Entrepreneurship
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Discussion
Do you want to spend the rest of your life selling sugared water or do you want a chance to change the world?
Here at Stanford University Entrepreneurship is a big deal. So, what's going on? We are all thinking about "Changing the World," "Getting Ideas Out There," "Making a better World," "Protecting the Environment," "Building bigger and better technologies," and so on...
We are a very small group of people if one considers the number of people out there in the world. So, we need the support of all those who are capable of understanding the concept and helping us build a better world.
What kind of issues do we like to discuss?
Social Entrepreneurship
- How can we help the developing nations build up
- How can we help women and children
- How can we eliminate poverty and provide jobs to everyone
Technology
- Really, what kind of technologies would we like to work towards? These days, there is a trend towards building anything and everything that comes to mind, but we need to figure out the proper directions, don't you think?
- Biotechnology
- Nanotechnology
- Medicine
- Gaming
- Internet
- Robotics
- Space Exploration
Education
- How can we improve the quality and quantity of education
Our professor Tina Seelig here at Stanford proving that entrepreneurship can be taught as always:
The guy who went from one red paper clip to a house: http://oneredpaperclip.blogspot.com/
One of the questions Tina loves to ask is "Are you a born entrepreneur or are you made an entrepreneur." And in my case I'm both. In India, Mittal (Agrawal) are known to be born entrepreneurs, and on top of that I'm getting a Stanford education. You can see there are 2 Mittal in the list of the top 100 in the world http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_billionaires and you can also see the Stanford grads like Larry and Sergey in that list. Given this background that redefines the probability of success as very high.
Really, the stories Tina told in the video above, they were taught to me at home, but this is the first time I'm seeing them taught in a classroom. The old version of the paper clip story goes as follows: A passionate but poor entrepreneur wanted to start a business, and so he went out to the richest investor in town. The rich investor laughed at him and said, "the best I can do is give you that dead rat lying on the street in front of my house, why don't you go start your business with that." The poor entrepreneur picked up the rat, and wondered how he could do business with it.
The poor entrepreneur was carrying the rat down the street in his hand when a woman's cat saw the rat and became excited. The entrepreneur gave the rat to the cat. The cat was content. Seeing this the woman gave the man some bread. The man took the bread and walked on towards home as it was getting late. He had to pass through the woods to get home, and in the woods he met an old man who was lost and hungry. The entrepreneur let the old man have the bread and fetched him some water from a nearby stream. The man was happy, and it turned out he owned a large wood mill. The entrepreneur got the job of a manager there, and converted the small wood mill into a large estate. Then when the old man died, in his will he left the estate to the entrepreneur. Well, a red paper clip to a house, or a dead rat to an estate, the essence is the same.
Alright, I've built you Whackpedia, I've given you so much useful information, and a nice story too. If you want to continue trading information with me, you better add some useful stuff to Whackpedia.
Making Meaning
1. Increasing the quality of Life 2. Right a Wrong 3. Prevent something good from dying out - ex. environment
How to Hire
Karma
Great stuff has a way of surviving, and stuff that dies might have been stuff that you thought was great but .." I sort of disagree with this statement. A fruit tree is a great thing, and if brought up right, it can give fruits, but even great ideas are often killed, by not bringing them up right. But of course, Karma is always there, and sometimes its just that it finds a way to do great things even through people who haven't done the best. Even having a lot of money or being rich doesn't necessarily mean the person has a happier life, and if a person's Karma is bad, despite being rich he will not feel the same comfort as the poor person with a better Karma.
