Strong People Skills Are Essential to Negotiation Success

Negotiation is at the heart of a business. Winning customers, building partnerships, and securing vendors are all negotiation processes. The skills required to negotiate successfully are complex: inter-personal communication, sales skills, a bit of analytical psychology, assertiveness, and conflict resolution. In short, for a company to do well, the lead negotiator must like people and know how to deal with many different types of people.

Social Entrepreneurship: The New 21st Century Calling

Social entrepreneurship is an approach by start-up companies and entrepreneurs, in which they develop, fund and implement solutions to social, cultural, or environmental issues. The Camp in Aix has made social entrepreneurship a key part of their program. My students and I worked with Enactus, the international non-profit group which helps develop SE projects world-wide.

Mayo615 Plans Live Interactive Webinars For French Tech Entrepreneurs

Seeking Your Feedback To Offer The Most Effective Program of Webinars

Now that I have a large number of weekly viewers, and subscribers, I want to use this update video to again offer a bit more about myself, and to give you advance notice of my plans for delivering more online streaming and live video content in the next few months. I am specifically looking for your feedback comments to assist me in making those plans most effective.

First, I am a Silicon Valley veteran, an Intel alumni. I have started my own companies in North America and Europe, and worked on both sides of the venture capital process. I was the Director of a technology incubator in Silicon Valley, and I have taught entrepreneurship and management at a major university.  I am now planning to offer more in-depth live Webinars specifically targeted for the French Tech entrepreneurial audience.  My plan is to begin offering 1 hour Webinars based on my most popular YouTube Channel weekly teasers beginning in early October. I will eventually be returning permanently to France to offer live seminars.  I am reaching out to you for your feedback on my plans, and your suggestions. Please comment here, and I will respond.

The Critical Need to Integrate The Humanities With Deep Technology

Human Oversight of Deep Technology Development Is Playing Catch-up

Systems Similar To Those In Place for Medical Science Are Urgently Required

 

After watching “The Great Hack” on Netflix I am appalled by the absence of any moral compass at Cambridge Analytica, which transformed Big Data into a political weapon. Other disturbing examples are Uber’s former corporate culture and Facebook’s collusion with CA in abusing our privacy. These cases are prima facie evidence of the crucial need and the opportunity to integrate the Humanities and ethics with deep technology development. I began my career as a Humanities graduate at Intel Corporation working closely with Ivy League MBA’s and senior engineers. We shared our knowledge and learned together to enable the company to excel. The best companies are those grounded in an appreciation of human values, companies that seek out Humanities graduates with a passion for technology to balance out their teams.

After watching “The Great Hack” on Netflix I am appalled by the absence of any moral compass at Cambridge Analytica, which transformed Big Data into a political weapon. Other disturbing examples are Uber’s former corporate culture and Facebook’s collusion with CA in abusing our privacy. These cases are prima facie evidence of the crucial need and the opportunity to integrate the Humanities and ethics with deep technology development. I began my career as a Humanities graduate at Intel Corporation working closely with Ivy League MBA’s and senior engineers. We shared our knowledge and learned together to enable the company to excel. The best companies are those grounded in an appreciation of human values, companies that seek out Humanities graduates with a passion for technology to balance out their teams.

 

Is Facebook Simply Replicating Kenya’s Successful M-Pesa Mobile Payment System?

Facebook’s Libra and Safaricom’s M-Pesa

Are the similarities mere coincidence and competition, or is a global mega-corporation exploiting a successful Kenyan enterprise without collaboration or compensation?

Since Facebook announced its new Libra currency and mobile payments scheme, the global reaction has been very mixed. Libra is not truly a cryptocurrency though it will use blockchain. It will be pegged to a reserve currency, which cryptocurrencies are not.  Libra will “potentially” be governed by an association independent of Facebook, though that association remains non-binding and sketchy at this point. Potential regulatory issues abound around the World, and Facebook is currently not viewed very favorably by many governments.  But most interesting to me, Libra appears to be modeled after Kenya’s M-Pesa mobile payments system, the world’s leading mobile payments system, invented by mobile carrier Safaricom. Then I asked myself if Facebook, knowing that it needs to move away from selling personal data, has seized on Safaricom’s M-Pesa as its new revenue model. 

