We are particularly proud to announce that Ben Casnocha is joining us as a speaker on the occasion of the 9th Synetgies event.

Drawing on his own experiences as entrepreneur and the ones he gathered in writing his book, Ben will discuss what it means to think entrepreneurially in all contexts, not just in the process of starting a business. He will present a series of ideas, facts, and provocative opinions around the entrepreneurial mentality, and then facilitate a discussion as well as the usual interactive Q&A session.

Ben Casnocha is a Silicon Valley ­based entrepreneur and author. Currently twenty years old, he serves on the board of Comcate, Inc., the leading e-government technology firm he founded six years ago. He has received various accolades. In 2006 BusinessWeek named him one of America’s best young entrepreneurs. In 2004 PoliticsOnline ranked him among the “twenty-five most influential people in the world of Internet and politics.” The Silicon Valley Business Journal named his blog one of the “Top 25 in Silicon Valley.” His work has been featured in hundreds of media around the world, including CNN and USA Today. He’s a commentator for public radio’s “Marketplace”. He is a seasoned speaker on entrepreneurship and leadership, and he cofounded an intellectual discussion society for business and technology executives.

These 9th Synetgies event will take place on the
Date: 19.05.2008 at 19h15
At: ETHZ (Zürich) - HG E 33.3

Please apply through our Facebook-Event or by e-mail at team@synetgies.org.

Looking forward to seeing you there!

Popularity: 30% [?]

by Gabor Cselle, San Francisco, California, November 22, 2007

Most revolutionary new technology products and Internet services come from a handful of large companies and small startups. What’s the secret sauce?

Successful and profitable large companies such as Apple and Google invent and produce such products as the iPod, the iPhone, Google Maps, and Gmail. In contrast, startups have developed products and services such as Google Search (back when Google was a startup), Hotmail, PayPal, YouTube, Blogger, Facebook, and Twitter.

Users and the press rave about these products, and they have generated large valuations and profits. How does this kind of product innovation happen?

In this article, I’ll contrast product development at large and small companies. I’ve experienced product development at Google (where I worked on Gmail and some unmentionable projects) and Yahoo (where I interned at the end of the last bubble). I’m currently working on my startup, Xobni, where my role involves development as well as setting engineering and product priorities. We’re a small team of 10 people and are building new ways to search and navigate your email. Thus, I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum.

Between the two extremes of small and large companies, there are a few common denominators:

• Both types of companies start with good people who are smart, well-educated, and passionate.
• They provide good tools: High-end workstations, great infrastructure, and good benefits.
  For example, Google will pay employees for health insurance, serve free food and drinks, coupons towards buying hybrids, gym memberships, and the like.
• They set a culture that is centered on engineers.
  Engineering is the scarce resource, as it hard to find excellent engineers who can create great products. Openly or covertly, PR, Marketing, Sales, and HR are seen as second-rate citizens. This is most clear at Google, where engineering is kept on the main campus, but HR and PR are located in “Siberia“: office buildings so far away that employees have to use bikes and scooters to commute to meetings.

Most people think of “innovation” as “ideas”. But there’s no lack of good ideas. At Xobni, we have an internal Wiki page with hundreds of product ideas. At Google, there’s the ideas mailing list on which you can find thousands of employee-submitted proposals for new features and new products. I’m sure that Microsoft has an equivalent tool. But anyone who has added to that Wiki, or written to the ideas list knows that they are the place that ideas go to die.

What really counts is execution: At large companies, the ideas that survive have a strong proponent who will get support for the idea, find colleagues to work on it with, defend it in meetings, and launch it to a public. This is what happened at Gmail: Paul Buchheit started working on a webmail client, found others to work with, defended it against VPs who said that an ad-supported model would never work, and managers who said that it is prone to extinction because of Microsoft’s control of JavaScript. At startups you’ll find the same process (but less meetings): Xobni’s most popular feature is search. It was two of us who took it from a feature added as an afterthought to one of the core pieces of our functionality.

Yet, there are many differences. Large companies and startups both have their own set of advantages that play in their favor when executing ideas:

Large technology companies

• Resources: As the name says, large companies have tons of people. Once management is convinced of the viability of a project, they can put people, infrastructure, and money to work to make the idea become reality. Giants move slowly, but once they do, the earth starts shaking.
• Experienced management: In Silicon Valley, senior managers at large companies typically have startup experience. They started or joined small companies that got bought or went public. They know how to manage innovation and push interesting projects forward.
• Instant credibility: When Apple, Google, Microsoft, or Yahoo launches a new product, the world listens. If a startup had released Google’s phone SDK, there would not have been so much Google phone speculation in the press, weeks before the launch. Consumers will feel safe buying new Apple products when they’re launched, because they would know where to buy and what level of quality to expect. Startups have to build a really good product and build it from the start, build press relationships, and resort to guerilla marketing as needed.

