 I wonder around, yes, but it's got the usual little power thing on it. Well, you have Ken's email, right? I do have Ken's email, yes. Okay. So he's aware. But it was only last week or so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So, I've already introduced Paul Mater to you. He's the moderator of the second panel, so I'm going to turn it over to you, Paul. Okay. Thank you. Testing one, two, three. All right. So, I'm going to introduce a panel very briefly. On your right is Pano Anthos. He's the president and CEO of a startup called Hangout Industries. Hangout's an early-stage consumer startup that's marrying the community aspects of social networks with virtual reality to create a new level of user experience and social interaction on the web. And I got to tell you, it is wicked cool. And the spirit of full disclosure, we're an investor. We seeded the company and have been investing all along. My partner, Bob Davis, is on Pano's board. Previously, Pano was the CEO and founder of several successful companies, including Pantera, which has sold the progress. Econovo and Clear Cross, which is previously called Cintra. Holds a bachelor's degree from University of Delaware and a master's degree from Columbia. So, real-life entrepreneur with lots of creds. Next, Lita Nelson is the director of the TLO, the Technology Licensing Office at MIT, which manages over 500 new inventions every year from MIT and Lincoln Labs. I think that's so big that they spun out the whitehead. We had acted as an agent for the whitehead and now they're getting big enough to do their own. They're getting big enough to do their own. So, MIT, as we know, is enormously prolific. The TLO typically negotiates over 100 licenses and helps to start 20 to 30 new companies per year. Prior to joining MIT, Lita spent 20 years in industry, primarily in membrane separation, medical devices, and biotech. At such companies as Amicon, Millipore, ADL, R3D Little, and Applied Biotechnology. She got her BS and MS in ChemE, chemical engineering, for those who are at Harvard and don't know what engineering is, from MIT and an MS in management from Sloan, where she was a Sloan fellow. And then Bill Ouellette, who's all the way on your left, is a senior lecturer and entrepreneur in residence at the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. He's an accomplished business leader with a 25-year track record. He's raised over $100 million for startups and built hundreds of millions of dollars in value in those startups directly. He started his career at IBM. He went to business school at MIT after he got his master's in MIT. He became a serial entrepreneur, running two MIT spin-outs, CEO, Decision Dynamics and Sensible Technologies. He graduated with honors from Harvard University with a degree in engineering. They actually misspelled the word engineering on his degree, but he got that straightened out. He earned an MMS from Sloan, Masters in Management Science, where MIT named him a Sloan fellow. And he's a former professional basketball player, even though he's five inches shorter than Rondo, which probably explains why he had to become an entrepreneur and slum it a little bit. So I've got a couple slides I'd just like to go through with you. The topic we're talking about is how to make Massachusetts even more innovative and more competitive than it is. So the first slide I have here is a bit of a scorecard, and again, as Mike pointed out earlier with his comments, it's hard to come up with a really good proxy for competitiveness or innovation, whether it's number of startups or number of big companies created, but I chose one at random that is particularly easy to search on Google. And that is number of billion company sales started in the state in the last some period of years in technology. And not surprisingly, Silicon Valley beats out all the rest of the area. So clearly they're doing something right. New England is at 9% Silicon Valley at 39% and the rest of the company at 50%. And my guess is probably a lot of those 52% include companies that we might not consider truly tech companies. So that's the scorecard. California is doing well. I'll have a question for the panel, which is are they really doing much better than we are, because they have 36 million people and we only have six. And should we look at it on a per capita basis? But that's another talk that I give. And in fact, the really fair comparison is the Bay Area versus Route 128. And we've got about 4 million people living in the greater Boston area. And the Bay Area is probably about 18, 16. It was 10 million when I lived there in the 70s. So it's probably 15, 18 million people. So did they have four times as many as we do? Probably about. So on a per capita basis, we may not be that far off, but we can always do better. So how do we do better in Massachusetts? There are five ingredients for startups. Ideas, people, you need capital, you need a culture of innovation, and you need government that isn't in the way. So each of these five pieces come from various places. Ideas come first and foremost from customers who have problems. They come from existing startups that have carried the ball a certain way and are now biologically ready to die off and pass the ball to the next generation of startups. They come from business schools and universities, and of course from government institutions. People like to badmouth government's role in innovation, but as we all know, the internet in fact came out of DARPA, and the integrated circuit came out of NASA. So government plays an enormous role and can play an enormously positive role in innovation. People come from big companies, legacy startups, business schools and universities again. Capital, we all know the sources of capital. They are varied, and some people like to say now that the investment banking community has turned its back on startups. The boutique investment banks are really gone, and the industry banks in no small part of LA at Spitzer is dominated by large firms that really only care about floating debt for General Motors. I think they'll have a lot of opportunity to do that over the next few years. The startup culture, well, the first issue with the startup culture is when you go home for Thanksgiving dinner, does your uncle turn to your parents and say, when is Bill going to get a real job instead of doing these silly little startup things that I don't understand? When's he going to get it, go to work at Chase Manhattan Bank for Pete Sakes? That is a question that doesn't get asked in California because nobody has any uncles in California. I lived there for six years. Everybody's uncles are back on the East Coast. You can do what you want. California has role models, and finally I will say, I don't know whether you can demonstrate this statistically, but