RT @Scobleizer: Oh, we finally found a GREAT use for Google Wave! Holy shitake! RT: @Orli: Awesome video!! http://bit.ly/4vfQAR #googlewave

You might also want to check this out

Over 20,000 people…double wow!

Congrats Oprah!

Here’s a humorous poke at how to protect your privacy…

Google Opt Out Feature Lets Users Protect Privacy

There are two types of motorcyclists, those who have been down and those who are going down.

I heard this saying repeatedly after buying my third bike, a 2006 Harley Davidson Road King Classic and I count myself fortunate for never having felt the unforgiving impact of pavement (close only counts with hand grenades and boccie ball).  Today, I wondered aloud to my partner in crime whether being a motorcyclist is similar to being an entrepreneur. It was pretty easy to come up with all sorts of similarities; freedom, responsibility, risk, protection, speed, strategy, navigation, balance, vision, execution. Off we went to do a little research…

Stop the presses…statistically motorcyclists are NOTHING like entrepreneurs! Mainly because in 2007 over 5,000 people died in motorcycle accidents and I can’t recall the last time I heard of an entrepreneur dieing as a result of being an entrepreneur. Perhaps we had conjured up a poor comparison to begin with but after a bit of research the similarities were down right disturbing.

Statistics Leaving Bugs in My Teeth

1. Only 21 states have universal helmet laws requiring all riders to done lids
2. 31% of motorcycle fatalities are related to alcohol impairment, 27% of which were over the .08 blood alcohol content legal limit
3. $230.6 billion a year – impact on US health care system

Thinking that perhaps I was being a little too literal, I decided to see how many small businesses “go down” each year since my search for “entrepreneur+fatalities” wasn’t giving me much info. Sadly, those numbers aren’t much better;

1. Two-thirds of SMB’s survive at least two years – Translation: 33% go down
2. 44 percent survive at least four years – Translation: 56% go down
3. 31 percent survive at least seven years – Translation: 69% go down

On second thought, maybe our idea of comparing motorcyclists and entrepreneurs wasn’t as far off track as I originally thought. Granted, I couldn’t find an entrepreneur that died as a result of being an entrepreneur but entrepreneurs typically have a significant personal investment in a business, so for argument sake we could say that an entrepreneur ‘is the business’ and vice versa. The track record for motorcyclists and entrepreneurs may not align as nicely as we might have liked but we managed to draw a couple comparisons worth mentioning.

Motorcyclists & Entrepreneurs Take Heed

1. Enjoy the freedom of the ride and take responsibility for your actions
2. Accept the risk while getting as much protection as possible without limiting your ability to operate
3. Speed is crucial but fast is not always better, you have to have a strategy
4. Sharpen your navigation skills and learn to balance distractions
5. Have a vision of where you want to go and execute on it

Lingering questions: How can we reduce the increasing fatality rate of motorcyclists? Likewise, can the number of businesses/entrepreneurs going down be remedied?

Click the image, watch the video and decide for yourself

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“Are You an Inventor or an Entrepreneur?”

- Harvard Business Publishing

I am most definitely not an inventor but an entrepreneur…

Over the past couple years I’ve given a lot of thought to whether I consider myself an entrepreneur. Sure, I’ve started a handful of businesses but is that indicative of being an entrepreneur? To some perhaps but it takes a lot more than “starting” a company to be considered an entrepreneur. So I decided to see what the world has to say about the characteristics of an entrepreneur; vision, tenacity, sensibility, progressive, calculating, individualist, planner and the list goes on and on. I did, however, learn a bit about the history of the entrepreneur and how the view of an entrepreneur has changed over time.

History At A Glance

Jean-Babtiste Say, a 19th century economis, is believed to have been the first to coin the term “entrepreneur” around 1800. The definition of entrepreneur stems from the French word entreprendre to undertake and when broken down; entre “to enter” and prendre “to take”.

To summarize, over the past 20 years or so there has been a lot of research on the characteristics of an entrepreneur. Generally speaking there was a fixation with predicting whether an individual would be a successful entrepreneur based on their personality characteristics, cultural influences and life experiences. What I found particularly interesting is the fact that recent research has shown results that counter the “person-centric-cowboy characteristics”, instead research is shedding light on the fact that entrepreneurs don’t work in soloist silo’s but in collaborative social environments. As I mulled it over it seemed quite obvious; while individual personality characteristics certainly play a role in defining entrepreneurship, equally important are the social aspects that are oftentimes overlooked (For more info Read Characteristics of the Entrepreneur: Social Creatures, Not Solo Heroes). Why that wasn’t readily apparent from the start is beyond me because I’ve grown up and was educated in the “there is no ‘I’ in team” system. That said, culturally the U.S. is one of , if not the, most individualistic environments in the world, so it makes me wonder what characteristics of entrepreneurship exist in a place like China.

Common Definition of Entrepreneurship

“Entrepreneurship is the process of creating or seizing an opportunity and pursuing it regardless of the resources currently controlled”      — Timmons, J.A. 1994. New Venture Creation: Entrepreneurship for the 21st Century.

Despite what you may have heard or think about China or Communism in general, I think China as a country is hyper-entrepreneurial. If the essence of entrepreneurship, as Timmons points out, really is about creating or seizing opportunity regardless of resources controlled, then China is the entrepreneur poster child. Oddly what is striking about Chinese entrepreneurs isn’t that they’re soloists, on the contrary, the fabric of their society revolves around relationships, far beyond anything we have here in the U.S. Due to China’s sociopolitical and legal environment Chinese entrepreneurs are anything but individualistic. Sure, there some soloist characteristics but at the root Chinese entrepreneurs understand that being well networked is an absolute requirement for success. My intent isn’t to drag you into a scholarly examination of Chinese entrepreneurship (Read Liao and Sohmen’s “The Development of Modern Entrepreneurship in China”) but simply to draw the parallel to the concept of ‘social creatures‘.

After a couple hours of research and a lot of thought, I was still contemplating whether I’m an entrepreneur. If popular opinion was any indication there would be a resounding “yes, Shawn is an entrepreneur”. I guess the issue I see is on a broader spectrum, I’ve always taken issue with categorizations regardless of how accurate or far flung they appear to be. Categorization to me is akin to wearing a wool sweater, comfortingly warm but boy does it itch, so with the phrase “If the shoe fits kid” ringing in my ears, I’ll submit albeit with some trepidation, yes I am an entrepreneur and most definitely not an inventor.

Rina took the “Climber of the day award” when she ascended her first 5.10a, a feat was quite impressive!

Here’s a quick video of our day at Mission Cliffs…enjoy!

Monkey’s @ Mission Cliffs from Shawn Cheatham on Vimeo.