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Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an authoritative list that took into account all entrepreneurs across America. Untrue. May be

by zaidf 17y ago

Your post is flawed because it assumes that this is some sort of an authoritative list that took into account all entrepreneurs across America. Untrue. May be you should attack the magazine that created the list instead of the entrepreneurs? Better yet, create your anti-list of guys you think should be there but never will be because they are too busy doing too many important stuff. Simply cherry picking flaws in a bunch of businesses is very easy--even if I agree with many of your assessments about individual ones.

mechanical_fish 17y ago
Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible. I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America today. You've just never heard of them. Just as nobody in America has heard of Philo Farnsworth, except for entrepreneurs who are looking for bedtime stories to tell their kids. Farnsworth did his best work in obscurity, in a tiny startup consisting mostly of himself and his immediate family. He then managed to secure a patent, which enabled him to get a piece of the action when RCA turned his invention into a household word. If he had been a little less stubborn and independent RCA would have succeeded in buying him out completely; if he had been a little less of a romantic figure (the Idaho farmboy turned electronics genius!) only historians would know his name. It's easy to meet people who are as smart and inventive as Farnsworth. They're designing graphics processors or creating MEMS devices or building robots or developing vaccines. They're designing the tiny components that make the iPhone possible. If you run into them on the street in Silicon Valley, they look just like everyone else. And none of them are famous, because they're not trying to be famous. Their business doesn't depend on that.
- jfarmer 17y ago
  Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things. [Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.] And that is great. Maybe there's something intelligent to say about how we need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors, or what the difference is, or why hardly anybody knows two of those three inventors. Instead he went for the easy article and decided to piss all over everyone. Gratifying, to be sure, and there's going to be a coterie of people saying, "Yes, right on. Here are other ways in which all these people suck," but I think everyone is a little worse off for having an article like this written. It was mean and no less venal than the entrepreneurs he is criticizing.
  - zaidf 17y ago
    need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically brights folks working on new things. This ends up with the boring conclusion that may be we need both inventors + entrepreneurs. But just because it's boring doesn't mean it isn't accurate.
    - jfarmer 17y ago
      Huh? I'm not saying anything about inventors or entrepreneurs; I'm saying something about the author's article and why it was unnecessary and unproductive, particularly if it was meant to be a critique of BusinessWeek as well as the entrepreneurs it highlighted. I have no idea how many entrepreneurs or inventors there are, what the appropriate balance between the two is (if that even matters), whether the world needs more or less of either, etc.
  - slocklin 17y ago
    Gates wrote BASIC at 20 and founded Microsoft in the same year. I thought everyone knew that. I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design company featured in business week? There was nothing exceptional about her business model or returns.
    - jfarmer 17y ago
      He wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair. Apple had their own version, too, for example, and there's a funny story about Woz not wanting to implement floating-point arithmetic in their version and Apple having to license that technology from Microsoft. So, it wasn't "Bill Gates wrote BASIC" it was "Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair." I can imagine you writing a snarky sentence about that. Oh, blah blah, a version of a toy computer language on a toy computer. I agree that a lot of the other companies featured were more interesting. I think we'd agree on a lot. I guess one thing we don't agree on is the most productive way to respond to an article like this. I agree the article isn't helpful and that, perhaps, it puts on a pedestal people who don't deserve to be there. Or, in any case, that there are other people doing more interesting things who deserve to be featured instead. Those people, however, don't deserve to be pissed on just because BusinessWeek decided to write the piece. My question is this: what was the goal of your article? From my perspective you went for the cheap shot, the easy laugh, the fart joke. It's ego-gratifying and will get you all over HN, Reddit, and the other usual places, but I'd expect an article exhorting entrepreneurs to do more (or, really, mocking them for not doing enough) to live up to its own standards and bring something new to the table. For example, I would have been interested in reading a series of articles that goes through company-by-company, outlining their market, their challenges, and two or three things you think they could be doing better. An article about the "The Top Under-25 Entrepreneurs BusinessWeek Should Have Listed" would have been interesting, too. Finally, what if you reached out to the entrepreneurs on the list you DID think were interesting and conducted interviews with them? That would have been great! I realize all of those would have taken a lot of time, effort, and research, but doesn't everything worthwhile?
- slocklin 17y ago
  I'm sorry, dude: it is not at all easy to meet people as inventive as Farnsworth. Television... compared to making another kind of MEMS accelerometer? And what do these modern inventors do for an encore that compares to inventing what is still the most promising technique in nuclear fusion? Farnsworth was a living god of invention; do not take his name in vain, and compare him to dopes slinging VHDL or whatever. I agree that inventors labor best in obscurity ... however, these guys were all nominated and carefully selected by Business Week. Some of the top 25 were impressive inventive types, as I realized later: they simply were not mentioned at all in the main article.