my sense is that people kind of ring the bell here on the startup and they say, well, okay, that was great. It was really risky. I made a lot of money, built a great company. Now I'm either going to go chase a little white ball around a green field for the rest of my life, or worse yet, and I need this like a hole in the head, I'm going to become a venture capitalist. I think you know how in physics, the absolute entropy of the cyclical system tends to increase, so eventually the whole universe is just lukewarm and there's nothing going on. Well, I think eventually this entire world is all venture capitalists, and there'll be one entrepreneur left standing. No, no, at uneconomic valuations. And finally, government. Government should but does not take a Hippocratic oath to do no harm, and government often does harm. It can do good, as I mentioned earlier, mentioning DARPA, but its principal function in this area ought to be to create a level playing field, which we often don't have. So first question, is there a problem? Here are some numbers. I'd normalize them for population, state population of 36 million in California and 6 million in Massachusetts. Boy, on a per capita basis, we're not doing too badly. Seed and later stage financings and so forth. Oh, boy, this computer is slow. Gotta get that Washington-based operating system in it. I mentioned earlier in the previous panel, 126 colleges and universities in Massachusetts bringing in brilliant people every year are too many of them leaving. Scott Kursner, who was here a minute ago, was now left because he heard I would be speaking, wrote an article a little while ago in The Globe about the brain drain and movement to California. I can tell you that's been going on for 30 years. I went to California in 1976, but there is also a reverse drain. There are people coming back here, and I think in ever larger numbers. Company drain? Well, this is a small subset of all the companies sold in Massachusetts and technology in the last 15 years. There are actually 854 of them. I went through the whole list and just pulled out a few obvious ones. It's extraordinary how many California companies we have built with Massachusetts companies that have been acquired. However, with all that, we're doing very, very well with respect to our venture capital community. They're very competitive, and that's why in spite of California's hotbed of innovation, limited partners keep wanting to invest in East Coast venture firms. And how about universities? Well, we've got one super-performing university. There are more MIT degrees on the walls of the CEOs in Silicon Valley than the degrees of any other university, including Stanford. MIT has more CEOs in Silicon Valley than even Stanford. Here is a somewhat anecdotal bit of data. I did a Google search on the website of MIT, the website of Stanford and the website of Harvard for the word startup. The results speak for themselves. Harvard first needs to get okay with the idea of just business and commercialization, then maybe they'll move on to startups. Isaac Kolberg in a TLO is working hard to make that happen, and Larry Summers was pushing hard in that direction, and I think eventually it'll happen. But there are things that stand in the way. Here's another measure of university performance. The Milken Institute publishes a list based on a number of criteria of universities have done the best job of getting their research out of the university and into the hands of the people that will actually benefit from it. That's, after all, what commercialization is, is distribution. MIT's number one worldwide, or in the United States anyway. No surprise here, UC System California, University of California System number two, Caltech number three, and Stanford number four. Then we go down the list, and I think there are only 25 companies in the list, Harvard University's number 18, which is remarkable because it certainly has the largest business school and the largest medical school in any university, and I would posit that medical school is really actually the largest engineering school in the world. Harvard Medical School is a school of applied science, and if ever there's anybody that ought to get their technology out into the marketplace, it's a medical school. So I'll leave this last slide up, which comes from Bill in the Sloan Center where Bill does his thinking and gets his pencil sharpened, and he really talks about these five elements that I mentioned, government not getting in the way, capital, people, ideas, as an ecosystem, a cycle of activities. Some are more important, some are less important, some we can improve and turbo charge, and some we cannot, but they really interact very strongly with one another. So with that, I'll start with some questions. So first, and why don't we start with Pano because you've started more companies than you can shake a stick at. Massachusetts has the lowest divorce rate in the country. So what are we trying to optimize here? I mean we're really trying to optimize good lives, healthy relations with our families and our fellow people, and I mean how many startups do you really need, how rich do you really want to be? Is there a problem? Do we have a problem, or are we actually just pretty happy being in second place? Well, that's a big question. I think that there's a long-term problem. It's not maybe evident short-term, but there's almost like an exponential impact of this drain going on, which is that in the short-term you don't really see it, but if you're in a consumer space at all, hiring in Massachusetts is very, very difficult. And for a number of reasons. One is you need some experience. It's all on the West Coast, and there may be two or three consumer plays on the East Coast and both. And then secondly, if you hire only young kids, and we have 27 or so, there are three people over the age of 30 in the company, and vast bulk of them are 22 or younger. So the challenge with that is discipline. So they're full of ideas and almost no discipline. You end up with trying to optimize both. I think it makes the startup process a lot harder here as a consequence. I spend far more time recruiting than I should be. I can't tell you the number of people in California who have said, if that company were out here, I'd be in it in a second. And I'm talking about, you know, executives at Yahoo, Google, and elsewhere. So you end up with asking yourself the question, candidly, why am I doing this here? And the answer is? Because I found myself here. Well, I think it doesn't mean it's impossible. And what I do find is we're really designated, the product that we're building is really for high school and college-age students. So if there are 126 colleges here, what better place for that demographic to actually have an impact on the product? And