More disturbing to me, I asked myself if this might possibly be an example of Western mega-corporate exploitation of a smaller enterprise in the developing world. I have heard no reference whatsoever to M-Pesa from Facebook. In similar situations in high tech, the mega-enterprise would typically acquire the intellectual property of the smaller company, hire its founders and employees to gain market advantage. This is often called an “acqui-hire.” Even without IP, it can be done to simply ensure a positive brand image transaction.

Four years ago, in 2015, Facebook With apparent good intentions, and also a good dose of Facebook business strategy, struck out to promote Free Basics, a free limited Internet for the poor in less developed countries sponsored by Facebook and its local telecommunications partners. India was a prime market focus. While on the face of it Free Basics seemed to have merit, Zuckerberg ran into a wall of opposition. On close inspection of the details, Facebook’s problem, despite all of its global corporate sophistication, appeared to have been naïveté about the foreign markets it was trying to enter. International business is strewn with case studies of corporate arrogance and ignorance that led to failure. Zuckerberg could have looked no further back than 2013 for clues from Google and Eric Schmidt, who also failed in India, as to why Facebook failed. The Indian government viewed both Facebook and Google with the same suspicion that they had for the Raj in 1947.

I do not have all the answers yet about Libra and M-PESA, and other mobile carriers have also entered the mobile payment market, but at this point, I have deep reservations about Facebook’s failure to acknowledge its role and its responsibility to Safaricom and M-PESA. IMHO, questions need to be raised directly to Facebook.

Read more: Facebook’s International Business Blunder: following in the footsteps of Google

A bit of history from The Economist:

Why Does Kenya Lead The World In Mobile Money?

A convergence of factors, some of them accidental, explain Kenya’s lead

Source: Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money? – The Economist explains

The Economist explains

From March 2nd, 2015:

PAYING for a taxi ride using your mobile phone is easier in Nairobi than it is in New York, thanks to Kenya’s world-leading mobile-money system, M-PESA. Launched in 2007 by Safaricom, the country’s largest mobile network operator, it is now used by over 17m Kenyans, equivalent to more than two-thirds of the adult population; around 25% of the country’s gross national product flows through it. M-PESA lets people transfer cash using their phones, and is by far the most successful scheme of its type on earth. Why does Kenya lead the world in mobile money?

M-PESA was originally designed as a system to allow microfinance-loan repayments to be made by phone, reducing the costs associated with handling cash and thus making possible lower interest rates. But after pilot testing, it was broadened to become a general money-transfer scheme. Once you have signed up, you pay money into the system by handing cash to one of Safaricom’s 40,000 agents (typically in a corner shop selling airtime), who credits the money to your M-PESA account. You withdraw money by visiting another agent, who checks that you have sufficient funds before debiting your account and handing over the cash. You can also transfer money to others using a menu on your phone. Cash can thus be sent one place to another more quickly, safely and easily than taking bundles of money in person or asking others to carry it for you. This is particularly useful in a country where many workers in cities send money back home to their families in rural villages. Electronic transfers save people time, freeing them to do other, more productive things instead.

Dozens of mobile-money systems have been launched, so why has Kenya’s been the most successful? It had several factors in its favour, including the exceptionally high cost of sending money by other methods; the dominant market position of Safaricom; the regulator’s initial decision to allow the scheme to proceed on an experimental basis, without formal approval; a clear and effective marketing campaign (“Send money home”); an efficient system to move cash around behind the scenes; and, most intriguingly, the post-election violence in the country in early 2008. M-PESA was used to transfer money to people trapped in Nairobi’s slums at the time, and some Kenyans regarded M-PESA as a safer place to store their money than the banks, which were entangled in ethnic disputes. Having established a base of initial users, M-PESA then benefitted from network effects: the more people who used it, the more it made sense for others to sign up for it.

M-PESA has since been extended to offer loans and savings products, and can also be used to disburse salaries or pay bills, which saves users further time and money (because they do not need to waste hours queuing up at the bank). One study found that in rural Kenyan households that adopted M-PESA, incomes increased by 5-30%. In addition, the availability of a reliable mobile-payments platform has spawned a host of start-ups in Nairobi, whose business models build on M-PESA’s foundations. Mobile-money schemes in other countries, meanwhile, have been held up by opposition from banks and regulators and concerns over money-laundering. But M-PESA is starting to do well in other countries, including Tanzania and Afghanistan, and last month it was launched in India. At the same time, operators in some other countries are doing an increasingly good job of imitating it. Some of the factors behind Kenya’s lead cannot be copied; but many of them can, which means it should eventually be possible for other countries to follow Kenya’s pioneering example.