by zaidf 17y ago

mechanical_fish 17y ago

Yes, this critique suffers from a quite typical problem: Sample bias in the press. Some business plans require PR in order to work, so those are the businesses you'll hear about. The businesses that don't thrive on PR are effectively invisible. I'm particularly amused by this guy's citation of Philo Farnsworth as the sort of entrepreneur we should all aspire to be. There are plenty of Philo Farnsworths in America today. You've just never heard of them. Just as nobody in America has heard of Philo Farnsworth, except for entrepreneurs who are looking for bedtime stories to tell their kids. Farnsworth did his best work in obscurity, in a tiny startup consisting mostly of himself and his immediate family. He then managed to secure a patent, which enabled him to get a piece of the action when RCA turned his invention into a household word. If he had been a little less stubborn and independent RCA would have succeeded in buying him out completely; if he had been a little less of a romantic figure (the Idaho farmboy turned electronics genius!) only historians would know his name. It's easy to meet people who are as smart and inventive as Farnsworth. They're designing graphics processors or creating MEMS devices or building robots or developing vaccines. They're designing the tiny components that make the iPhone possible. If you run into them on the street in Silicon Valley, they look just like everyone else. And none of them are famous, because they're not trying to be famous. Their business doesn't depend on that.

jfarmer 17y ago
Also, none of them are entrepreneurs and none of his examples are examples of entrepreneurship -- they're examples of inventors inventing things. [Edit: to be clear, Gates is an entrepreneur, but "writing BASIC at 20" doesn't make him an entrepreneur, it makes him an inventor. Starting a company around that invention and organizing the capital to get it off the ground makes him an entrepreneur.] And that is great. Maybe there's something intelligent to say about how we need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors, or what the difference is, or why hardly anybody knows two of those three inventors. Instead he went for the easy article and decided to piss all over everyone. Gratifying, to be sure, and there's going to be a coterie of people saying, "Yes, right on. Here are other ways in which all these people suck," but I think everyone is a little worse off for having an article like this written. It was mean and no less venal than the entrepreneurs he is criticizing.
- zaidf 17y ago
  need fewer entrepreneurs and more inventors You are making a similar mistake. How do you know how many inventors there are? How do you know there aren't people writing stuff like BASIC? I am guessing it is because you don't see their faces splashed or hear much about them. But just visit most COMP SCI programs and you'll find very technically brights folks working on new things. This ends up with the boring conclusion that may be we need both inventors + entrepreneurs. But just because it's boring doesn't mean it isn't accurate.
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    Huh? I'm not saying anything about inventors or entrepreneurs; I'm saying something about the author's article and why it was unnecessary and unproductive, particularly if it was meant to be a critique of BusinessWeek as well as the entrepreneurs it highlighted. I have no idea how many entrepreneurs or inventors there are, what the appropriate balance between the two is (if that even matters), whether the world needs more or less of either, etc.
- slocklin 17y ago
  Gates wrote BASIC at 20 and founded Microsoft in the same year. I thought everyone knew that. I gladly accede to "mean and venal." However, I also make stuff people use, so I feel perfectly entitled to piss all over ... for example ... yet another webpage design company. I have a half dozen friends who design webpages for money; some of them even do fancy software type things. Why was some random webpage design company featured in business week? There was nothing exceptional about her business model or returns.
  - jfarmer 17y ago
    He wrote a version of BASIC for the Altair. Apple had their own version, too, for example, and there's a funny story about Woz not wanting to implement floating-point arithmetic in their version and Apple having to license that technology from Microsoft. So, it wasn't "Bill Gates wrote BASIC" it was "Bill Gates and Paul Allen wrote a BASIC interpreter for the Altair." I can imagine you writing a snarky sentence about that. Oh, blah blah, a version of a toy computer language on a toy computer. I agree that a lot of the other companies featured were more interesting. I think we'd agree on a lot. I guess one thing we don't agree on is the most productive way to respond to an article like this. I agree the article isn't helpful and that, perhaps, it puts on a pedestal people who don't deserve to be there. Or, in any case, that there are other people doing more interesting things who deserve to be featured instead. Those people, however, don't deserve to be pissed on just because BusinessWeek decided to write the piece. My question is this: what was the goal of your article? From my perspective you went for the cheap shot, the easy laugh, the fart joke. It's ego-gratifying and will get you all over HN, Reddit, and the other usual places, but I'd expect an article exhorting entrepreneurs to do more (or, really, mocking them for not doing enough) to live up to its own standards and bring something new to the table. For example, I would have been interested in reading a series of articles that goes through company-by-company, outlining their market, their challenges, and two or three things you think they could be doing better. An article about the "The Top Under-25 Entrepreneurs BusinessWeek Should Have Listed" would have been interesting, too. Finally, what if you reached out to the entrepreneurs on the list you DID think were interesting and conducted interviews with them? That would have been great! I realize all of those would have taken a lot of time, effort, and research, but doesn't everything worthwhile?
slocklin 17y ago
I'm sorry, dude: it is not at all easy to meet people as inventive as Farnsworth. Television... compared to making another kind of MEMS accelerometer? And what do these modern inventors do for an encore that compares to inventing what is still the most promising technique in nuclear fusion? Farnsworth was a living god of invention; do not take his name in vain, and compare him to dopes slinging VHDL or whatever. I agree that inventors labor best in obscurity ... however, these guys were all nominated and carefully selected by Business Week. Some of the top 25 were impressive inventive types, as I realized later: they simply were not mentioned at all in the main article.