so consequently, it's very easy for us to hire graduates or undergraduates who are interns. So that's the good news. The bad news is from an executive standpoint, and Bob, I'm sure, has told you this already, hiring my executive management team is not a trivial exercise. It's very expensive and very time-consuming. So, Paul, can we jump in? I think is a New Yorker. I don't know why he would have left the Yankees to come up here. Why is he here? We're okay to just jump in, right? Yeah, jump right in. I'm a short attention span. I'm not a lawyer. So I would say that's true if you're in certain spaces. But if you're in robotics and you're here, it's just the total opposite. If you're in biotech, I would say it's pretty much the opposite. So, first of all, it really depends. Second of all is, you know, we like to make this like Yankees Red Sox, you know, California versus Boston. The reality as... That was Lakers and Celtics. What was he up to? Yeah, it's getting better. It's not really like that, right? It's more we're going to set up operations in both places and we're going to try to leverage both. And by the way, not just California and Boston. The question is where is your management team centered, which I think is the point that you're going on. But that being said, I think there is an issue that we do need to think about here in Massachusetts about how competitive do we want to be and what areas do we want to be. And in some areas we're not doing that well. I think it's a good discussion to have. But I don't think we should wring our hands. I've seen things about, you know, energy where we're so far behind, which is near I know something about. And I would contest that vigorously, not because I'm a cheerleader for it. I just don't think it's correct. I think to some extent we're Yankees. We don't blow our own hornets much. And so the statistics may be okay, but the perception may be different. And I think that point is especially true with MIT. When I first came to MIT, I couldn't believe it. If you take the startups that come out of MIT, as Paul just mentioned, it's absolutely prolific. If you just take the companies that come out of MIT as a standalone economy, it's the 24th biggest economy in the world. Well, let's not exaggerate too much. But it is very influential. It's the startups founded eventually by alums or students or faculty in their life, but nonetheless, we're spinning off 20 or 30 directly as licenses out of our office every year, and God knows how many out the back door. But isn't exaggerating too much what business is all about, Lita? There's a wonderful website. If you go to stanford.edu, and do a search on Wellspring, and it's on the Stanford website, they list every company that's come out of Stanford, and I don't know exactly what the criteria are, whether it's people that once had lunch on campus or people that actually started companies while they were there. But of course, it starts an old list. It's about five years old. It starts with HP and Cisco and Google. Google is not in the two-bank Boston study. In the study, these folks have it on their website, and they list the trillions of dollars of cap value and the quadrillions of dollars of revenues. It's very impressive. If you look at this, if you're a young person thinking about starting a company, and it's pretty easy to figure out where you want to go, and whether it's true or not is almost beside the point. No, but also we're not... It's emblematic of a startup culture. We're not having any trouble attracting kids who want to be part of the entrepreneurial culture. I mean, the Sloan School had a very interesting experience. When I went there, and my first job out of college was my MIT professor's startup company. So when I went back to business school, I figured, gee, I'd be... Was that Aspen? No, in my case, it was Amakan and my husband's case, because he also started with his professor's startup company. It was Bose Corporation. So we all went to work for little companies. And so when I went back to Sloan in the late 70s, I was amazed. It was a well-known, named business school, Alfred P. Sloan General Motors. All the studies, everything was about large companies. But then when the high-tech part of MIT, most of MIT, started getting this reputation for startup companies and entrepreneurship, it was the incoming students that forced the entrepreneur track in the business school. So to some extent, I guess the reputation was there, deserved or not. I don't think the origin of the student is what the question is. I think the question is, where does the student land and where does that money get made and where does that ecosystem get built? I will say to anyone who's old enough to have college-aged children, don't let them go to college in New England because your grandchildren will be born in California. Conversely, send them off to Stanford, and they'll come back. Undergrads nowadays are like high school, and you send them somewhere else, so they'll come back. But I think that you just saw, that Lita is a chemical engineer. This just happens all the time at MIT. I'm a fake engineer, as Paul said. I went to Harvard. Whenever we say this study, and I present this, the engineers say, well, Bill, but you have to, and they qualify it. As opposed to Paul and I would say, well, wait a second, it's based on facts, we'll stand beside these facts. But it is the Yankee tradition. Yeah, I just, some people confuse, used to say that that's what our office did. I wish I could take that much credit. So it is absolutely prolific. Just one other data point is to go, your point's a good one, Pano, is not where are they trained, where they end up. At MIT Sloan, it used to be, actually, I was a Sloan fellow in 1994. They fought me, because I wanted to do an entrepreneurship thing. And nobody wanted to do it. They actually did not give me a room in being an entrepreneur. I went out and did it anyway. And now, just recently, they had an entrepreneurship and innovation track. So if you're a student at MIT, you come here, it's one of the top business schools. You can go to door one, and you can become a consultant. And you can study to be a consultant. You can go work at Bain, Mackenzie, Pete's, VCG. You're going to make $200,000 or more, and you have a good chance to make a million dollars in a short period of time. You can do finance, and you can go out and make $300,000. You have a good shot to make a million dollars. You are set. You can pay this back. Or you can go to door three, which is a major called Entrepreneurship and Innovation. And you don't know whether you're going to make payroll on Friday. But the chances are you'll be teaming up, because it's oriented towards technology-based, and by which I don't mean only computers. You'll be teaming up with technology people with really innovative ideas. Now, I will argue, Paul, that you said that the prime purpose of government is to stay out of the way. Or to make 11... Wait, Lita, can I just finish the point, am I? Yes. So you have these three doors. You have 360 people. Decision theory would tell you that they would all go to door one and door two. When Ed Roberts started, he said that he thought there would be 20 people, maybe, who chose the entrepreneurship and innovation track. Any guesses how many people chose it out of 360? Wanted to be in it? 300. 