"Being a Generalist" Part 2 -- The HOWTO Guide

A successful entrepreneur needs to know both the technology and the market, as young Thomas Edison learned his lesson. So how does one become a generalist? Here are some quick ideas:

1. Attend conferences and seminars. Pure networking events are often boring. When you attend a conference or a seminar with a technical or business theme, not only will you be able to learn something out of your domain of expertise, but you'll be able to chat with like-minded entrepreneurs and potentially foster new ideas. NECINA is one such non-profit organization providing these types of entrepreneurship opportunities. 

2. Step up and volunteer. Say your a technologist and would like to gain more marketing insights -- find an organization where you can contribute on the marketing and customer-facing side. Conversely, say you have an MBA background and would like to gain some tech chops -- find an organization where you can help develop and maintain its website. The beauty of volunteering is that the entry bar is often lower (e.g. you are often spared a formal interview process), it usually won't conflict with your day job and employer, and you will feel good about adding social value.

Don't just learn by reading a book. Learn by doing. Not only will you gain hands-on experiences in the field, you will get good advice and mentorship this way as well. Have you ever dreamed of having experts sit down and share their insights and experiences with you on a topic of your interest? Yes, this is a sweet dream. After all, you are no longer in school and you are not paying them. However, if you contribute to a course of their interest, they will often be more than happy to do the talk while you do the work. See, get your interests aligned, and here comes a win-win.

3. Plan your career transition. Compared to the above two options, this one is much risker and less feasible. After all, changing your full time job requires careful consideration and is not always feasible due to many constraints. You might be ready for the transition, only when all the following conditions are met: a) you have gained enough expertise in your current job are no longer as motivated; b) there is a new opening that you are qualified for, excited about, and can learn skills; c) if the new gig fails, you have fall-back plans.

Again, any radical transitioning involves a lot of risk. Why not reduce the risk by trying something part-time, as a volunteer? I have some excellent volunteer opportunities for you, on both business and technology tracks. Ping me and I will offer you the leads for free.

P.S. I am not a recruiter, and has no financial interest involved. How I do enjoy match making. :-)

"Being a Generalist" Part 1 -- A Lesson that Thomas Edison was Taught

Dear friend, if you are still not convinced by my previous post about the importance of being a generalist and diversifying your skillset, let me tell you another story -- A story about the legendary inventor and entrepreneur Thomas Edison, and his first patented invention.

At the age of 22, Edison invented a voting device that automated ballot counting through electrically and chemical mechanisms (recall modern computers did not yet exist in that era). This brilliant device not only significantly reduced the error margin resulting from manual counting, but was able to shorten the prolonged voting process by hours or even days. Think about how much cost it would cut for the government!

However, things took a 180-degree turn, when the device was taken to Washington DC to meet its buyers -- the high-powered politicians. To Edison's astonishment, the politicians were abhorred by this invention, as its adoption would lead to a significant decrease in the time for conducting their political moves such as filibusters and lobbying. Clearly, when it comes to voting, faster is simply not better by their standards. But this was a new revelation to young Edison.

As a result, the device was a technical masterpiece, but sold exactly 0 units in the market. Imagine how heart-broken Edison must have been. But the lesson paid off in the longer run.

LOF (leap of faith) or NDA -- what would you do?

A friend of mine was recently approached by a startup founder to discuss potential employment or partnership possibilities. While this sounds like a wonderful career opportunity, he told me he was turned off by the founder's insistence that he should sign an NDA before they entered the conversation. Here are his arguments for why no sensible entrepreneur should sign the NDA in a situation like this:

1. How much the founder will be telling my friend about his company is solely at the founder's discretion. It is not clear what the founder is protecting against even before they enter the conversation. It only conveys a lack of trust and confidence, not exactly a turn-on during the "dating period."

2. When the start-up goes out to pitch VC firms for their funding, the convention is that VCs won't sign any NDA. Here is a starting point to research on this topic: http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=vc+sign+nda. For example, Brad Feld made some good points from the VCs' perspectives.

The irony is, clearly VCs will be more connected than an average employment/partnership candidate, and therefore bears a higher "risk" of "leaking" the start-up ideas to others. So why insist that the latter sign, but relax the rules on the former?

3. Here are some real legal concerns from my friend's perspective: The legal cases between Mark Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss brothers, or between Mark and Paul Ceglia recently are good entrepreneurial lessons that suggest one should never sign any NDA or contract casually. No one knows how the stuff he signed will affect his career 5 or 10 years down the road, right?

Well then, as a start-up founder, if you don't insist that people sign NDAs, how do you protect your ideas? Here are some heretic (read: non-scientific, non-data-driven) tips that are not taught in school: Be street-smart, and follow your gut feelings. If the candidate is a person you feel you can trust, then take a leap of faith and see where it leads you. Also, don't be too serious or overly protective with your ideas. After all, some say that ideas are a dime a dozen; execution is all that matters.

Natalie Portman is an outlier, and other entrepreneurial lessons learned from her career

Natalie won best actress Oscar for her terrifying portrayal in "Black Swan." 


I was not at all surprised and yet was super excited at that moment. How can I not feel exhilarated, when someone I've deeply rooted for in years finally received the ultimate recognition in her profession? When numerous daunting challenges have to be overcome with tenacity before success emerges in the line of sight? When brilliance and hard work paid off? 

