Larry Chiang investigates and experiences entrepreneurship and pre-entrepreneurship. He covers the front-lines via Bloomberg BusinessWeek’s channel “What They Don’t Teach You at Business School”. He has a JBA not an MBA. Its a Jedi in Business Administration. After Chiang’s Harvard Law keynote, Harvard Business wrote: “What They Don’t Teach You at Stanford Business School“ (the same title as his NY Times bestseller). If you read his scandalously awesome “How to Hack at AfterParty“, “What a Supermodel Can Teach a Stanford MBA” and “How to Get Man-Charm”, you will like his latest post:

What Seth Sternberg Can Teach a Stanford Engineer About Entrepreneurship
By Larry Chiang

I’m an Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) at Stanford University. It’s a first for an engineering school to have an EIR that lives on campus.

As EIR, I am required to motivationally speak. But what makes me different from better and more qualified entrepreneurs is that I motivationally listen.

I listen and take lots of notes. Sometimes I crash conferences like the Princeton University one held in Palo Alto over the weekend. Here is “What Seth Sternberg Can Teach a Stanford Engineer About Entrepreneurship”

-1- Raise VC Money After Product Gets Traction

Seth said, “Getting VC money is easy after your product gets adoption”. Hustling up those intros and turning them into term sheets is hard BT (before traction)

-2- Only take seed investment from seed funds

Series A investors have been doing seed rounds but that doesn’t mean you should take that money.

-3- Add value as non-tech founder

As CEO, Seth buffers so that his tech co-founders COULD work.

He went for supplies, got them food. Was a beta.

This post was drafted in an hour and needs your edits… email me if you see a spelling or grammatical error(s)… larry@larrychiang com

Larry Chiang started his first company UCMS in college. He mimicked his mentor, Mark McCormack, founder of IMG who wrote the book, “What They Don’t Teach You at Harvard Business School”. Chiang is a keynote speaker and bestselling author and spoke at Congress and World Bank.

Text or call him during office hours 11:11am or 11:11pm PST +/-11 minutes at 650-283-8008. Due to the volume of calls, he may place you on hold like a Scottsdale Arizona customer service rep. If you email him, be sure to include your cell number in the subject line. If you want him to email you his new articles…, ask him in an email

You can read more equally funny, but non-founder-focused-lessons on Larry’s Amazon blog

Larry’s mentor Mark McCormack wrote this in 1983. His own book came out 09-09-09. It is called ‘What They Don’t Teach You At Stanford Business School‘

Don’t be evil — that’s Google’s unofficial motto. But while some companies may take that motto to simply mean “don’t do anything bad”, some might argue that rather than being passive about avoiding evil, companies should actually be more active in combating evil and doing more good. For Facebook, doing good and giving back seems to be very much in part of their effort to give back to the world. Sure, their service allows people to connect themselves with others from around the world, but there’s always more that can be done and one might suggest that Facebook has strived to be good global corporate neighbors. Just take a look at recent events to gain a glimpse at what the power of Facebook has had over our lives–the service has helped directly/indirectly shake the foundation of some of the most totalitarian regimes across the Middle East during the famous Arab Spring event. And Facebook’s founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg, has not made it a secret that he intends to donate some of his wealth to charity, having signed onto billionaire Bill Gates & Warren Buffet’s “Giving Pledge”. And in 2010, Mr. Zuckerberg famously went on the Oprah Winfrey Show and announced that he was giving $100 million to the Newark Public School System as part of his effort to help Mayor Cory Booker revive the struggling education system.

Facebook and Mr. Zuckerberg have clearly been corporate model citizens helping to illustrate that companies can do good for the public and that more can be done instead of simply pledging never to be evil–there are other philanthropy efforts that need corporate help and it seems that Facebook is leading the way.

Look out Big Apple! One of the hottest events dedicated to finding the next big startup is set to make its next showing in just a couple of weeks–yes, that’s right, TechCrunch Disrupt is returning to New York City and you can bet that it will be even better than ever. It all takes place at Pier 94 on the westside of the city just a few blocks away from Central Park. For the third year in a row, TechCrunch is setting out to find out just who has the hottest startup outside of Silicon Valley. We all know that there’s a thriving entrepreneurial ecosystem outside in the rest of the United States and New York is just one of those hubs in the country where technology is practically flourishing. Known in many circles informally as Silicon Alley, New York City is home to some of the tech world’s well-known startups, not to mention that it’s what The Startup Genome  considers to be  the number two tech hub city in the world, placing only behind San Francisco.

In its inaugural year, Soluto was crowned winner of the TechCrunch Disrupt battlefield. A year later, GetAround claimed the top prize. This year, the competition is wide open. Applications for the Disrupt Battlefield have already been received and finalists may be notified shortly. But what you’ll see at TechCrunch Disrupt are companies who are young and eager to get their product out into the world and gain some much needed press coverage. Each of the finalists are going to be companies that have been around for only three months and most likely haven’t received any press coverage before. But I’m sure that at least one established company will grace the audience with their presence by unveiling a brand new product for the world to see and enjoy. But who will be that next lucky company to get that big break? Once on stage, it’s a “do or die” attitude because each startup presenting is doing so not only for the coverage, but for the prestigious Disrupt Cup and also a chance to win $50,000 on the spot and be named this year’s top startup–not to mention that it would be critiqued by an “all-star panel of the biggest innovators, angels, VCs and influencers in the tech community”.

You know it was probably only a matter of time before someone did it. In light of all the popularity and hype over services like Instagram, Pinterest, and even Tumblr, somehow the industry has managed to forget about a special set of people. They were first recognized in the era of email marketing when folks using UNIX and PINE accessed their email. Just who am I talking about? Why, the text-only generation…the people who never liked looking at images in their inbox with HTML emails and those that slows down their download speeds. And that’s why over the past few days, some interesting Twitter accounts have popped up to (supposedly) make it easier for people to understand what people are sharing on some of the most popular services on the Internet today.

The first one that apparently popped up is called Text-only Instagram and it was created by Josh Helfferich, a man who found it appalling that people would need to be subjected to endless bad photo filters and having to engage with followers. He created Text-only Instagram as a means of taking what people would normally see on Instagram and converting it into a text-based feed without all the “messy and superficial social interactions“. All you need to do is go to the service’s Twitter account and you’ll be able to see tweets of some of the millions of photos shared on Instagram, but without needing to worry about the Lo-Fi, Amaro, Hudson, Earlybird, Brannan, Inkwell, Hefe, or Nashville filters mucking up the image.You can just use your imagination to see what people are photographing and let THAT be your memory.

Who says that Silicon Valley doesn’t give back? In a huge act of generosity by one of the leading venture capital firms in the San Francisco Bay Area and most likely the technology industry, powerhouse Andreessen Horowitz announced earlier this week that the six General Partners are all committing to donate at least half of the income from their respective venture capital careers to philanthropic causes. While you might be thinking that this is just something cool and nice of VCs to do, think about how much this can represent to any number of non-profit organizations who would will benefit from this enormous act of kindness. For those who do know venture capitalists, the amount of money that just the partners could stand to get as a result of any number of acquisitions or exits from their portfolio companies can be enormous–more so now simply because in this situation, it’s the firm of Andreessen Horowitz.

As CNN Money reports, here’s how this “bold philanthropic pledge” will work:

Each of Andreessen Horowitz’s six general partners — Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz, Jeff Jordan, Peter Levine, Jon O’Farrell and Scott Weiss — will donate at least half of all management fee and carried interest income they earn for the rest of their venture capital careers. It is up to each individual partner to determine where the money goes.