120. 120. Even though it doesn't make... It does not make sense. That's because all the other ones went to... All the other ones who liked the other stuff went to Harvard. Seriously. Well, no. I would respectfully disagree because we have such an entrepreneurial culture that people come in and they start seeing things like the 100K and the VCPE club. You're attracting the students who are... So we have ideas here. We have innovation here. Let's follow our way around the circle. What's next? Because you said that... I was being somewhat facetious. There's no question that government pays for a lot of the research that happens. If government didn't do the fund... We wouldn't have research universities, correct. Fundamental research. It takes too long to pay off. Nobody else would do it. Correct. And yet it's out of that that comes the internet or that comes the genetic engineering revolution. That couldn't be started by... Here's an example of a law that is... There are two laws out there. The whole issue of valuation for startups, which affects everyone, which I won't go into. But the second one that just hit me, like a ton of bricks, is contractors who work regularly in your company but are not on your payroll full-time. So 1099s must be paid... You must pay Social Security and benefits for them. This is a new... I don't know where this came from. I don't know what lawmaker put this together, but it completely stifles the ability to quickly hire people, figure out whether you've got a business or not. You've got to deal with HR issues. Instead of just writing them a check and saying, take care of yourself, sorry, figure yourself, deal with yourself. We actually, even when we were 10 people now, all of a sudden we've got to go back and go over all the contractors we've had if they have been regularly with us 10 hours a week, 20 hours a week. The loss is basically if you have any influence over their schedule. So if they come in regularly on Tuesdays, you've got to write Social Security checks. That's a federal tax law, and that's actually a level playing field and it may be irrational and it may be anti-startup. Right. What about funding? Is there a difference in funding because Lita made the point that there are so many bright young people who come here, they are very enthusiastic about starting companies. So where in the cycle do things break down? Is it funding? Well, it is. And what I would say here is that when I saw your numbers about the Northeast making great returns and the West Coast not, I wondered how can that be? You've got these outsized returns at Sequoia and a number of firms and then you've got great returns here. So I come back to risk taking. So what it really comes down to is there are any number of companies that have come through the East Coast and have ended up on the West Coast because basically they got passed over because their ideas were too outsized, too crazy, didn't have a business model associated with them. And candidly, a lot of the great innovation is outside the box. Pick at Skype, pick Google, pick whatever metaphor you want. So the idea is if you've got a crazy idea where are you going to go with it? You're not going to come East with it, you're going to go West with it. And it's a great idea that you're betting on what the West Coast is willing to do is bet on crazy ideas. And we're trying here a little bit better, but it's half a million to a million bucks. Just try it out and see what happens. That's the first thing. Some people don't want to be venture capitalists who have got any sort of DNA in them. I know two major players on the West Coast that have joined, left their firms and went and got back into startups. Very oddly enough, it's like, whoa, that's usually the complete opposite. So to your point, if you're a two-time or one-time entrepreneur that's been remotely successful, you start looking for your venture capital firm to go look for. And you get courted and so forth. And the West Coast, I think it's very different. I see guys leaving firms to go back into startups because actually I think they think they can make better returns. So Paul, just to comment on this, if you just saw what I see, because at MIT, we talk about funding all the time. How much funding are we getting? And we need the funding at MIT, and it's a good thing. Anyone from the government keep it coming. Thank you very much. But we get a disproportionate amount of funding, especially in the medical areas you're well aware of. Disproportionate, does that translate to startups? Does that translate to innovation? And the answer, I think, as you hear from Pano, as I hear all the time, is no, the innovation is much more dependent first order on the culture and the ability to do risk taking. The ability to accept failure and say, hey, that's okay, I learned something from it, as opposed to, you know, at the dinner table with, you know, when is Bill gonna get a real job and stop doing these things? It's this culture of acceptance, of risk taking, of I learned something from it, and this is what I want to be. It's this, the rock star is the entrepreneur. It is not the funding person, it's not the person who got that. I have another story on this. But is that cause or effect? Is it cause or effect? Yeah, did Zeus come down and say in California, I mean, there's a reason for that, and I'm not sure that's an underlying cause. That may just be an effect for the last couple of years. Failure is a curse on the East Coast. It's a badge of honor on the West Coast. And I'll give you a quick story, I'll try to make it short. So I was on the West Coast pitching my third company, trying to get this thing funded, and I had seen 35 VCs all over the place. And I was turned down everywhere, except I had one West Coast firm kind of holding out saying, well, we can get a partner. So I sit down with one of the major players on the West Coast, and he's like, I'll hear the pitch later. How many venture capital firms have you talked to? Now that's a really two-edged sword, right? If you're honest and you say 35, what everyone else has done is say, I'm 36, thanks a lot. Or, you know, is it a badge of honor? And I said, I'm going to be honest with you, I've seen 35. And he said, that's awesome. He said, that means you