In a post in the Equity Kicker that linked to a graphic from Tech Crunch there was the image below of all the start ups spawned by former Yahoo employees. (Click on the nodes for the detail. Takes a while for nodes to show)
Yahoo has served as an entrepreneurial incubator because employees participated in the early stock appreciation of Yahoo and the scale of Yahoo involved a lot of talented people (per Equity Kicker).
When we look at Yahoo and all the entrepreneurs that it produced, the point that is perhaps overlooked is that Yahoo in its early days was an entrepreneurship classroom for the employees. The founders made a lot of good entrepreneurial decisions that the employees learned from (a form of mentoring). Of the seven senior managers at the billion dollar company I built in Indonesia, four became successful entrepreneurs, two are CEOs of large companies and one is still a senior executive with the company.
As we look at the South Florida entrepreneurship scene and the number of large companies developed here, the landscape is pretty bleak. The best examples are Brightstar, Citrix and Carnival. Why do we have so few:
- There are few successful technology companies or near tech (Brightstar) to foster employee entrepreneurship by example
- We have no great universities. I continue to believe that we should offer an irrestible deal to Oxford or Cambridge to set up a branch of their university in South Florida focused on science education and related disciplines (mathematics, entrepreneurship, etc.) The University of Miami Medical School might fill this void but that is debatable.
- There is little seed money, few angel investors and no venture funds for early stage companies. Perhaps what we need is an incubator funded by the private sector, tightly affiliated with a university, but looking for investments in the entire community.
