New Educators Corner feature: Embed videos on your webpage

We just added a new feature to the STVP Educators Corner that allows users to embed a video on their own webpage. I've included an example below of Guy Kawasaki.

Marketing a Start-Up

Donna Novitsky, CEO, Big Tent Design - 2 min. 49 sec.


Our very dear friend, supporter and colleague (as an adjunct professor), Donna Novitsky, talks in this brief video clip about developing a marketing strategy for a start-up. She addresses key issues about segmenting customer priorities and their pain-points; and building a competitive strategy. Novitsky notes that customers are the biggest marketers for an organization. She also illustrates from her personal experience about partnering with other players to generate mutual benefits.

To hear her full talk, "From Venture Capitalist to Entrepreneur," get the podcast at this location on the STVP Educators Corner website.

New Entrepreneurial Thought Leader Podcasts Now Available

Below is the lineup of speakers for our Fall quarter of the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders lecture series. Free podcasts and video clips of the following lectures are available on the STVP Educators Corner website:

From Venture Capitalist to Entrepreneur, Donna Novitsky, Big Tent

Lessons from the Electric Roadster, Martin Eberhard, Tesla Motors

Startups: The Need for Speed, Dominic Orr, Aruba Networks

The Art of Negotiation, Stan Christensen, Arbor Advisors

The Growth of Solar Ventures, Larry Bawden, Jadoo Power

Connecting Common Experiences, Armen Berjikly and Julio Vasconcellos, Experience Project

Delivering a Digital Torrent, Ashwin Navin, BitTorrent and Ping Li, Accel

STVP Professor Kathy Eisenhardt Receives Awards

STVP Professor Kathy Eisenhardt has received two prestigious career awards.

Along with former STVP PhD student, Associate Professor Jeff Martin of University of Texas, Austin, she was awarded the Schendel Paper Prize, 2007, for the paper: "Dynamic Capabilities: What are They?” This annual award, sponsored by the strategic management society and Wiley-Blackwell, recognizes the paper published at least 5 years ago that has had the highest and most enduring impact on the field of strategy.

She has been elected as an inaugural fellow of the Strategic Management Society, 2007, the premier honorary society in the strategy field.

And she and her work were recently featured in Valley Life Quarterly magazine.

Stanford & MIT Research Results: Xbox, iPod, RAZR Development Shows Benefits of Taking Turns

Excerpted from Network World article, Nov 7, 2007

Apple, Google, Motorola and others stand to deliver more successful products the more they are willing to cede total control to development partners -- at least temporarily, according to new MIT and Stanford University research.

The researchers -- Jason Davis of MIT's Sloan School of Management and Kathleen Eisenhardt of the Stanford Technology Ventures Program -- say the process of "rotating leadership" was found to be beneficial based on their examination of 10 companies across eight technology collaborations. Their paper, "Rotating Leadership and Symbiotic Organization: Relationship Processes in the Context of Collaborative Innovation"), disguises actual companies and projects behind names such as Cleopatra and Falstaff, but does cite specific companies such as Apple and Google and their willingness to work together in new ways to deliver potentially powerful products, such as an iPhone that plays YouTube videos, even as they might also go head to head, as in the case of the iPhone vs. Google's Android and possible gPhones.

Rotating leadership entails one company leaving its partner or partners completely alone for some period of time to concentrate on developing a product based on its area of expertise. The study illustrated the success of this approach in areas from VPNs to middleware to mobile e-mail.

Read the rest of the article online: Network World

600 People at Launch of Stanford Entrepreneurship Network

Wow. The launch of the Stanford Entrepreneurship Network (SEN) went even better than we could have hoped! On October 10, about 600 people gathered to hear Tesla Motors give an absolutely fascinating presentation about the journey to build a car company in Silicon Valley, starting with two guys who knew nothing about the car business. It was standing room only, and when Martin Eberhard, Co-Founder and President of Technology, finished, hardly anyone moved. He was riveting.

Afterward, people filed into a “trade show” reception to learn about the various entrepreneurship groups on campus. A lot of new students signed up to join the SEN mailing list and were thrilled to find out there are so many options on campus.

You can learn more about SEN at http://sen.stanford.edu.
Here's the podcast of Martin's talk.