really believe in what you're doing. And I got a check. And I was like, this is amazing, right? Because what they're looking, what they really believe in, I think, and there's some firms, again, I wouldn't be with Highland if I didn't believe this, but the reality is they back the entrepreneur. They say, screw the business model. We'll figure that out later. We may not figure it out in which case we'll sell the company, but you got passion about doing something. Here's a half a million bucks. It's no sweat off my back, or here's what they say. It's a jockey, a horse, and a race. The race is the market you choose. The horse is the technology you have, and the jockey is how they're going to run the race for. You want to adjust during the race and everything. And venture capitalists went through this and did an analysis afterwards. He found the technology, the horse failure, was five, maybe 10%. That's not where the failure was. Was it they picked the wrong market? That was 10 to maybe 10%. It was on the jockey. That's what you're betting on. No question about it. I think this idea of acceptance of failure, just a quick story on this. Thomas Watson Jr., who you won't get hurt as an entrepreneur, who I started IBM, I think he's the greatest business leader of my generation, although he's older than I am, of my time. One time someone came in and made a, at that point it was a manufacturing. And Thomas Watson was very shocked when he took him through and up and down about what was wrong and at the end of the meeting, he was destroyed. And he said, so I guess Mr. Watson, you like my resignation. He said shut the hell up and get back out there. I just spent $2 million on your education. And that is the approach that you have to take. If it's a good jockey and they get destroyed by it or they learn something extraordinarily valuable. So let's talk a little more about the jockeys. MIT Entrepreneurship Center has an apprenticeship program or a summer project program that I know can put together where Sloan students go out to companies and spend the summer and do a project. Terrific program. Is there enough of that going on in Massachusetts or is there too little? We have a taste of the environment here. I was recently on a vacation in a far off land and I ran into a fellow who was in the Harvard geology department, getting his PhD at MIT, got his undergraduate at Harvard and had a Fulbright studying in Iceland for the summer and the winter. He was very happy to see the sunlight. And he said, oh you're from Cambridge. I am. And he said, where do you live? And I said, well over by Fresh Pond Parkway. And now he's a geology student so you have to take that under count. He said Fresh Pond Parkway, where's that? And it made me realize that undergraduates really don't get out much. There's a lot going on for them on campus. And even graduate students, even business school students get relatively limited exposure to the local economy. And they may know what's going on in their hometown or in Silicon Valley from the press and they know about Massachusetts. So are we doing enough to sell Massachusetts to these folks so their instinctive move isn't to get on the first bus for California? The first thing is in the shameless plug department which you didn't mention, Highland Capital, which he didn't say has a fantastic summer program that takes people in and out of their environment. But it's a great program and you deserve credit for that. Also I think it was Scott who's not here in his recent blog talked about Y Combinator and what venture capital show up at those presentations. And as I recall it was like one out of 15 or 20 were east coast. And this is right here in our backyard. So the visibility is definitely missing Paul. There's no question that the connecting is between businesses, entrepreneurs and students. I'm not saying that I deserve anything but I've never been called to say hey can you come in and talk to a bunch of students one time actually about four years ago. Which is weird because there's tons of CEOs that are happy to do that kind of thing and provide guidance on this stuff. It's done through a social network in California all the time. The number of kids who have a father figure or mother figure who's acting as an angel investor and helping guide them is legion right now. I mean I don't have to be on the west coast Ron Conway just absolutely if you want to get funded for angel investing you go to Ron Conway first. And he has no idea who's investing in half the time. I mean he's got like 100 investments or something like that. It doesn't matter. It's a badge of honor to be able to do that. I mean I don't think there's such a point of nexus here. Yes there are. Yeah I mean the venture mentoring service the Dishbandi Center the enterprise forum. The hundred K contest that brings in all the people from the industry. So I know I would I would. I understand the consumer area you're dead on. But but but. And by the way it's become self-fulfilling at this is totally different. If you talk about the C. E. O. is that they're they're they're in and there's a there's a big focus on that I have a class at MIT these people through there all the time we have a clean energy prize. We have a Dishbandi Center links into there. You have someone at the T. L. O. who's who's focused on clean energy. It's it's it's a pretty good system that's but that's that's your point is really. I mean that's the best platform. And do we do as good a job of that. Is California. I I don't think we do it we don't do in certain areas I think it's hard to do it. When the critical mass is bigger they are than it is here right. If it's easy to build. Infrastructure if you've got fourteen million people as opposed to. Three million people. Right. But there's also invariably an game. So if you go to a party, a dinner party in California, there's only one thing people are going to be talking about, tech startups. If you go to Starbucks, if you go anywhere, that's what they talk about. If you go to a dinner party in Boston, people may be talking about managing universities, they may be talking about fidelity, they may be talking about the law, they may be talking about the Celtics and sports management. We are not a single company town which makes it a more attractive place to live in some ways, but a less vibrant, frothy cultural environment for startups. I think something very interesting is here. Where would you find the consumer, where in the country would you find the consumer products company town? New York and California. Well, I think Highland is one of the few consumer people in Boston. Yeah, our consumer fund is one of the few consumer venture funds in the country. It's fix and border consumer, not what Pano's doing. When Pano talks about consumer, he's really talking about