George Parker: Serial Entrepreneur at Large… Batten Down the Hatches!

I had to laugh the other day when I came across something called the “Stanford University’s Entrepreneurship Corner.” It was gushingly described as a fantastic resource for anyone interested in keeping up with the latest and greatest ideas coming out of Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. Ah yes, Stanford, the biggest MBA and Vulture Capitalist factory in the US, producing endless armies of masters of Power Point and Business Bullshit speak. If you visit the “Corner” (sounds suspiciously like Second Life to me!) You can watch video’s of child prodigy Mark Zuckerberg waxing eloquent about Team Dynamics – Challenges going forward… I guess the latter is code for how the fuck do we make money with this thing? Or, what’s my defense going to be when I have to be in court facing the guys who actually came up with this idea?

But my favorite is a guy called Steve Blank, who has founded or participated in eight Silicon Valley startups since 1978, and is described as a “Serial Entrepreneur.” When you use the word “serial” as a descriptor for a pursuit or occupation, doesn’t it sound like someone who’s out of control and should be constrained before they wreak any more havoc? Which applies to most serial entrepreneurs I’ve dealt with over the years. My all time favorite was Nolan Bushnell. Remember him? He’s the guy who invented electronic gaming with “Pong,” the foundation of his Atari Empire. Then he sold it for a gazillion dollars and went off and founded Chucky Cheese, purveyors of the world’s worst pizza, but with lots of games for kids… Not electronic though, ‘cos he’d signed a non-compete clause with Atari. So the games were things like shuffle board and shooting gerbils out of cannons (Just kidding – Esoteric TV reference there.)

But, as is common with these people, they can’t just park their millions under the sidewalks of Zurich and enjoy life, they have to go off and found another company, ‘cos they’re “Serial Entrepreneurs!” Up to date, Nolan has founded over twenty companies; problem is, since Atari, most of them have not enjoyed the success of his very first venture, and the reputation he enjoyed in the eighties has been somewhat diminished. But “Serial Entrepreneurs” never stop looking for the next “Killer App.”

Back in the late eighties I was working on 3Com when they bought Bridge Communications, a company founded by Judith Estrin and her husband, Bill Carrico. Over a period of a few years, they had founded three companies and sold them for hundreds of millions of dollars. So they decided to pack it all in and spend a few years travelling the world. They came back after two weeks, ‘cos they were bored. She has since founded four more companies. Which begs the question – why are the largest, best known, and most successful tech companies still run by their founders – think Microsoft, Oracle and Apple?

George Parker is a guest columnist for psfk.com. He the perpetrator of adscam.typepad.com, which is without doubt, one of the most foul and annoying, piss & vinegar ad blogs on the planet. He is the author of MadScam and his new book, The Ubiquitous Persuaders, which is currently setting the ether ablaze (and which you can order now on Amazon). He will continue to relentlessly promote the crap out of it until you are forced to stab yourself in the eyes with knitting needles.