiple, college-specific competitions, the students will learn more and get a better career boost than the all-campus Inventapalooza that would otherwise ensue.

Seeking a judicious decisiveness

Coming to the end of his second journal editorship, economist (and Yahoo researcher) Preston McAfee reflected on the thousands of decisions he had to make — rejected 90+% of the submissions.

His views on decision-making seem directly applicable to the core problem of an entrepreneur: making decisions quickly based on incomplete information:

When Paul Milgrom recommended me to replace him as a co-editor of the American Economic Review, a post I held over nine years [1993-2002], one of the attributes he gave as a justification for the recommendation was that I am opinionated. At the time, I considered “opinionated” to mean ‘holding opinions without regard to the facts,’ and indeed dictionary definitions suggest ‘stubborn adherence to preconceived notions.’

But there is another side to being opinionated, which means having a view. It is a management truism that having a vision based on false hypotheses is better than a lack of vision, and like all truisms it is probably false some of the time, but the same feature holds true in editing: the editor’s main job is to decide what is published, and what is not. Having some basis for deciding definitely dominates the absence of a basis. Even if I don’t like to think of myself as “obstinate, stubborn or bigoted,” it is valuable to have an opinion about everything.

In his resume, there’s little evidence of any entrepreneurial bent, and in fact he was the economist helping the Federal Trade Commission attack the creative (if controversial) Rambus business model.
I do see one problem in applying his model to a startup. The editor of an elite journal has hundreds of very bright minds to draw on. Yes, half of them may say “no” when asked, and some have personal agendas. But still, this is a tremendous pool of knowledge that can correct egregious errors by the leader.

No such pool of knowledge is available to the tech startup, which raises the risks of overconfidence by its leaders. Certainly scientists (and to some degree engineers) tend to have the view there is one “right” answer. When it comes to the merits of an idea, some overconfident leaders tend to assert “this idea is wrong” when really “this idea is wrong for us.”

Henry Chesbrough famously noted that in innovation, firms often control for false positives (Type I errors) and predictably end up creating too many false negatives (Type II errors). This is one of the reasons he came up with “open innovation” paradigm — both to remind firms to avoid Type II errors, and to suggest specific mechanisms for profiting from good ideas that don’t fit.

Still, a judicious decisiveness is essential for any entrepreneur or entrepreneurial management team. From my own experience, it’s clear that postponing decisions often makes the decision for you. The key is that if it’s important, the startup can’t afford to “watch and wait” but instead must aggressively investigate to obtain the missing information.

References
R. Preston McAfee, “Edifying Editing,” American Economist, 55, 1 (Spring): 1-8.

Hat tip: pointer to McAfee essay via blog of Greg Mankiw.

Child entrepreneurs II

One of my dilemmas on this blog is how much it’s about engineering and how much it’s about entrepreneurship. I solve that by sometimes combining both, sometimes focusing on one or another.

Distinctly on the engineering side is the First Lego League, a program for kids 9-14. After experiencing FLL as a coach, the past three years I’ve served as a judge — including last Saturday at St. Lawrence Middle School in Santa Clara. The first round tournament was one of 22 organized this month by NorCalFLL and Playing at Learning.

With a St. Lawrence teacher, I was evaluating the efforts by half of the 18 teams to solve this year’s puzzle: find a biomedical solution to a human health problem. (The project is completely independent of most exciting element of the FLL competition: making a Lego robot to run the maze.)

In the end, our evaluation criteria seemed fairly similar to what an engineering school would use for a business plan competition (or idea fair) for these same kids a decade later:

• A good idea, well researched
• Professional, polished presentation and visual aids
• Balanced team roles in the prepared remarks and Q&A
• Enthusiasm and creativity in engaging the audience

Except for the content, the best teams were as good as the undergraduate teams that I’ve seen in my business school teaching for almost a decade.

The big problem we had in judging was balancing creativity vs. realism in their idea for a biomedical product. Some teams had fanciful ideas that were utterly infeasible. Others had utterly prosaic ideas that were so practical that someone either is implementing them already or will be soon. The best came up with something that might not be feasible today but could be soon.

If I had one piece of advice to give the kids (or parents or teachers) of how to balance this, it’s this: do more research. Understand your problem, customer, competitors better; understand the technology better; think through more details of implementation.

As it turns out, that’s not that different than my advice to b-school seniors for their business plans. Or, for that matter, what many entrepreneurs wish they’d done before they launched their companies.

In other words, this program for developing elementary and middle school engineers is a good predictor of skills they’ll need in college or even the real world. That‘s an impressive testament to the leadership of the FLL program, including founder Dean Kamen (creator of the Segway) and retired MIT professor Woodie Flowers (who essentially created the robot competition at MIT).

I wonder if researchers will follow up on the FLL (or FRC) competitors to see if they are more likely to entrepreneurs 10 or 20 years later.

Note: Although this is my second posting in a week on childhood entrepreneurship, it doesn’t reflect a new emphasis of the blog, just my personal interest in entrepreneurship and K-12 STEM education.

Really young entrepreneurs

Normally we think of tech entrepreneurs as starting in their late 20s — earlier if their name is Jobs or Zuckerberg — but after they have an education and perhaps some work experience.

Tonight I heard a talk by an entrepreneur who thinks every kid should do a startup (or similar creation effort) before graduating from high school — because he began his own journey in 4th grade — and was shipping his first product through Amazon at age 14.

Anshul Samar spoke a K-12 event of the MIT Club of Northern California, a speaker series that I co-chair. His is an interesting story of technical entrepreneurship that involves science, consumer products, and outsourcing. It’s also a story — unlike child actors — of pursuing his dream part-time while keeping his education as the primary goal.

It was a little surreal having a high school student lecturing a room full of MIT grads (including a couple of PhDs) on entrepreneurship and science education. But he's clearly grown from his entrepreneurial journey and his many speaking opportunities.

The short version is that the once-devoted Pokemon player wanted to make an educational card game. Before having a real chemistry class, he settled on the elements as providing both real science and a basis for strong characters. The result was Elementeo, which is Pokémon-meets-Periodic-Table.

The idea was clearly novel, novel enough that well-meaning grownups eventually introduced him to Peter Adkison, founder of Wizards of the Coast (think Magic and Pokémon cards) who gave him manufacturing advice. Along the way, Anshul spoke at the various conferences: California Association for the Gifted, TiEcon Silicon Valley and the American Chemical Society.

Like any first-time entrepreneur, Anshul had to learn a lot on the job. He knew almost nothing about chemistry when he started, but fortunately library books on the elements were not very much in demand. He had the usual epiphany about financials, PR, logistics, cash flow, distribution.

One 21st century lesson was the power of outsourcing. To make his game look professional, he needed professional artwork, which he was able to outsource using a website and email to create PDFs that were iterated until they were ready for 4-color printing.

He also learned the value of 3F money — dad works at Oracle — rather than professional investors. While VCs approached him after TiEcon, he realized that “If you end up taking the VC money, it’s like 60 hours/day: work work work”.

Instead, he’s going to school, working on the game in the summer and vacations and doesn’t feel guilty about occasionally watching TV. He also plans to go straight to college in 20 months. Unlike Jobs or Zuckerberg or Gates or Dell, he’s not going to put his education aside to pursue his entrepreneurial passions. (Although Woz eventually finished college.)

His story suggested two aspects of the nature of entrepreneurial opportunity. First, users can have creative insights as to their own needs (a user innovation argument) that have not previously been realized. Secondly, although not a dime a dozen, entrepreneurial vision is far move common than entrepreneurial success: the difference is ability to obtain and effectively apply resources to realize that vision.