Carlos Selonke's posterous

Silicon Valley investors often have a picture in their heads of the type of person who is worthy of funding: young, brash, stubborn, and arrogant. They believe that successful entrepreneurs come from entrepreneurial families and that they start their entrepreneurial journey by selling lemonade while in grade school. Angel investor and entrepreneur, Jason Calacanis said as much in his recent talk

to Penn State students. And after meeting Wharton students, VC Fred Wilson expressed shock when a professor told him that you could teach people to be entrepreneurs. Wilson wrote

, %u201CI%u2019ve been working with entrepreneurs for almost 25 years now and it is ingrained in my mind that someone is either born an entrepreneur or is not.%u201D

Jason, Fred, and Silicon Valley VCs, I%u2019ve got news for you: you%u2019ve got it all wrong. Entrepreneurs aren%u2019t born, they%u2019re made. And they aren%u2019t anything like you think they are. My team surveyed

549 successful entrepreneurs. We found that the majority didn%u2019t have entrepreneurial parents. They didn%u2019t even have entrepreneurial aspirations while going to school. They simply got tired of working for others, had a great idea they wanted to commercialize, or woke up one day with an urgent desire to build wealth before they retired. So they took the big leap.

We found that 52% of the successful entrepreneurs were the first in their immediate families to start a business %u2014 just like Bill Gates, Jeff Bezos, Larry Page, Sergei Brin, and Russell Simmons (Def Jam

founder). Their parents were academics, lawyers, factory workers, priests, bureaucrats, etc. About 39% had an entrepreneurial father, and 7% had an entrepreneurial mother. (Some had both.)

Only a quarter caught the entrepreneurial bug when in college. Half didn%u2019t even think about entrepreneurship, and they had little interest in it when in school.

There was no significant difference between the success factors or hurdles faced by entrepreneurs who were extremely interested in entrepreneurship in school (and who likely set up the lemonade stands) and the ones who lacked interest. But entrepreneurs with extreme interest started more companies and did it sooner. Of the 24.5% who indicated that they were %u201Cextremely interested%u201D in becoming entrepreneurs during college, 47.1% went on to start more than two companies (as compared with 32.9% of the overall sample). Sixty-nine percent started their companies within 10 years of working for someone else (as compared to 46.8% of the rest of the sample population).

What did affect their successes?  Education %u2014 but not the college they graduate from. In a different study

of the 652 CEOs and CTOs of 502 tech companies, we researched the correlation between education and the sales and headcount of companies founded. We learned that the there was a significant difference between companies started by founders with just high-school diplomas and the rest. Education provided a huge advantage. But there wasn%u2019t a big difference between firms founded by Ivy-league graduates and the graduates of other universities.

The education and training of entrepreneurs is something that the Kauffman Foundation

has been researching extensively. Over the last six years, it has invested around $50 million on academic research to understand what makes entrepreneurs tick and what policies are most conducive to entrepreneurship and to construct data bases to permit analyses of these subjects. (Kauffman has also funded some of my research at Duke, UC-Berkeley, and Harvard.) Its VP of Research, Bob Litan, says that Kauffman has learnt conclusively that entrepreneurship can be taught. The key is to provide education at %u201Cteachable moments%u201D %u2014 when the entrepreneur is thinking about starting a venture or ready to scale it. What entrepreneurs need isn%u2019t the type of abstract course they teach in business schools, but practical, relevant knowledge.  That%u2019s why Kauffman created a program called Fast Trac

, which has trained 300,000 entrepreneurs so far.

One of the findings of Kauffman research is that of the appx. 600,000 businesses that are started every year, less than a fraction of 1% become high-growth %u201Cscale%u201D businesses. These new firms, especially the %u201Cscale%u201D firms, have added all of the net incremental jobs to U.S. economy since 1980 (about 40 million), and probably account for about 1/3 of GDP growth since then. So the key to boosting economic growth is to increase the number of successful high-growth startups.  After all, the growth rate of our economy is nothing more than the aggregation of the growth of our firms.

That is why Kauffman (which has a $2 billion endowment

) is investing heavily in an ambitious new program called Kauffman Labs

.  This aims to dramatically increase the ability of small businesses to become big businesses. The Labs program is built around a novel idea: that highly motivated individuals with %u201Cscalable ideas%u201D can be recruited to be entrepreneurs and to be made successful, by surrounding them with a network of other experienced entrepreneurs; sources of money; and mentors. The goal is to educate entrepreneurs and surround them with a powerful network. This is like a Y Combinator

on steroids.

Anecdotal evidence also shows that there are many more factors at play than that of genes. Note this

BusinessWeek article about waves of spinoffs from Google. I doubt that all of these Google employees who are starting successful businesses were born with entrepreneurial genes. VC and former entrepreneur Brad Feld also blogged

about how many of his frat buddies at MIT had become successful entrepreneurs. Were all of these people born to be entrepreneurs as well? I don%u2019t think so. It is probably education, exposure to entrepreneurship, and networks that led these people to pursue the entrepreneurial path %u2014 which means that Kauffman Foundation may have hit on the right idea with Kauffman Labs.

The reason this topic is really important is that, as Wilson writes, %u201CVenture Capital is a lot about pattern recognition%u201D. The reality is that VCs like him make quick judgments about people based on the stereotypes in their minds. So, like the women that I wrote about in my previous posts, we may be disadvantaging another important segment of our population %u2013 a segment that is older, more humble, more sensible, and more realistic than the population that is getting all the attention (and the money).