Strategic Inflection Points

I want to more fully explain the concept of Strategic Inflection Points. I have referred to this topic in my Week 5 and Week 11 update videos. Former Intel CEO Andy Grove first described a strategic inflection point as a time in the life of a business when its fundamentals are about to change. That change can mean an opportunity to rise to new heights. But it may just as likely signal the beginning of the end. An inflection point can be the result of an action taken by a company or an action taken by another entity. An excellent recent example may be Facebook’s announced intention to enter the cryptocurrency market. The markets have already reacted sharply to Facebook’s move. Analysts have suggested that it may significantly alter the forecasts for cryptocurrencies. Change is inevitable and change is happening more rapidly than ever. Adaptation to change is imperative for corporate survival.

Managing The Accelerated Corporate Lifecycle

As Change Accelerates, More Important Than Ever

Anyone starting a new company should understand the concept of the “corporate life cycle”, and use it as a guide for understanding where the company is in that cycle, to understand the risks at each stage, and to recognize the need for action to change course. This graphic shows a typical corporate life cycle and different possible paths as the company matures. Management of the corporate life cycle also dovetails with the concept of a “strategic inflection point,” which I briefly discussed in my Week 5 Report, The Internet of Things. John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco Systems has pointed out that the rapid acceleration in market changes has also accelerated the corporate life cycle, emphasizing the importance of understanding it. Companies abound that were initially very successful and yet eventually closed their doors, or were acquired because the company did not anticipate market changes and the need to adapt to the new situation.

Strategic Focus versus Nimbleness

This week I want to discuss the importance of strategic focus, while still being open to possible opportunities, sometimes called corporate “nimbleness,” which may seem like a contradiction. I am a strong believer in strategic focus, however, I have also personally experienced a case where an “openness” to opportunity transformed the enterprise from a pedestrian company into a Silicon Valley legend. Ascend Communications was “focused” on ISDN based video conferencing with a modest and profitable OEM agreement with AT&T. However, AT&T came to Ascend and asked if it could solve a much bigger problem…

Paris, the Rising Hope for a European Silicon Valley | OZY 🇫🇷

Aix/Marseilles, Bourdeaux, Lyon, Paris, and Toulouse Are All Thriving French Tech Innovation Hubs

This article and others have focused on the recent meteoric rise of Paris as an emerging high technology innovation hub. However, there is much more to it than just Paris. There are thriving La French Tech Hubs all over France and in international locations around the World.  Both KPMG’s annual global Technology Industry Innovation Survey and the 2019 Startup Genome Global Startup Ecosystem Report have validated the significant advance of France and Paris as a leading innovation center.

 

Source: Paris, the Rising Hope for a European Silicon Valley | Fast Forward | OZY

Nick Fouriezos, Reporter

WHY YOU SHOULD CARE ABOUT THE RISE OF FRENCH TECH

The French, with their 35-hour workweek and café culture, might be poised to attract the next great tech talent.

Rand Hindi has the quintessential tech guru genesis story. He started coding at age 10 and built a social network by 14. After getting a Ph.D. in artificial intelligence, the entrepreneur set his sights on Silicon Valley. But that’s where the narrative began to fray. Despite all the hype, the Bay Area, known for innovation, felt like a bust. “When you [speak] to people, everybody says they want to do something great,” Hindi says. “But what people really want is to work at Google or sell their company to Google.” So Hindi returned to his native France, started Snips, a company specializing in AI voice technology, and watched his company flourish from three employees in 2013 to 80 today.

As a growing souring on Silicon Valley sinks in, young tech workers aren’t just leaving hot spots like San Francisco and New York, as OZY has previously reported. They are also leaving the country altogether. And while Asia’s — and in particular China’s — tech advances are drawing the world’s attention, it turns out that a growing number of startups are swooning for the City of Love.

For the first time, more than half of respondents to KPMG’s annual global Technology Industry Innovation Survey in 2019 believed that Silicon Valley will no longer be the technology innovation center of the world in four years — due to questions around its escalating cost of living, lack of diversity and troublesome corporate cultures. Cities like Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai and Taipei are best placed to replace it, the survey suggests. But it’s Paris that is gaining the most steam. After not being ranked in last year’s KPMG survey, it moved up to No. 14 — behind only London among European cities. Other analysts are even more bullish: Paris ranked fourth in the A.T. Kearney Global Cities Report and third in the IESE Business School Cities in Motion Index.