individual internet users. And the irony is that New York, if you're an internet consumer company, you have to have a presence in New York. And Boston is so much closer than California, and yet that triangle just doesn't straight line versus hotness, whatever it is, it just doesn't work. And you're all out there instead. I want to open this up to questions. So if any of you have questions, please go up to the mics. I'll ask the group one more question, which is, Lita was talking, or because Bill was talking about entrepreneurship at Sloan. I went to Harvard Business School in the early 80s when it was General Motors and McKenzie dominated. And entrepreneurship is now, without question, the number one department. It's the biggest department. It runs the place. Do other institutions in the Boston area celebrate entrepreneurship as much as they should? Well, Boston University, whose new president used to be our provost, is heading with great steam into that job. And of course, you've got Babson, who probably has the best entrepreneurship down and dirty practical MBA around. Yeah. And I think that, I think we're still head and shoulders above in the Boston area. And even, I didn't know that Harvard Business School entrepreneurship was now the biggest, is that? Yeah. That's a bit. Yeah, by a pretty wide margin. That's very interesting. There's a number of faculty, a number of students trading, number of courses, number of students attending courses. Yeah. Right. Because they come over and they participate. They don't have the number of competitions. They don't have these extracurricular activities and things like that. So we frequently see them in our classes and our activities all the time. And it's fantastic. That's exactly what we want as we want this intermingling. But Babson is very good. Boston University is definitely coming up. Question on my right, your left. There you go. Sean Broderick, president, CEO of Trust Plus. I had a question for Ms. Nelson regarding the licenses that your office is getting out to start up. You said 24 this past year. Yeah. Something like that. And I assume that's 24 a year or so roughly speaking up and down. But it depends on the mood of the venture capital community, to some extent. So much does, doesn't it? And my question for you is what is the Topano's point? What is the geographic breakdown, roughly speaking, of where those licenses are going? Are they staying in Massachusetts? Are they going to California? What's the rough breakdown? At least when they first start up, because they're technology based, mostly they want to stay in Kendall Square. So the vast majority of them are in Massachusetts for a period. But the vast, vast majority are in Massachusetts for the first couple of years. Tends to be a local phenomenon. Because they need, again, we're not talking about the odd student start up that goes off. We are talking about true technology based, where you are dependent on the technological vision and capability of the founders, most of whom are professors who stay working for the company. And Lita, can you give us a rough guess of the split by industry between healthcare and tech and energy? Energy is still small. I mean, because, you know, the research is brand new. You're not going to be spinning out companies based on research that's only two years old. The, I probably 30 to 40 percent, depending on the year, is in the biotechnology slash medical devices, with a bigger part of that in the biotech. Then you get into everything. And, of course, it depends what you call energy. A123, which is one of our most successful start ups, is batteries, comes out of the material science department. You've got, depends what you call a company like Liliputian, is it IT, is it nanotech, once they get into that whole area. So there's a lot in that intersection between electronics and materials. Not much, almost nothing in pure software plays. They either don't have any intellectual property or go out the back door or whatever, but very little of that. ours is almost all true technology. Or it's getting to be a mature industry. Excuse me? Or it's getting to be a mature industry. That could be two. But even looking back 20 years, we had very little of that in pure. Akamai, yes, but that was, that was really network systems. Right. And I guess the only pure, pure software might have been RSA data security. Right. Hello. Daniel Capongo. You have made a lot of comments on the differences between the East and the West Coast from the perspective of venture capitalists and the societal judgment as a whole. I was wondering if you could comment on the attitude from the entrepreneurs point of view. In my circle, I still hear a lot of concerns among entrepreneurs who have to still share a certain degree of reluctance in getting venture capital. And to what extent do you see that as a factor between the East and the West Coast in terms of not only the number of startups, but also the viability of the startups? So if I understand your question, am I, that was to me? Okay. I think she's talking primarily about funding. Do you want me to go first? Because I studied this. And by the way, I looked at it not just, I've actually done it more between the U.S. and other countries studying it. But it's actually very interesting is for startup companies, VCs are not, and we're allowed to disagree with each other on this panel, VCs are not the most important for an entrepreneur. It actually is the angel investor that's more important to get the entrepreneur to get some escape velocity. Because by the time it gets to a venture capitalist, they want to know that the technology risk is gone, that the market risk is gone, and that they're really more dealing with a execution risk because they can handle that much better. They would like to see you've proven those other things. So for an entrepreneur to have a good angel network is actually the data we, the experience I've had and the data we've seen is actually more important than a venture capitalist. Once you get that velocity, the venture capitalist will find you. However, I think again, it's highly, highly field dependent. If it's the kind of technology that can do its product almost on the market for a couple of three million dollars, then I agree. If it's a core technology, you can't open a biotech company for under a couple of million bucks, much less show proof concept. So you see these extremely different chain of value from friend and family to angel to venture capitalist, depending on when you're talking about pure software, biotechnology, medical devices, materials, and sort of a long spectrum. So you can't generalize there. Bijan? I just wanted to, oh, I'm Bijan Sabat with Spark Capital. There's this comment I've heard repeatedly, and I think it's a very interesting topic, which