Getting information together

Using Twitter and Blog, i have followed a few venture capitalists and tech-focused blogs recently. Also i start to search the start-up firms in the area that i shall pursue my MBA.

I used google bookmark to store my favorite websites and address and hope to share with all of you. Now in VC, social web and mobile-based services/games are really great hits. There is one VC named Accel Partner that catches great intention these two years.  Famous case about Accel is that it invested in Facebook in 2005 when Facebook only had 2.5 million users. Now the users are 250 million. WOW! And recently Accel is the backed VC for two of biggest acquisitions. Google spent 750 million to acquire Admod and EA acquired playfish for around 500 million. Amazing exist.

Once you start to wear an Entrepreneur hat, you think differently. You start to become more sensitive about opportunities and the talents around you who may become your partners. Embracing entrepreneurship is going to be a rewarding experience. Won’t be regretted.

This is it

It was 4th,July, the independent day for America. It was also my birthday. No celebration and No party. It’s only a quiet evening. But magic happened and i received the greatest gift. I don’t know how it come or maybe it was dropped from chimney by Santa Claus on this special day.

So what’s the gift? It isn’t a subject but an idea, which solved my uncertainty and pointed the sound direction for my next 10 or 20 years life. And i know this is it, the right path to follow with my heart, body, mind and soul.

I’ve entrepreneurship in my spirit and I’ve made a few bold decisions which changed my life overall. That’s how i feel, a desire to change and meet the challenges.  From a straight A student with a lot academic potential to a successful sales manager working oversea in telecom field, I made the decision that surprised my peers.

And here comes to another bold decision: to create my own company after my MBA. But is MBA necessary for a person to become an entrepreneur? Yes and No. It all depends on your own plan. In my case, i need to leverage the resource oversea in North America, therefore MBA in particular school is a must for my plan to work.

So what’s my idea or business plan? Well, generally speaking, I’m going to try leverage the resource oversea to enter into Mobile Internet (in particular field) in chinese market. I’m writing my business plan to identify what resource i want, what kind of persons I’m looking for my business partners and what knowledge I need to learn. And it’s getting better and becoming more detailed.

Just keep following me on my blog and you will see more details and resources as I identify for my plan. Then you’ll get a clue.

Chinese students want to know: How do i get rich?

A good article written by a professor in Wharton Business school.

Take a look and think seriously about what you want to achieve.

A business school professor asks himself what he hath wrought.

In February, three Wharton faculty colleagues and I had the pleasure of dining with 19 visiting students from one of China’s most prestigious universities. The students were young. They were charming. They were very intelligent. And they were very, very goal-directed.

My colleagues and I had each prepared brief opening remarks, but the students were having none of it. They had elected a delegation leader, and the delegation leader, as quickly as possible, got to the question the students all wanted to address: What are the implications of the current financial and economic crisis?

A colleague in the accounting department gave them a careful, scholarly, even-handed explanation of how firms’ decisions on the repricing of assets in their portfolio could perhaps have been used, perhaps unintentionally, to create false expectations in the marketplace, and could have been done in a way undetectable to auditors, leading to over-investment in toxic subprime assets.

No, that’s not what the students wanted to discuss. With much less tact, I explained that, indeed, mispricing of assets at an inflated price could have been deliberately used to create the illusion of value, and this could then have been used to create the very real rewards of wealth for the financial engineering wizards responsible for the scheme.

This got us much closer to the questions that the visiting students wanted to address. Their first round of questions were basically, How can I get that job? How can I get a high-paying job in investment banking now?

My colleagues and I attempted to convince them that those jobs simply will not exist again, at historical levels of compensation, in the months or years before these students’ graduation.

This led to a second round of questions, like, What can I do while working as a desk drone in an audit firm in China to ensure that I can get into Wharton, Harvard or Stanford, and get a job in investment banking later? The students were patient. They did not need a job with a $10 million bonus now, as long as the prospect of receiving it later would still arise.

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I then suggested that perhaps they might work for companies that made things. Actual things. With a burgeoning middle class that would soon be larger than the entire population of the U.S. or Western Europe, surely there was going to be a huge domestic market for things in China. The students could pursue careers with companies that were working to develop and to sell appliances fit for a Chinese home, or mass-market, branded consumer package goods for the new middle class Chinese consumer.

This was met with stares from the students. Another colleague from the management department suggested that Chinese retailing and distribution offered two other growth opportunities for a bold young entrepreneur. Again, we got mostly stares.

I then explained that there are really only three ways for an individual to earn tens of millions of dollars a year:

–Create a company that creates real wealth and keep a piece of the company. Bill Gates did that at Microsoft (nasdaq: MSFT – news – people ), and he is, probably, still one of the five wealthiest men in America. Vanderbilt (railroads and shipping), Carnegie (U.S. Steel (nyse: X – news – people )) and Rockefeller (Standard Oil) did it, too. These men played hardball, seeking to crush commercial competitors, but they did successfully transform America and the world.

–Facilitate the creation of real wealth by others and keep a piece of each transaction. J. P. Morgan convinced European investors that they would earn far more investing in the fastest-growing industries in the United States than they would investing in their more developed, more mature and more slowly growing domestic markets. He directed the capital that led to the industrialization of the United States. American industrialists got rich. European investors got rich. America was transformed, and his share of each transaction ensured that Morgan became wealthy as well.

