Happy 1 Year Anniversary!

It has been one year since I posted my last blog... exactly 1 year, in fact. After a 1-year hiatus, it is time to return to the blogosphere. Thanks very much for all the kind encouragement, both publicly and privately. So, I officially launch a committed (weekly) effort to "provide encouragement and advice for" / "make fun of" economics and entrepreneurship.

Wellpsring Worldwide's Managed Development Services incubator works with a number of technology start-ups. I'm not going to post inside information, for obvious reasons. Most importantly is the tautology problem: posting means its no longer insider information. Unless, I have just one reader.

Still, we can chronicle general learnings. Since landing at Carnegie Mellon 5 years ago, I've been fortunate enough to actively participate in 19 start-ups so far, which is enough to build points on a graph predicting what works and what doesn't. I've been a "related observer" in another 5 firms. These were mostly firms where I did not want to commit significant time to since each firm had something that indicated doom beyond the box office income of The Happening (M. Night, what happened?). Like the "entrepreneur" who repeatedly requested we not meet on weekends because he reserved them for hiking. Needless to say, there's a minimal level of commitment required in starting a technology company.

As a former business school professor, I blame the entire professorial profession for the proliferation of profligate prosaics-- that is, misleading homework and memorization exercises which aren't moving you closer to starting a company.

This year, the goal is to encourage entrepreneurs to see through the shallow rhetoric and understand at a deep level what it means to create an organization for the purpose of extracting economic rents or Schumpeterian entrepreneurial profits (that's the pointy-head academic definition of entrepreneurship).

So, please start looking around Monday mornings for a zap of entrepreneurship. We can't make anyone an entrepreneur, because anyone can be an entrepreneur. Its a matter of recognizing opportunity + unique resources to capture that opportunity.