is that if you're an east coast entrepreneur, you've got this crazy idea you should go west. So I was an entrepreneur on the west coast, I was an entrepreneur on the east coast, and now I'm an investor in the east coast investing all over the place. And I think this has historically been, there's a lot of logic behind that. And I've heard of east coast VCs calling 495 the west coast for the longest time. But I really believe this is changing and changing fast and hard over the last four years or so. If you look at a number of firms, ours, and many, many others, we're investing a lot of money outside the market with these crazy ideas in California. And I've got three kids I'd rather not go to the west coast. I just took the red eye. It's not a great trip. So first of all, if you've got a great big out hunking, crazy idea, it's www.sparkhabital.com. But I think that part is changing. I think that this ecosystem slide is really a big deal. But I think this culture of risk aversion, there's movement there. I would agree. I would agree. Spark was a different type of approach. Right. It was not your father's Greylock or your father's Highland or your father's Matrix. Right. But I think Spark was a change to our ecosystem. And I think it's a positive one. By the way, risk aversion is a rational response to an environment where the tide may be going out or not coming in. And the reason California is not particularly risk averse is because every time they do some wacko stupid thing, it turns into gold. And if I lived in Mississippi, I probably would not be rationally inclined to start a company. I'd probably be much better off taking a job at an established stable company. There's nothing. It also gets like, you know, the interview process is really interesting. I've had both West Coast and East Coast venture backers. And invariably when I was talking a couple East Coast from Thailand is not on that West. And neither is Polaris the other one. Is that they want to know my background. And, you know, if you've got failures in your background, they're like trying to figure out, well, did you succeed or fail on that one? As opposed to, you know, how passionate about this idea, is it a great idea and is it worth taking a bigger look at? The other thing is, so they're focused on the wrong things, right? At least the interview process I think is focused typically on the wrong things, which is, what have you done wrong? You know, how much money did you make the last time as opposed to whether you are an entrepreneur and whether you belong in this business or not? A lot of people get lucky, right? In the second time, they're awful because they really were lucky as opposed to good. So, you know, part of it is saying, you know, the jockey's important. It's the ecosystem of the jockey. It's the trainer. It's the stable. You know, a lot of things go into this. And I think we should be about creating an ecosystem that makes it really easy for people to start companies. I don't think government wants. That's a really good point. There is a certainly a rising tide makes everybody look good. There were more geniuses in 1998 who knew how to, just brilliant managers and by 2002 they were all idiots. It's like what Mark Twain said about parents. Teenagers, anyway. So, in point of fact there is a big distinction between doing startup venture capital and later stage venture capital. If you're doing later stage venture capital, trying to decide whether the CEO of the company is actually a competent manager is a perfectly legitimate thing. If you're doing a startup and you're trying to evaluate the energy and the quality of someone's thinking and their ideas, what they've done before is almost entirely irrelevant. I completely agree. And it's really, the aphorism is that in the east coast people ask you what you did and on the west coast they ask you what you can do. Mike? Mike Velstein, Y Power, which is a startup. One of my concerns here is that the whole conversation has been about the competition between Massachusetts and California. Similar to the conversation being between MIT and Harvard. The biggest competitor for MIT and Harvard is not MIT or Harvard, Chris Cross. It's the internet universities, the universities with no bricks and mortar. I think the biggest competitor for Massachusetts and California is not each other, which is probably a valid conversation to be having here, but it's, for example, the international competition, the Asian competition. Isn't that what we really need to be focusing on because we're allowed to both be losing this battle in the long run, not in the next couple of years. In the next few years nothing is going to change between us here. But five or ten years from now we're allowed to find that we're both marginalized because there is maybe these are the right factors. There's a set of factors that have to do with whether entrepreneurship will grow rapidly in the Far East, for example. And so I would like to kind of get the panel's opinion of, because are we focused on the wrong I don't want to call it enemy, but the wrong competitor? I think your point's a very good one, and I would extrapolate it to say it's not us versus the international, it's us versus success. Are we going to succeed or not succeed? And when I look at a company, I don't think whether we should place it in Massachusetts or Denmark or Pakistan or wherever it should be, if you want to be a strong company, then you have to look at all options. So I completely think it's the entrepreneur versus success, not the Red Sox versus the Yankees or Celtics versus Lakers. I know Bill has to leave in a couple of minutes. I've got one final question for the panel. Let's take one final question from the group. Okay, kind of a continuation of that. Talking about this fixation of California versus Massachusetts, I wonder if it's possible, I know that venture capitalists here will probably disagree, but if it's possible that when talking about how to make Massachusetts more competitive, the answer is not in venture capital and in startup entrepreneurship. If you look at California, it's obviously doing startup entrepreneurship so well. It's worth thinking about whether Massachusetts shouldn't be fixated on trying to emulate California. Sort of an exception in California in the past several years I think has been Apple, which is an example of a company that has been extremely successful with no recent venture capital going into it. So if you look at a state like Massachusetts where you sort of have these famous historical companies, I know some of them are gone, but some of them are still here, is there room in this discussion for trying to influence the amount of internal corporate entrepreneurship in Massachusetts so that some of these existing established infrastructural companies