Trump’s Policies Are Already Sending Entrepreneurs to Canada and France

Canadian and French Policies to Attract Entrepreneurs and Researchers Impacting Silicon Valley

Last week, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security delayed the International Entrepreneur Rule to next March, and it is currently accepting comments on plans to rescind it altogether. The agency cited logistical challenges in vetting these new visas. The International Entrepreneur Rule was designed by the Obama Administration to support Silicon Valley and the high tech industry’s need for immigrant entrepreneurs and engineers. Immigrant entrepreneurs in the U.S. account for 44% of all startups.   The news has prompted a backlash from immigrant entrepreneurs like PayPal cofounder Max Levchin and leadership at the National Venture Capital Association, who argue that rolling back the rule will drive would-be job creators to other, more welcoming nations. This is already happening.

Canada’s Global Talent Stream Visa Program For Immigrant Entrepreneurs Targets U.S. Immigration Policy

To Silicon Valley observers, Canada has always seemed incapable of igniting a technology-driven economy, despite years of the government support for telecommunications, and a byzantine maze of government grant programs for research and development. Canada has remained a laggard in R&D investment compared to other OECD industrialized nations. Venture capital and government tax policy in Canada seemed to have a focus on short-term tax deductions rather than long-term gains as in California.  Then there was the demise of Nortel and the decline of Blackberry. There may be a new opportunity to bootstrap Canada into the high-tech industry big league: Trump Administration immigration policies that are already impacting Silicon Valley.  Not long after Justin Trudeau’s Liberals came to power in 2015, Trudeau sensed the opportunity to exploit Trump’s anti-immigration stances and the Liberal government swung into action to create the Global Talent Stream visa program specifically designed for rapid immigration for entire entrepreneurial teams. Since that time Trump has fulfilled his promises by slashing the H1-B visa program and announcing the end of the Obama Administration’s Startup Visa Program. Immigrant enrollments at U.S. universities is already down over 40%. Startup Genome, the acknowledged global leader in entrepreneurial ecosystems rankings, currently ranks Vancouver and Toronto 15th and 16th globally in its 2017 study, but those in the know acknowledge that Canada still lacks crucial technology ecosystem capabilities.  Nevertheless, Canada may be on the verge of a technology tidal wave.

Source: Trump’s Policies Are Already Sending Jobs to Canada | WIRED 

Source: Macron Inspires Entrepreneurs to come to France – Financial Times

Source: Trump Administration to end Startup Visa Program – Government Tech

Macron Determined To Make France “A Startup Nation” With Major Technology Initiatives

In 2015, long before Emmanuel Macron’s launched his campaign for the Presidency of France, as a minister in the Hollande government, Macron launched a significant new technology initiative, The Camp, on a seventeen-hectare campus just outside Aix-en-Provence, designed to inspire new thinking on crucial technology issues, and to incubate new entrepreneurial companies. The Camp will open officially this Autumn.  Now that Macron has swept the country in a stunning Presidential victory, it is clear that technology and entrepreneurship are crucial elements of his vision for France, backing it up with a 10B € technology-based economic development fund. The South of France generally, the Cote d’Azur and Provence are emerging as France’s technology center.  France’s nuclear research facility, Cadarache, just northeast of Aix-en-Provence, is the equivalent of California’s Lawrence Livermore Labs, and the home of ITER, the European nuclear fusion project. Prior to Macron’s 2015 launch of The Camp, the government had already established the Sophia Antipolis technology park near Nice, as a center for advanced telecommunications research and entrepreneurial start-ups.

The Camp, Aix-en-Provence

As if to underscore France’s rise on the global stage, France has recently leapfrogged the U.S. and Great Britain as the world’s new leader in “soft power,”  the ability to harness international alliances and shape the preferences of others through a country’s appeal and attraction.

 

 

Technology Entrepreneurship: Free Stanford University Online Course

Stanford University’s free online course, Technology Entrepreneurship begins this week. I have agreed to be a mentor to a maximum of two entrepreneurial teams in this Stanford online course.

In addition to being free you can follow the course on your schedule via the posted video lectures. The course will be taught by Assistant Professor Chuck Eesley.  The recommended textbook, Technology Ventures, by Thomas Byers, Richard Dorf, and Andrew Nelson, is available as an etextbook on CourseSmart or Kindle.  The first three course videos are available online now.

I will also be working this term with Professor Thomas Hellman at the University of British Columbia’s Sauder School of Business on his Technology Entrepreneurship course. I will be scheduling time to meet with students for both the Stanford and UBC Sauder courses.  Further information  on dates and times will be posted here.