Natalie's success story is inspiring to a young entrepreneur.

1. The 10,000 Hours' practice

Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" quantifies the amount of hard work that one has to put in before she masters a subject -- 10,000 hours' practice. This number might have intimidated you at the first sight, but rest assured that it is quite reachable. Say, if you have a sharp focus, and put in 8 hours a day, 250 days a year, it will only take 5 years to reach. If you are extra hard-working and energetic, and put in 80 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, you will get there in 2.5 years. By the way, 80-hour weeks are not uncommon for professions such as start-up employees and tenure-track assistant professors. 


Natalie's movie career has been longer than that. She was only 13 when she made her powerful debut in the movie The Professional (1994) (aka "Léon"). Though she was pursuing her education in parallel for many years, she has obtained abundant experiences in her movie career. Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation -- from her IMDB page, she has been a lead actress for at least a dozen movies. Say each movie takes 90 days to shoot, where she put in 10 hours' work per day (not a demanding standard), that's 12 * 90 * 10 = 10800 hours. 


The movie "Black Swan" is a must-see -- if you are an entrepreneur, it will teach you a lot about what not to do. :-) Also, the book "Outliers" is an entrepreneur must-read.


2. Diversify your skill sets, and trust the dots will connect
A successful entrepreneur is a generalist. She draws inspiration and insights from various sources. Natalie spent 4 years at Harvard studying psychology. This might have been considered by conventional wisdom a waste of time for such a talented actress, but here are her own words: "psychology seemed also a way where I could learn things that would be eventually helpful to my acting career without actually taking acting classes." What a farsighted statement it is -- will she have grasped in such a compelling fashion the role of Nina in "Black Swan," had it not been the in-depth training she has received in psychology? And yet, to quote Steve jobs, "you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."


Some more food for thought from Jobs' now classic "dot connecting" theory: "You have to trust in something --your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever-- because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference."



Are you comfortable with what you do? Are you still learning and growing?


3. The power of work/life balance and multi-tasking
When shooting the "Black Swan", Natalie also got engaged with the choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she is expecting their first child. Congrats Natalie!


This is a sweet slap in the face to those who equate a balance between work and life with a complete separation between work and life, to those whose hands come off the keyboard the moment the clock strikes 5pm, day in and day out. Who says work and life cannot be weaved into a harmonious symphony? Who says you had better work on only one thing at a time? Haven't you ever had interesting ideas or gained new insights when you mind wanders off, such as when taking a shower? 


Don't separate; integrate.


You have taught us well, Natalie. May the force be with you.

The Researcher vs. the Entrepreneur

High-tech startup companies often recruit technologists with PhD training into R&D positions, where the recruits and to continue down a highly technical and innovative career path. This often leads to win-win scenarios where the company receives a boost in its product offerings and enhances its intellectual properties, while the individual leverages the research and technical expertise she has built and is intellectually and financially rewarded by the challenging technical problems she helps solve. In this process, the individual is also likely to develop an entrepreneurial mindset, potentially leading the next wave of technical innovations in the IT industry.

However, for the researcher to become a successful entrepreneur, she has to adapt herself out of the researcher role that she used to play. I see the following key differences between a researcher and an entrepreneur.

1. Key inner drives
While both types of people can be motivated by external factors such as money and fame, their key inner drives are different. The researcher is mainly driven by her intellectual curiosity. Through reading, thinking and communicating, she constantly seeks to gain new insights into her research domains. In contrast, the entrepreneur is mainly driven by creating a real-world impact, which is often manifested in improving people's lives in concrete and measurable ways.

2. Problem solving methodology

When facing challenging technical problems, the researcher's primary focus is to innovate. She may study the literature to understand whether there is an existing solution that works well. If so, she has to either tweak the problem or pick a different one to tackle, as the original problem is no longer worth her time, where the worthiness is primarily measured by whether the result is publishable. In contrast, the entrepreneur cannot choose to tweak or discard the problem, as solving the problem is often an integral component in the end-to-end product solution that she is building. The entrepreneur will reuse the existing solution on a conceptual or implementation level if it is legally and economically feasible, as this allows her to maximize her productivity by solving the problem in the shortest amount of time with the highest quality. That being said, there are often plenty of challenging or open technical problems that urge the entrepreneur to innovate throughout her journey in building a high-tech startup.

3. Degree of completeness

The Researcher often takes the first step in addressing an open problem, and then moves on to other problems. She may also choose to tackle 3 to 5 problems or projects at once. In comparison, the entrepreneur has to build end-to-end solutions in the problems she tackles, and needs to stay sharply focused on the particular solution she is building. This is a trade-off between breadth and depth.

Conclusions

While the above differences are significant, they are character and preference oriented. In other aspects of their work such as skill sets and mind sets, the researcher and the entrepreneur have a large overlapping. First, both possess a strong technical background, understand the state-of-the-art and are able to advance it through innovations. Second, both work in a collaborative setting, where the key contributions are made by partnering with others or stepping on the shoulder of the giants. Last but not least, both need to be intuitive, relying on gut-feelings at the initial, exploratory stage of their journey; when the journey progresses into more concrete territories and the details of their work are to be fleshed out, both need to take on an analytical mindset, making data-driven decisions.

Are you a researcher or an entrepreneur? Do you see more similarity or differences between them?