Alterthefuturenow: Forum Making Money

Politico said he wasn’t, now Fox News (and Frum Forum) say he is. To help you process this news, read Ed’s post from this morning about Obama potentially spending a cool billion on the 2012 campaign and then have a look at Jay Cost’s graph of Republican fundraising over the last four cycles. Said Cost, believing that Steele was set to bow out, “In the end, this is what did Michael Steele in. He could not raise the money, and that just will not do moving forward.”

Or will it?

Ending weeks of rumors that he would not seek a second term, Steele plans to throw his hat into the ring during a conference call with RNC members at 7:30 p.m. ET, the sources said. Steele is said to be amused by false reports of his retirement and intentionally kept his plans secret for the last month in order to flush out competitors for the post, Fox has learned.

During Steele’s tenure, Republicans picked up 63 House seats in last month’s elections, the biggest gain in more than seven decades. But Steele has been dogged by criticism from some Republicans who see him as prone to missteps.

Criticism of Steele has helped lead to a crowded field of challengers seeking to head the RNC. Among those who have officially announced they are in the race are Saul Anuzis, a committee member from Michigan who ran and lost to Steele in 2009, and Reince Priebus of Wisconsin, a former member of Steele’s inner circle, along with former Luxembourg Ambassador Anne Wagner.

So that explains why he didn’t show up at the RNC chair debate: He was lying low, cagily making it look like he wouldn’t run again so that, er … more contenders would jump into the race. Frum Forum’s whip count puts him at around 45-60 votes in the first round of balloting, with 85 needed to win; several of his former aides and allies (Reince Priebus, Gentry Collins, etc) are in the race as challengers, so a key question will be what happens to their supporters if/when they’re eliminated in the first few rounds. Are those supporters so disgruntled with Steele that they’ll gravitate to a consensus alternative, like Saul Anuzis? Or are they actually clubby RNC insiders who prefer Priebus and Collins to Steele but will resort to the chairman as a next best option if their preference is eliminated? Or will some outsider with fundraising appeal, like Norm Coleman, sweep in to provide yet another alternative?

There are only two reasons to conceivably back Steele, as I see it. One: The GOP did, after all, win 63 seats on his watch, and he’s been lying low enough over the last few months that at least it looks like the gaffe-o-rama phase of his chairmanship is finally over. All of which is well and good, but in that case I urge you to follow the link up top and eyeball Cost’s graph again. The question isn’t whether the GOP did well this year, it’s whether it could have done better if the RNC had been flush with cash. Gentry Collins argued that poor fundraising might have cost Republicans an extra two dozen House seats, but given that he’s now challenging Steele for the chairman’s position, take that estimate for what it’s worth. Two: If you believe that, in an age of online donations and targeted giving to campaigns, the RNC will never again be relevant the way it once was, then maybe it’s better to keep Steele in place. It’ll avoid a nasty public squabble between pro-Steele factions, led by Palin, and anti-Steele factions like the “Bush establishment,” and it’ll spare us the spectacle of Steele doing interviews to dump on the GOP after he loses. Plus, if Steele’s reelected, Republican outside groups are bound to start planning way ahead to pick up the slack in case the RNC can’t get its act together to fulfill its traditional fundraising and GOTV roles. No one cares about the RNC as an organization, only that its functions are being done and done well by some conservative outfit. If Steele’s reelected, it means that some other outfit or outfits will be pressured to step up. Inconvenient, but not fatal. I think.

I spent two weeks of December in Chile as a guest of Professor Cristóbal García, Director of EmprendeUC at the Catholic University of Chile, which just signed up a 3-year collaboration partnership with Stanford’s Technology Ventures Program.

I did a keynote on innovation hubs at the newly created DoFuture program, spoke at Santiago’s Startup Weekend on Customer and Agile Development, and at a Conference in Patagonia supported by the Ministry of Economy’s Innovation Division.

I got smarter about the world outside of Silicon Valley, met some wonderful people who made me feel part of their family and shared some thoughts about entrepreneurship.

