Interaction with Successful Serial Entrepreneurs

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Interaction with Successful Serial Entrepreneurs
? ? ?

• Kentaro Toyama
• Microsoft Research
• TiECon Bangalore 2004

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Caveat

• From TiECon Bangalore 2004 program
• Inside India
• Entrepreneurs
• Serial entrepreneurs
• Successful serial entrepreneur

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About me

• Japanese, raised in Japan and U.S.
• Research scientist
• AB in Physics PhD in Computer Science
• Serial attempts at technology transfer
• 6.5 years at Microsoft with no direct impact on
  product
• Face detection, tracking, and recognition
• Semi-automatic video editing
• Multimedia (Interactive Images, http//wwmx.org)
• Successful tech-transfer
• 7th year Digital Image Pro ships with automated
  image-editing utilities
• Now research in computing technologies for
  emerging markets

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Great Opportunity in India!
Source Clayton Christensen, The Innovators
Solution, 2003
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But, beware!
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Competing with Free Stuff
Beware!

• Sales of font software and the font business
  have been adversely affected in recent years by a
  growing supply of free font software via the
  Internet Precision Type
• Stiff competition, Tower Records says, was
  compounded by the growing problem of digital
  downloading and file copying which has been
  plaguing the music industry BBC News

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Large-Scale Production
Beware!

• Hard to beat Moores Law you have to deliver
  twice as much to the customer every eighteen
  months in order to just stand still
  James Woodward, MIT Enterprise
  Forum
• handhelds from major makers such as Palm and HP
  have gained in features and dropped in price,
  factors which some have said undermined the
  reason for the Simputer's existence
  CNET Asia

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Passive Interactive
Beware!

• Interactive TV has had an unenviable
  reputation for torching through investors' cash.
  Some of the biggest names in broadcasting and
  telecommunications - BSkyB, Granada, Channel 4
  and BT among them - have burnt their fingers
  trying to enhance the power of the handset.
  Financial Times

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Opportunities around?

• Mobile phones
• 2.5M new subscribers per month in India
• E.g., Ringtone sales were at 3.5 billion
  worldwide
• Ultra-cheap computing
• E.g., Fisher Price Power Touch

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Serial Entrepreneurs

• are driven by the need to create something from
  nothing Seattle Business Journal
• sees success as a reason to launch a new
  venture Stephen Berglas UCLA
• are our economic artists - bringing together
  economic resources rather than putting paint on
  canvas" William Dennis Natl Federation of
  Independent Business Owners
• may be the best bet for job creation
  Association of Chartered
  Certified Accountants

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Thank you!

• kentoy_at_microsoft.com

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Interactive TV
What doesnt work

• Despite its youth, the sector has had an
  unenviable reputation for torching through
  investors' cash. Some of the biggest names in
  broadcasting and telecommunications - BSkyB,
  Granada, Channel 4 and BT among them - have burnt
  their fingers trying to enhance the power of the
  handset. Financial Times

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Network Attached Storage

• The fates of Scale8 and Zambeel indicate that
  there's a limited market today for such high-end
  distributed NAS systems -- no matter how good
  their technologies might have been. It didn't
  help that both were relatively young startups
  trying to convince customers to migrate critical
  elements of their infrastructures to a brand-new
  architecture, instead of offering products that
  worked with a company's existing storage systems.