Venture capitalists, early round investors in new companies and firms that underwrite their initial public offerings all facilitate the creation of new companies and the creation of jobs and wealth, and profit from it. Early investors in Microsoft,Google (nasdaq: GOOG – news – people ), Oracle (nasdaq: ORCL – news – people ) and Apple (nasdaq: AAPL – news – people ) all profited quite handsomely from it.

This used to be the principal function of Wall Street firms other than those principally in retail brokerage. But it produces individual Wall Street executive wealth only slowly, and only when Wall Street produces increases in national wealth. Patient men like Warren Buffett still facilitate wealth creation, and Buffett may be richer even than Gates.

–Steal it. Stealing money is much more reliable than earning it. You can steal wealth slowly, the old-fashioned way, buried within the operations of trading for the house account. Or you can steal it quickly, by using obscure and poorly understood financial artifacts to produce the illusion of wealth creation. Then you take a piece of the illusionary wealth, as personal cash, now. Then you exit and duck for cover before the entire game blows up. Better yet, you can sell your private equity firm to naïve investors for one final twist of the knife into the carcass of your nation. (Deliberate fraud, like those allegedly committed by Bernie Madoff or Robert Allen Stanford, is too crude to be of interest to young financial engineers, and too likely to result in extreme punishment.)

I then suggested that if students were not interested in earning their money through entrepreneurship (too risky), then investment banking in China offered the next best alternative for personal wealth creation. Facilitating investment in, and growth of, companies catering to the wants, needs, cravings and longings of China’s growing middle class, offers Chinese investment bankers a path toward personal wealth by creating national wealth, much as J. P. Morgan did for America.

The students, though, were uninterested in banking in China. After the students left, it took my colleagues and me a couple of hours to figure out why this was so. I-banking in China is about improving China. The students saw i-banking in America as being about improving their own personal wealth, first and foremost; if the client could be assisted without too much personal inconvenience then and only then did they see American i-banking as also being about value creation.

I asked myself, What have we done? When I thought that the craze for private equity careers and investment banking careers among the brightest Western students was the fault of Western business schools, I felt both shame (for perhaps having contributed to this) and fear (for how we as a nation could possibly compete with foreign nations where the best and brightest young students sought real careers).

Perhaps the fear was unwarranted. Perhaps the best and the brightest students of other nations also wish to transform their homelands from economic dragons into paper tigers, following the Western model. Interestingly, our own students are indeed learning to manage, learning to market, learning operations and production planning and logistics; they are working hard to get ready for a world of things. Perhaps America doesn’t have as much to fear from foreign competition as we thought.

Eric K. Clemons is a professor in the Information Strategy and Economics Group at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Is Enterpreneurship for everyone

I’ve put being an entrepreneur as my long-term goal in my essays to MBA. In fact I’m very seriously about it. However to be a successful entrepreneur, I believe I need to develop a few key personalities, which are learned and concluded by my own experience and observation.

1. be open-minded. You need be very sensitive about opportunities around. Therefore you need to open-minded, be willing to talk to any persons and eager to learn through their experiences.  Don’t take yourself too serious, be humble and admit that everyone you encounter have the wisdom and experience you don’t have and may bring opportunities to you.

2. be a good team player and learn to develop leadership. Every entrepreneur starts from scratch and being a good team player is essential to intrigue other’s interest to work with you. Furthermore, develope the leadership skill as soon as possible.  You’re supposed to lead the team and drive the growth. You introduce the vision and of course you need to pursue others to believe in it even though your goal some time sounds crazy.

3. Develop your interest and hobby.  Most successful entrepreneurs find their interest at early stage of their life. If you don’t have and just hope to make money out of your entrepreneurial activities, you may not go too far on this path.

I don’t think i am a perfect person to be an entrepreneur or not even close.  But what drives me is the curiosity. I want to know what’s the entrepreneur experience? I want to test my ability and see how far i can reach.  The more experience i gain, the better i learn more about myself.

On the other hand, just curiosity isn’t enough. Persistency plays key role while running the business. The most risky things that an entrepreneur may encounter is not knowing how to balance curiosity and persistency(Same applys to every person). They change subjects from times to time because of curiosity. While in fact only persistency and great effort will lead to the day when people see the brilliant result.  Well, according to this theory, I may lose points to my goal. However i have built the awareness and what i have to do is to grow myself.

Finally, you’re not alone. You have a team and you need to count on them.  Your team member could be your schoolmate, your colleagues and clients or even any persons you encountered during your life and developed the relationship.

Next Topic.  To do what? Come up your business plan.

I can’t see why should anyone who with chinese background leave the country and want to set up their own business oversea. Leaving 1.5 billion people market behind is stupid decision. However to gain oversea experience is good approach to facilitate future business development in China.

创业项目：

1.  金融方向：中国懂金融的人太少，而金融确实国家的命脉。所有资源都打上了金钱的符合，这是看不见硝烟的战场。Finance Engineering是一个方向，这是集合数学，金融和计算机的交叉学科，国内很少看到，国外也不是所有学校都有。这是一个小圈子，但世界永远都是一小部分人统治大部分人。使用数学模型来分析金融市场是必须的，不然怎么指导操作呢？买卖不是拍脑袋的。如果进入这个行业，将来可以尝试拥有自觉的Fund来投资。中国不缺懂数学和编程的学生。

2. 老本行，电信行业：这个门槛太高了，没有大资金的投入，没有技术积累，很难成气候。但可以be open－minded

3. 互联网：其实和电信行业一脉相承，并越来越融合在一起。有新的idea往往就有机会。

4. 区域性机会： 国外，国内不同地区的局部机会。