Editor%u2019s note: Guest writer Vivek Wadhwa

is an entrepreneur turned academic. He is a Visiting Scholar at UC-Berkeley, Senior Research Associate at Harvard Law School and Director of Research at the Center for Entrepreneurship and Research Commercialization at Duke University. Follow him on Twitter at @vwadhwa

.

https://squareup.com/

A bill introduced today in the Senate by Democrat John Kerry and Republican Richard Lugar proposes a new type of visa for immigrants who create startups

and jobs in the U.S. A similar proposal is part of an immigration reform bill in the House. The Startup Visa has been controversial and will no doubt draw fire from anti-immigrant forces and xenophobes. But if we are going to be giving away visas, giving them to people who will help build the U.S. economy and create jobs is hard to argue against.

The Startup Visa Act of 2010 would create a two year visa for immigrant entrepreneurs who are able to raise a minimum of $250,000, with $100,000 coming from a qualified U.S. angel or venture investor. After two years, if the immigrant entrepreneur is able to create five or more jobs (not including their children or spouse), attract an additional $1 million in investment, or produce $1 million in revenues, he or she will become a legal resident.

The bill would carve out a new %u201CEB-6%u2033 class of visas from the existing %u201CEB-5%u2033 class of visas which has a higher threshold for becoming a legal resident. So it%u2019s not really that radical. The EB-5 requires immigrants to invest at least $1 million in the U.S. and employ ten people.

The Startup Visa sends the right message to prospective immigrants: create jobs, get a green card. A group of 160 venture capitalists and angel investors support the bill, including Paul Graham, Brad Feld, Fred Wilson, Dave McClure, Ron Conway, Mike Maples, Reid Hoffman, Chris Sacca, Jeff Clavier, Bijan Sabet, Josh Kopelman, and Chris Dixon. If you agree that the Startup Visa is a good idea, you can find ways to support it here

and here

.

He said cloud computing is changing the way companies build and buy hardware and write applications. More computers will be bought in mass to run discrete systems, he said. Microsoft used to buy full, pre-configured racks of servers, but it's now buying entire shipping containers of two thousands servers and petabytes of storage at a time. This is rolled into the data center, where the company adds power, cooling and Ethernet, and it's ready to go.

From the text:
"The Coming Change
The Entertainment & Devices division of Microsoft, with its "Chief Experience Officer" J. Allard, is different from the rest of the company. It made the Xbox. The Xbox had—waitaminute—Microsoft software running on Microsoft hardware, which you bought together as a package. Why? Because a gaming console wouldn't work very well as an open system, sold like a desktop computer. People buying a gaming console expect a single, integrated experience that just works. This is a historical truth: Since the NES, Nintendo, Sony and anyone else entering the business who you've actually heard of will only build closed boxes."

Evaristo Sa/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images An cybercafe in Brazil.

Update | 12:11 p.m. Corrected headline to remove China and add Brazil. Thank you to the many people who wrote us about the error.

Google’s dominance of the Internet in the United States is hard to overstate. The company accounts for two-thirds of all Web searches, it owns YouTube, which is 10 times more popular than its nearest competitor, and it is No. 1 in areas like maps and blogging. Over all, Internet users in the United States spend 9 percent of their time online on some Google service, according to comScore.

Yet there are places where Google is far more dominant. India and Brazil stand out, according to new data that comScore made available to The New York Times. In those countries, for every hour people spend online, about 18 minutes are on a Google service.

To be precise, Google accounts for nearly 30 percent of people’s online minutes in Brazil and nearly 29 percent in India. The next country in terms of Google’s dominance is Ireland, where it accounts for 16 percent of online minutes.

The global average is 9.4 percent, or slightly higher than in the United States.

Google’s gaping lead over rivals in Brazil and India is in part the result of an anomaly: Orkut, Google’s social network, which has been a failure pretty much everywhere else in the world, is No. 1 in those two countries. But Orkut is only part of the story.

In Brazil, Google captures nearly 90 percent of all searches, 71 percent of the time spent on maps (compared with just 42 percent here) and 43 percent of the time spent on blogs (compared with 30 percent here). In India, it represents 88 percent of searches, 64 percent of maps and 48 percent of blogs. Gmail accounts for nearly half of the Indian Web e-mail market, compared with just 6.4 percent here.

Andrew Lipsman, director of industry analysis for comScore, said that Google’s dominance in those countries has historical reasons. While on opposite sides of the world, when it comes to the Internet, India and Brazil developed in parallel, he said.

“Part of the explanation was that Google emerged onto the scene at the time these markets were developing,” Mr. Lispman said. “As Google became the default search engine, the brand extended to these other services.”

There are other countries, of course, where Google has not been able to beat local brands — notably China, the Internet market with the most users, where it lags behind Baidu, and Russia, where Yandex is the leading search engine.

But India is ranked seventh, and Brazil ninth, in terms Internet use globally. They are also two of the fastest-growing markets.

That growth obviously bodes well for Google. It also suggests that Google still has room to increase its dominance in the United States and makes it clear just how challenging it is for a rival like Microsoft to compete against Google globally.

From the text "So when you tally everything up, Symbian lost the most share (5.5 percent), followed by Windows Mobile and Linux. The iPhone saw the biggest gain (6.2 percent), compared to smaller but roughly equal jumps by Blackberry and Android (up 3.3 and 3.4 percent, respectively)."