This post is a personal view of what I saw in what I call “Chilecon Valley” — in no way does it represent the views of the fine institutions I teach at.

Read this with all the usual caveats: visiting a place for a few weeks doesn’t make you an expert (heck I’ve lived in Silicon Valley for over 30 years and I’m still surprised), I’m not an economist, and the odds are I misunderstood or misinterpreted what I saw or just didn’t see enough.

Creating the Next Silicon Valley – The Chilean Experiment
Chile has decided that it wants to be an innovation hub in South America.

In my short time in Chile, I spent time meeting with:

Chilean entrepreneurs; as part of Santiago’s Startup Weekend as well as EmprendeUC-DUOC New Ventures Contest Awards ceremony.

The government; the Innovation Division of the Ministry of Economy, the Chilean Economic Development Agency, (CORFO) which sponsored Start-Up Chile and Do Future in Patagonia as well as Fundacion Chile, the main R&D agency and the National Innovation Council.

Universities; including the business, design and engineering schools in the Catholic University of Chile who are hard at work teaching and encouraging their students to think big and to start companies.

Independent non profits such as the Innovation Forum, encouraging entrepreneurship and innovation in education.

The good news:
Entrepreneurship and innovation is being talked about continually in Chile. This isn’t some small-time effort. The country is dead serious in all levels of government and universities about making this happen. They’ve been thinking hard and smart about the lessons to be learned not only from Silicon Valley, but with only 16 million people, they are also looking for lessons from other small innovation clusters such as Israel, Singapore and Finland. These countries are great models of countries too small to sustain startups of scale on just domestic consumption yet have managed to create innovation with a global reach.

What needs work:
As an outsider I was incredibly impressed with how far Chile has progressed in making the country an innovation hub. However, I had questions about the challenges that still needed to be addressed.

Venture Capital
Perhaps it was just who I was meeting, but for a country so focused on innovation and startups the lack of venture capitalists was noticeable. Given the interesting things going on in the engineering labs I visited and the startups I met, one would have thought the place would have been crawling with VC’s fighting over deals. Instead it felt like the government – through CORFO - was doing most of the risk capital investing. Given that great VC’s are much, much more than just a bag of money, this means that startups lack experienced board members with practical experience. There seemed to be very few who knew how to coach entrepreneurs and to build companies. Finally, it wasn’t clear if everyone was on the same page; that for a Chilean startup to scale it was going to have to reach past Chile and go global. There seemed to be few tools, techniques and strategies to do so.

A sign of progress will be when some of the CORFO guys leave the government and start their own VC firms.

Corporate Connections
Entrepreneurship in Chile seems to be disconnected from the country’s largest industries and core resources. The clearest example is the country’s copper mining industry, which contributes 20% of the Chilean Gross Domestic Product. (Chile produces 35% of the world’s mined cooper.) The largest company, the state-run Chilean National Copper Corp CODELCO, has $23 billion in sales. Yet the copper companies import nearly 100% of the advanced technology they use. Interestingly, CODELCO is required to contribute 10% of its revenues to the armed forces, but the mining industry seems to have little or no connection with innovation and entrepreneurship efforts in universities and startups. (Perhaps it’s because the Ministry responsible for Mining is separate from the Ministry responsible for the Economy and Innovation.)

I suggested that Chile’s mining industry could contribute to building innovation leadership by funding a multi-tiered initiative in the country’s leading universities:

Professional management training (obvious and immediate payback)

Applied engineering (top 10 annual challenges from the mining companies)

Basic research (copper based materials science, robotics, materials handling)

Small Business versus Scalable Startup versus Corporate Entrepreneurship
There’s confusion in both the Government and Universities about the difference between small business entrepreneurship (startups designed to be family businesses,) scalable startup entrepreneurship (startups designed from day one to scale big inside Chile and then expand globally) and corporate entrepreneurship.

