Kauffman Lecture Series

While on the program one of the core focuses has been on receiving lectures from some of the best lecturers and entrepreneurs in the country. Kauffman has gone to great lengths in selecting people to speak to us and flying them in from all over.
Some highlight for me include:

• Noam Wasserman: Harvard Business School Lecturer
  
• Eugene Fitzgerald: MIT Professor of Materials Science and Engineering and Founder of Amber wave
• Ted Zoller: Executive Director, Center for Entrepreneurial Studies UNC, and founder
• Nick Franano: Kansas city Entrepeneur and Founder of Proteon Therapeutics
• and Ken Harrington: Managing Director, The Skandalaris Center for Entrepreneurial Studies

I hope to write a brief summary of all the lectures I have received while being on the program. Hopefully some will find it informative and useful.

First Week in Kansas City USA

I arrived in Kansas city after 20 hours of traveling to the sight of snow everywhere, which covered the ground for the following week. First impressions: cold, white, sprawling.

The week began on Tuesday with a tour of the Kauffman Foundation, an introduction to its CEO Carl Schramm and the rest of the Kauffman directors, including the program organizer Wendy Torrance. Wendy explained to us that over the course of the next 5 weeks we would go through an intensive training course in business and entrepreneurship. In the first week we received lectures from Carl Schramm, Ted Zoller, Craig Armstrong.

Carl Schramm explained to us why we are here learning entrepreneurship in America: because Americans do it best! but the interesting thing to me is why Americans do it best. In Carl's mind is that it practically an accident that it turned out this way, heres his take:

1. American law changed pensions liability from company to individual.
2. American law changed to allow pension fund holders to put money into venture capital.

The reason these laws changed at the time had completely different political motivation but the effect was dramatic towards entrepreneurship.

1. Moving liability to individual made the workforce more mobile as they were no longer tied into one company, they could work where they wanted to more easily.
   
2. Pension funder holders could choose to invest there capital into high risk high return VC market, which gave Venture Capital Funds a huge boast in money to invest in start up companies.

One final piece which makes the American people entrepreneurial is that employment is at 95%.

If I'm an American employee and I want to start a company there's very little risk (compared to other countries).

• First I can be practically guaranteed a job should my venture fail due to the very high employment rate.
  
• Second should my start up require funding there is plenty of Venture Capital available.
  
• Third my pension is still fine, as its connected to me personally and not my company.

So the American Entrepreneurship culture is an accident? I certainly don't think America has been engineered to be this way; but there is certainly more to it than just these 3 chance factors, otherwise it would be straightforward for other countries to copy.

And there'd be no reason for me to be here ;) Thank goodness thats not true!