entrepreneurism

PUERTO MORELOS, Mexico--They kept their Twitter feeds quiet and their iPhone cameras dormant. Most of them didn't want their names to be used.

There was more than a little bit of paranoia in the air as the guests arrived at last weekend's Summit Series event, formally the Young World Leaders Summit--not the most modest of names. It was a gathering of about five dozen under-35 entrepreneurs and executives at a beachfront luxury resort outside the glitzy vacation city of Cancun. Among those present at the retreat, which was fully paid for by sponsors, were a handful of executives … Read more

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg rarely writes for the company blog, typically taking a byline only when the company is doing some damage control. But on Thursday, the young executive penned a post for the Facebook Blog about his recent trip to Europe, which included a speaking engagement at the Future of Web Apps conference in London.

There's nothing ground-breaking in the post, titled "Hello from Madrid." But considering Zuckerberg is known for keeping to himself, a mild irony for the young fellow who facilitated the sharing of ten billion photos and a cascade of personal … Read more

LONDON-- Britain's normally gray capital was unusually sunny this week. So were the attitudes of Web developers gathered here for a conference while, across the pond, Wall Street was in full panic mode.

A bright-eyed pack of several hundred aspiring Web visionaries descended upon London's Excel conference center for the semi-annual Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference. Eager developers trawled the show floor's booths for stickers that they promptly stamped onto their (overwhelmingly Apple-manufactured) laptops. One pack of young men strolled around in straw sombreros. Another trio passed some time in between lectures by tossing around a … Read more

Have you founded a tech company?

Chances are, if you're a U.S. entrepreneur, you're about 39 years old and hold a bachelor's degree, and there's a good chance your company was started in the same state where you received your education, according to a study released Thursday by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation and researchers from Duke and Harvard universities.

Based on a study of U.S. entrepreneurs who started their companies between 1995 and 2005, the findings show the median age of U.S.-born founders was 39 years old, with only 1 percent … Read more

One part college reunion, one part cultural showcase, and one part weeklong think tank, some classify the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSWi) as "spring break for geeks."

But this year more than ever, many eager young entrepreneurs consider the festival, which takes place Friday through Tuesday, to be more than just a nerd haven where the margaritas are flowing, the barbecue is sizzling, and (almost) everyone knows that Ruby on Rails is not the name of an indie-rock band. Going to SXSWi is considered a crucial business move, particularly after the meteoric rise that the then-unknown Twitter … Read more

The Department of Energy announced on Wednesday its choice of three venture capital firms to send promising clean-tech entrepreneurs to collaborate with national laboratories.

The government's new Entrepreneur in Residence plan is designed to speed the development of the green technology sector.

"Government has to cultivate the conditions for these technologies to thrive," U.S. assistant secretary of energy Alexander Karsner told attendees of the Cleantech Forum in San Francisco. "We felt very strongly we had to build bridges over the commercialization valley of death."

The venture capitalists include Kleiner, Perkins, Caufield, and Byers to … Read more

Instead of relying solely on sales and competing with established sellers such as Wine.com or brick-and-mortar stores, where most wine is sold, entrepreneurs are building social networks aimed at wine lovers.

Read the full story at BusinessWeek: "Building a Facebook for wine"

Several days ago, Gary Rivlin of the New York Times called me about a story he was writing about the brilliant Max Levchin of Paypal and Slide, and the general topic of serial entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. The story came out yesterday; below are the notes I prepared for my conversation with Gary.

In a nutshell, Gary's question to me was: what makes serial entrepreneurs tick? Why do people like Max keep going and start new companies when they could just park it on a beach and suck down mai tais?

First, in my experience, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs are … Read more

One of the things that separates the new News.com personal blogs, like this one, or Declan McCullagh's The Iconoclast, or Caroline McCarthy's The Social, from the larger, impersonal News.com blog, is that they are a place for us to write not just about what's going around us, but also what we're doing ourselves that's relevant.

In my case, that's pretty easy because I live a lot of the things I write about. So there's a never-ending supply of blog fodder. And you get the benefits of that. Insert smiley here.

Well, … Read more