can try to become the next surprising comeback or the next out of nowhere influential company such as Apple did in California. I would say right off the bat is what Steve Jobs did by running both Pixar and Apple would not be tolerated on the East Coast. How many CEOs do you know running two companies? Startup or otherwise, which by the way happens a lot on the West Coast. So that's one thing I think there's a real creative mindset there that is highly stimulated and allows, not just on a non-compete issue that we talked about earlier, but just on a wide scale of just having your hands and many things simultaneously is pretty unheard of here. It's focus, focus, focus, which is good but Jobs clearly took Pixar and what he was doing with what was his other company, Next, and took the Next technology and threw it into Apple. He couldn't have done that if he was just on Apple. He took the best of Next and folded it in Apple and now you've got a phenomenal machine. Just two comments. One, the idea that we're failing might be helpful but it's not true. I mean we should be paranoid but to think that we're failing and I go around the world, we have a vibrant entrepreneurial ecosystem. We can flog ourselves for what we don't do well here but let me tell you, people would die to have our ecosystem. So that doesn't mean we should stand still but I just to put it in perspective. I think the second point is that what's really important is innovation. Whether it's innovation based startup, which is much more effective generally because of incentives, because of the focus that you have but it's very similar to what's done at Apple and we do a lot of work with large companies, be it Microsoft, HP, Saudi Aramco, they all want to be more innovative. It's just really hard for large companies to do that as Clayton Christensen talks about, the innovators dilemma. It's hard for them to do that. Apple is one of the few companies that's been able to do it. Sony used to be able to do it, doesn't do it anymore. 3M doesn't do it anymore. So Bill, I think you're absolutely right. The score is pretty mixed. We lost semiconductors, we lost software, we won networking with one major exception, Cisco. It's a big exception but we won networking communications and we're winning in biotech which is by any measure a huge industry that's the future. There's a reason Novartis is located here. Energy and environment are up for grabs. My final question is what can the three of you do individually, what can each of us do? What are the two or three things we can do over the next year to make Massachusetts more competitive and make sure that the next few spins on the dial end up being headquartered here? I'll go first. First of all you left out the biggest one of all and that was the Celtics. I think first of all the things that are most important in your list of four are the people and the culture. The funding will be there, believe it or not. Ideas is now becoming a global market. I have a student that started coming and almost won the MIT Clean Energy Prize for $200,000 in cash with an idea he got at Lawrence Livermore. Ideas now are becoming borderless. It really comes down to the culture and the people and those two are very interrelated. We have to do everything we can to make our culture better. We need to have where we celebrate entrepreneurs, where we have these events where people can meet each other, can meet the executive team and they're helping him, those are the things. We try to do that to facilitate it by providing Susan Hockfield talks about being an honest broker for the community, not just at MIT. So we try to do it, we don't do a perfect job at all by holding competitions that are open to outside people. The technology licensing office makes their technology available to outside people. And regarding the training, we try to do all we can to train our entrepreneurs to time-compress that cycle where they can learn the things, where they can make the mistakes and learn faster. That's what we're trying to do. Well, what I can do personally is keep and hire good people in my office and work with the rest of the ecosystem both within MIT and in this marvelously networked community because I think we should stop blogging ourselves. If we're pessimistic about how good a place we are, we're not going to keep attracting people and I think we ought to get off this. However, if I were to think bigger than that, make this an attractive place for really successful entrepreneurs to raise their families, get the school systems better, get the traffic better, get the environment better, but above all get the school systems better because then we're going to attract the best and the brightest, not only to our universities but the older experienced managers also. Thank you. Paula? Well, I'm conflicted because if I were to do the kinds of things that you all are talking about, I wouldn't be focusing on my business. On the one hand, I have to focus and drive a lot of growth for the company but I do think that there's a story here that needs to be told and it's not negative and I think that I would not if I were Massachusetts give up on a whole area called consumer internet. I just think it's just way too big. There's too much advertising being spent all over the world and I hope we would not do is give up on the space because then it really means the death knell for a whole market. Great. Thank you very much for the panel. Thank you everyone for coming. We hope you'll join us for a drink, a beer, a Coca-Cola, whatever just across campus. If you have the agenda and if you don't there are more out here. Flip it to the other side. You'll see a little map but we are just three or four minute walk across campus at the Berkman Center which is 23 Everett Street. We'll see you there and thanks again to Paul and to the panel. Am I going to blow it up if I pull the thumb drive out? You're about to but despite this... You all have your card. Can I take that up? It gave me a little nasty message. What's your name? Oh, you're leaving. I'm not going to give you a card because I don't have any but I'll give you an email address. How's that? What are you leaving to do Nadia? We have full physics and full training but it's in the ground. It's much lighter. What industry? It's a trivial thing. I can't figure out where you are because the first thing is if I want to know where I am. Yeah, that's true virtual reality. We're kind of doing 3D as opposed to true virtual. Thank you. Thank you. I was a college I wasn't going to go back to business school. I was actually a... undergraduate? Jesus Christ, you're older than I am. I don't meet many people older than me anymore. What are you doing? I went to law school. It's great. I wound up in law school by accident. During college I didn't work with kids. Yeah.