I suggested that they think about educating (and funding) each class of entrepreneurs differently and realize different regions of Chile have different needs. In Santiago the concept that startups are not smaller versions of large companies and traditional business school classes and methods don’t apply, is starting to take hold and will help shape how they educate entrepreneurs. In contrast, over lunch with the governor of Ultima Esperanza (the “Last Hope” province on the Southern tip of Chile,) it became clear that there’s a pressing need for training and education in small business entrepreneurship, dramatically different then the scalable startup education wanted in Santiago.

These three types of entrepreneurship need to be explicitly recognized, encouraged and managed.

A Magnet For Talent
My sense is that Chile has not yet “declared a major.” Saying that you support entrepreneurship and innovation is a start, but the sentence needs to be finished. Entrepreneurship and innovation in what field? Where will Chile establish technical and innovative leadership? Is the only way they will attract talent by paying entrepreneurs to come to the country? Or will students and entrepreneurs come to Chile because it is one of the best places in the world for innovation in certain specific industries (pick your favorite – alternative energy? materials science? food science? cellulose outputs? video games and film? South American web commerce hub? automated mining? UAV’s? etc.)

Already there are multiple centers of excellence in the engineering schools in Santiago with strong entrepreneurial professors. Yet no dean, provost or government minister seems to want to issue a declarative sentence that says, “For the next five years we’re going to focus on building world-class leadership in these three areas.” (Perhaps because the cost of a public failure is so high in Chile. See below.)

I suggested that what seems to be missing is a stated goal for Chile to become a magnet for talent in specific domains. Why will people from South America stream to Chile, besides its magnificent geography? In what fields will Chile’s universities and entrepreneurial culture create such an irresistible pull?

A Culture that does not accept failure
Chileans I met were concerned that their culture was not accepting of business and/or personal failure. This is not the land of second chances where failure means you are an experienced entrepreneur. Partially due to a lack of bankruptcy or commercial courts, the bankruptcy process in Chile is draconian. In discussions with accounting and financial professionals, I learned that getting caught up in it feels like a Dickens’s novel, it can take years to shut down a company.

In addition, in Chile the cost of personal failure is high. If you fail, you’ve failed your family, your community and your country. As a result, societal pressures favor people who avoid risky ventures. Because its entrepreneurs are unlikely to make commitments or definitive statements which they know might be risky, i.e. “we’re going to be a leader in our market” or “our startup will be $100 million in five years,” Chile can’t foster the “reality distortion field” that underlies a dynamic entrepreneurial culture.

I suggested that perhaps using a science analogy could help change Chilean perspectives about the risk and experimentation it takes to build new ventures. Entrepreneurship and incubators could be described as an “Innovation Laboratory” - similar to a scientific laboratory where entrepreneurs develop and test hypothesis (iterative guesses) about new business models. And like science, starting a new venture is not a linear process but one that involves failures, dead ends and changes in direction.

Lessons From the Valley
At one of my presentations the audience was a mix of deans of multiple schools at Catholic University, government officials from the Ministry of the Economy, active entrepreneurs and students. I offered that Silicon Valley’s rise was serendipitous, that you can’t reverse engineer an accidental Entrepreneurial Cluster formed in the Cold War. However, we can point out the elements that made our valley successful, and point out the ones that may be helpful in Chile; the role of Universities and defense-driven university R&D, the rise of venture capital, a failure-tolerant culture and the emerging science of entrepreneurial education. Slides 22, 36, 97 and 117 are the key points.

Come To Chilecon Valley
If you’re serious about understanding centers of entrepreneurship outside the U.S., Chile is now one of the required stops. The progress in the last few years has been nothing short of outstanding.

I’ll be back.

Lessons Learned

Chile is trying to engineer an entrepreneurial cluster as a National policy

They’ve gotten off to a good start with a committed Ministry of the Economy

The universities are on board with passionate faculty and excited students

The country needs to build a deeper Venture Capital industry

Chilean core industries need to view entrepreneurship as an asset, and technological innovation as an opportunity to leap forward

Second chances are hard to come by in current Chilean business climate and culture

surface encounters rock tops surface encounters macomb mi

Thursday, January 6, 2011

Forum Making Money

No comments:

Post a Comment

Followers

Blog Archive

About Me