IT MAKES PERFECT SENSE THAT PEOPLE WHO ARE THINKING ENTREPRENEURIALLY WOULD WANT TO BLAZE A DIFFERENT PATH.

ANDREW RUSSELL, SUNY POLYTECHNIC INSTITUTE

Driving this shift is a growing contrast in France’s approach toward global tech innovations to the U.K. and the U.S., experts say. On the one hand, London’s status as a financial and innovation hub stands challenged by Brexit’s enduring uncertainties. And America and Britain are tightening up on immigration. On the other hand, the French government is aggressively courting tech entrepreneurs and investments — a strategy that’s showing results. Paris rents are also 61 percent cheaper than San Francisco’s, according to Numbeo, the crowd-sourced global database of statistics such as consumer prices, perceived crime rates and quality of health care.

In 2017, the Emmanuel Macron government introduced a program that fast-tracks four-year residence visas for tech entrepreneurs and their families. Since then, French tech startups are witnessing a dramatic increase in funding: There were 743 French startups raising money in 2017, a 45 percent increase from 2016, according to CB Insights. Global giants are taking notice, with both Facebook and Google opening new AI research centers in Paris. Google has even announced plans to create local “hubs” to teach digital skills in other French cities, such as Rennes, with the goal of getting more people online (and using Google products).

The private and nonprofit sectors are pitching in too. Since June 2017, Paris has hosted the 366,000-square-foot Station F, the world’s largest startup incubator, backed by French billionaire Xavier Niel and Iranian-American executive Roxanne Varza. In October 2018, nonprofit StartHer hosted Europe’s biggest startup competition in Paris explicitly catering to female founders, with a record 363 applications from 30 countries. And this March, the French government further expanded access to its tech visa, from around 100 qualifying startups to more than 10,000.

“It makes perfect sense that people who are thinking entrepreneurially would want to blaze a different path” given the high rent, cost of living and income disparities emerging in the Bay Area, says Andrew Russell, dean of the College of Arts & Sciences at SUNY Polytechnic Institute. Cities like Paris see “an opportunity to capture some of the energy” of Silicon Valley “without falling into some of the excesses and toxicity,” Russell adds.

Admittedly, the European market does not hold the same kind of stratospheric (and, to this point, largely unrealized) potential of Asia. But the new buzz around France’s startup scene simply didn’t exist just a few years ago. Hindi remembers the policies of François Hollande being “anti-startup” when the former French president first took over in 2012. But a rising backlash driven by business leaders led to significant change, says Hindi, a former member of the French Digital Council advising on AI and privacy issues.

Before, if your company went bankrupt, you were banned from starting another one for nine years, making students from French business and tech schools risk-averse. That policy has since been scrapped. Tax credits for hiring people were created, and up to 30 percent of a startup’s technology and salary expenses are reimbursed by the French government, allowing French companies to operate at a fraction of the cost of their foreign competitors. Then there’s the tech visa and its expansion.

Those incentives are sorely needed, considering the obstacles France does have. While the country has enough angel investors — and a de facto investor with the government — there isn’t much of an exit market. Unlike American companies, European companies have a tradition of more of a revenue-profit mindset and less of a willingness to take on the (substantial) risk of acquiring a mid-tier player and turning it into a massive, industry-defining giant, Hindi says. They also prefer to invest in goods and services over potentially groundbreaking technology that needs a few years to develop before producing, he adds. The even bigger challenge? The language, which is why London has typically reigned supreme in the European market.

Some of those issues are more perception than reality, say entrepreneurs and tech workers in France. Snips engineer Allen Welkie — who moved to Paris after working at startups along the East Coast of the United States — says many French-based companies are bilingual and that the visa process was simple. A better work-life balance than in the U.S. helps boost retention too, Hindi says. “In Silicon Valley, everybody is fighting for the same few talented people. … If you’re lucky, they’re going to stay a couple of years. How can you build a company if people are constantly leaving?” As San Francisco becomes more and more untenable for everyone but the highest earners, it’s worth asking whether you can build a city that way either.

Could Macron and Brexit make France Europe’s tech capital? 🇫🇷

Source: Could Macron and Brexit make Paris Europe’s tech capital?

FRANCE 24

Date created : 13/04/2019 – 18:14Latest update : 15/04/2019 – 08:23

Ludovic Marin/AFP | French President Emmanuel Macron speaks as he visits the start-up campus Station F on October 9, 2018.

This article’s original headline and content focused only on a very large, high profile startup incubator in Paris, but frankly, there is a lot more going on in other parts of France as well.