Startups

• Focus, clear priorities: You’ll never see a company as focused on progress as a startup. At Xobni, the number one priority is to get high-quality software out the door. There’s only this one project: There are no distractions, no talks to attend, no other projects for engineers to switch to. We’re all sprinting towards a clear goal.
• Aligned incentives: At startups, employees have a significant amount of stock in the company, and their financial future is highly correlated with the success of the company. Thus, there is only one controlling variable: Their contribution to the product. If they can add or improve features, they will. On the other hand, large corporations attract resume stampers who are sometimes guided by self-interest: Their priority is to rise in the ranks, not contribute to overall success.
• No lockstep development: Startups have small numbers of people working on small products. Large companies work on large products with lots of people. These people require coordination and planning. For example, I’ve heard that the feature sets of Microsoft’s Office suite are planned out two releases in advance, with two years between each release. This means that a product manager on Word knows what features the product will have in 2011. If you’re an engineer at Microsoft and have an idea, it may not get executed upon until four years from now! In addition, there’s the burden of reverse compatibility: Every new feature must be compatible with versions of the software that are decades old.

In summary, we explored differences in how startups and large companies run innovation and product development. There are some commonalities – great people, focus on engineering, and good tools – but startups have large advantages because they are more focused and have no existing customers, products, and profit lines to look after.

Gabor Cselle is the VP Engineering at Xobni, an email software startup in San Francisco. Gabor received a Master’s degree in computer science from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETHZ) for his thesis on “Organizing Email”. Prior to joining Xobni in March 2007, Gabor was a software engineer at Google Switzerland.

Popularity: 78% [?]

by Christian Emigholz, November 16th, Leipzig

Spreadshirt is often considered to be a reference for building up a company. Its history provides an example for many uprising (potential) entrepreneurs. Its company culture is said to reflect the spirit of an inspiring start-up (a reason for me to come here). The entrepreneurial spirit seems to belong to Spreadshirt like the ‘Amen’ to the church.

Regarding its five years of existence, the market entries of several competitors and a total number of 250 employees (150 in the HQ in Leipzig), one might wonder whether Spreadshirt could maintain an “entrepreneur’s spark” in their employees – a willingness to undertake a venture and to achieve through taking risk, improvising by following a vision.

The answer? - Well, they try to.

The theory: Core values of Spreadshirt’s company culture

The entrepreneurial Spirit is fostered (if not ‘spread’) among the employees through one of Spreadshirt’s core values. Such a value (there are six in total) reflects the “typical” Spreadshirt culture and shall be internalised by each employee. Each new employee has to attend a so-called “cultural onboarding” where Lukasz (founder of Spreadshirt) introduces these values.

At the last general assembly (a monthly held employee meeting) the relevant core value of this article was addressed: “think smart, move fast”. This value is about lighting the entrepreneurial fire in every employee. The following statements specify what thinking smart and moving fast should mean to the Spreadshirt employee

• behave as if you were the owner
• apply common sense, not rules
• structure is the servant not the master

Spreadshirt wants its employees to think out of the box. They shall not simply follow procedures and given tasks. They shall question, dare to do differently and improve the given. The employees are not only responsible for the output, they provide input to the organisation.
The rationale behind is the learning organisation. Spreadshirt operates in a fast-changing (web-) environment, where the ability to adapt to new circumstances is the crucial factor that decides about success and failure: “Be quick or dead” was the concluding phrase in the general assembly.

The practice: Entrepreneurship among employees at Spreadshirt

The employees can be regarded as the working hands of their department manager. Employees are quite self-dependant in working-style, work location and the way tasks are carried out. Nonetheless, if problems and questions occur, the informal culture allows it to let the employees give feedback (and proposals) to their managers. Employees thereby avoid a risk of failure and let their managers know where change and innovation is needed. Possible solutions are then discussed (complicated process) and eventually taken into practice (a long list of proposals still wait for implementation at Spreadshirt’s IT). Nowadays it’s more of an innovation process, than it is entrepreneurial spirit that changes Spreadshirt or that determines its future actions.

The above-mentioned explaining statements for think smart, move fast show the natural trade-off: More structure means less entrepreneurial spirit. The more employees an organisation has to coordinate, the more necessary structures become. If employees change the structures of their working environment by “being entrepreneurial” they endanger the proper functioning of the whole organisation.

Thinking smart and moving fast shall in fact encourage employees to generate ideas on how to do things better. The big difference between a young start-up and an adolescent company is how these ideas are taken into practice. The individuals of a start-up necessarily implement their ideas more or less straight away. Often no best practice exists and nobody can be asked. As structures, processes and hierarchies are set up, employees (can) rely on their managers and profit from the organisation’s past experiences.

In my opinion the adolescent Spreadshirt can’t be called “entrepreneurial” anymore. I consider “controlled innovation” a much more appropriate description.

An additional note: As more employees enter a growing company, the likeliness to employ only individuals with an entrepreneurial attitude diminishes. Creating (!) an entrepreneurial spirit can’t be achieved through something that will often only remain a phrase: think smart, move fast.

After studying general business administration at the University of St. Gallen (HSG), Christian is currently taking an internship at Spreadshirt in Leipzig. Before eventually running his own business in the future, he wants to learn from others who have overcome the peaks and problems an own venture faces.

Popularity: 71% [?]