VIDEO: Stanford University E145: Technology Entrepreneurship, Introduction & Overview

Register for this free course here: Free Registration for Technology Entrepreneurship

Recommended Textbook

Technology Ventures: From Idea to Enterprise

Byers, Dorf, Nelson

McGraw Hill

ISBN:  978–0–07–338018–6

Entrepreneurs Can’t Fix What They Don’t Understand

Reblogged from PandoDaily

Francisco Dao is one of my favorite bloggers. Francisco focuses like a laser beam on the tough issues of entrepreneurship with unfailing logic, sometimes tough for some to hear.  In a previous post, Francisco spoke openly about the frothy enthusiasm and euphoria surrounding entrepreneurship, suggesting that there were too many entrepreneurs producing too many mediocre ideas.   In this post, Francisco explores the current shift in entrepreneurial profiles, bemoaning their ignorance of how businesses work, and the embarrassing consequences.  He makes the very interesting point that in the past entrepreneurs would gain experience working in an industry before striking out on their own. That was my experience. Today, too many entrepreneurs are dropouts, recent graduates, or have only startup experience. As he points out, this has become the Achilles Heel of entrepreneurship.

You can’t fix what you don’t understand by Francisco Dao When you look at Walmart, what do you see? A store? Dying brick and mortar commerce? Badly dressed poor people? If you’re an entrepreneur looking for massive opportunities, what you should see is a business empire with almost $500 billion in sales, 2.2 million employees, 8,500 stores, 25 percent of all grocery sales in the United States, and most importantly, a mastery of supply chain logistics that its competitors have been unable to match. How about UPS, a company much of the Valley is dependent on for its physical deliveries? Do you look at UPS and think of blue collar guys driving brown trucks and showing up late? Or do you see an unimaginably complicated coordination of moving parts that delivers 15 million packages per day? When you think of General Electric, do you picture an appliance and light bulb company or a conglomerate that makes everything from medical imaging equipment to railroad locomotives along with a financial arm that alone has nearly $600 billion in assets? One of the main reasons few Silicon Valley entrepreneurs tackle big challenges is that most of them don’t really understand how things work. It used to be entrepreneurs would spend several years in industry before starting something on their own. During their time working, they got to see how companies operate, including how they approach large scale opportunities and deal with looming threats. They also likely worked on projects with real or potential profits of hundreds of millions, or even billions, of dollars. Obviously a few years on the job doesn’t teach someone everything that a massive company like Walmart or GE does, but at least they received some real world experience and saw some things first hand that could be improved. These days many entrepreneurs are either college dropouts, recent graduates, or only have startup work experience. Having never spent time in a big company solving big problems or seeing complex business processes, they don’t have any experience or knowledge of how any of these things are handled. As programmers, they have the tools to build solutions but they don’t have the knowledge of what should be built or what solutions are even needed. It’s like giving someone a construction crew without any training in architecture or telling them what type of buildings the city needs. They’ll probably be able to piece together a house, and once they’ve done that they can copy it “like this for that,” but they don’t have the experience or architectural knowledge to build anything complex or useful. Even more damaging is the increasingly popular, and arrogant, belief that inexperienced entrepreneurs can solve everything. It’s one thing to be ignorant of how a complex business works, it’s another thing to assume everything is simple and the people running established companies are stupid. Just because Walmart and UPS are old school brick and mortar companies doesn’t mean their CEOs don’t know what they’re doing. Having the potential power of the Internet at your disposal doesn’t make you omniscient or all powerful. It certainly doesn’t reduce all complex problems down to a simple web solution. Perhaps it’s time for a new type of business school, one that teaches would be entrepreneurs about the large scale challenges in big business. I’m not suggesting everyone get an MBA or spend 10 years working a corporate job before becoming an entrepreneur. But a little exposure to how real companies doing big things actually operate would go a long way toward helping entrepreneurs address some legitimate needs. Instead of simply trying to crank out copycat startups as fast as possible, incubators could even take on this role of teaching entrepreneurs case studies of complex problems. What could Silicon Valley solve if entrepreneurs actually understood how Walmart’s supply chain worked, or UPS’s delivery logistics, or even why it’s so hard to provide a nutritious school lunch? What could we streamline if we had knowledge of the challenges and problems that currently plague these and other complex systems? The bottom line is that you can’t fix what you don’t understand, and with so little first hand experience working on big, real world problems, most young entrepreneurs don’t understand all that much. [Illustration by Hallie Bateman]