Text by:Charlotte WILKINS

Shortly after his election in May 2017, President Macron said he wanted France itself “to think and move like a start-up” – a vision of the country’s digital future that is gaining traction as Britain wrestles with Brexit.

French President Emmanuel Macron’s vow to make France a ‘start-up nation’ amid the uncertainty over Brexitis raising the question of whether Paris could supplant London as the capital of European tech.

Since his election, Macron has wooed tech entrepreneurs with a string of initiatives in the form of lavish tax breaks, subsidies, and credits for research. In March 2018, he promised to invest €1.5 billion into artificial intelligence research through 2022.

Some of these initiatives, in addition to Macron’s dynamism, have lured British tech companies who are looking to gain a foothold in Europe.

“It made sense to have a European base,” said Cedric Jones*, a Briton who recently launched a start-up at Station F, the cavernous old train station that is now home to the world’s largest start-up campus. “If I’m going to make waves in continental Europe… I wanted to get here before Brexit happened.”

Jones is among dozens of foreign entrepreneurs who have recently launched their start-up at Station F, whose 3,000 desk hub has seen spiraling applications from English-speaking nationals in the last two years.

Some cite political woes back home, the burgeoning French tech sector, or are inspired by Macron’s bid to make Paris the innovation heart of Europe.

“There’s an air of optimism and a can-do spirit in France that I feel we’ve lost somewhat in the US,” said Mark Heath, a New Yorker, who stayed on in France to launch a start-up after studying at INSEAD in 2017.

The Macron effect

Much of the investment in French tech predates Macron’s reforms. The state investment bank Bpifrance, launched by former French president François Hollande in 2013, has been widely credited with developing the sector. Hollande also set up new foreign visas for start-up entrepreneurs.

But Zahir Bouchaary, a Briton who works out of Station F, credits Macron with injecting dynamism into the sector.

“Macron has installed a [start-up] mentality within the French ecosystem itself,” said Bouchaary, adding that it has become much easier to do business in France in the last few years.

“French customers are a lot more willing to work with start-ups than they were before,” said Bouchaary. “France was a very conservative country and our clients were used to working with big old-fashioned companies that have been around for a while. For the past few years, they’ve opened up a lot more to working with younger companies and seem to take more risks than they did before.”

Jones agreed that Macron was “the single variable”. “When he [Macron] goes, the dynamism will go too. I absolutely would not expect that to remain the case if he’s not the president.”

However, although Macron has moved to ease labour laws, Jones said that navigating the country’s labyrinthine bureaucracy in French remained “very burdensome”, and that it was far easier to build a business in the UK. “Whether it’s from a tax perspective or from a legal perspective it’s just so much more complicated.”

UK tech ‘resilient’

The tech scene in London appears to be just as vibrant as ever, explained Albin Serviant, president of Frenchtech in London, who said many UK-based tech entrepreneurs are adopting a “wait and see” approach to Brexit.

“The UK ecosystem is quite resilient,” said Serviant.

“In the first quarter of 2019, there were about €2 billion invested in tech in London. That’s compared to 1.5 billion last year, which is plus 30 percent. And that’s twice as much as France – which invested 1 billion. France is catching up very fast but the investment money is still flowing in the UK,” he added.

Serviant cited London’s business-friendly ecosystem and international talent pool as reasons for why London remains the capital of the European tech sector. Barcelona and Berlin are also contenders for the UK’s tech start-up crown.

Nonetheless, Serviant cautioned against the effects that a hard Brexit would have on the tech sector in the UK.

“‘If Brexit happens in a bad way and if people like me and other entrepreneurs have to leave, obviously that’s very bad for the UK because what makes it very different is the international DNA of London.”

Hard Brexit would not just damage the UK tech sector but would also pose challenges for British developers, who post-Brexit may need a carte de séjour to work in the country, looking to find work in France.

Sarah Pedroza, co-managing director of Hello Tomorrow technologies, a Paris-based startup NGO, said that if she had to choose between hiring a British national and an EU citizen with the same skillset, she would opt for an EU citizen because there would be less paperwork involved.

Brexit aside, others suggest that France is snapping at the UK’s technological heels.

“I do think France has the potential under Macron to close the gap with the UK,” said Jones.

“The single biggest factor in what’s going on for France is that France is developing a sense of confidence in itself, in its start-up scene, as a tech hub, that’s being helped by France and that’s also being helped by Brexit.”