Technically, all that being ‘self-employed’ means is that you pay yourself income, but if you don’t (because you can’t, because there isn’t any) and you also don’t have an employer who does, then if you’re below retirement age, you’re probably eligible for any unemployment benefit that’s available, startup, or no startup.

If governments want to reduce unemployment, one of the things that they can do is to encourage you to start a business.

One of the (admittedly, inadvisably brutal) ways they could do this would be to eliminate unemployment benefit, but introducing widespread starvation (which might just happen if the businesses that people were ‘encouraged’ to start were not producing enough to live on by the time the next dole payment would have been due) might, for some unaccountable reason, not be universally recognised as a risk-free strategy.

Nonetheless, one would probably be somewhat rash to put this beyond the (last?) pronouncements of a sufficiently desperate administration: ‘…as an integral part of our ongoing efforts to vigorously encourage individual personal participation in entrepreneurship and innovation, whilst at the same time bearing down relentlessly upon unsustainable public expenditure…’

So why not ‘go the other way’ and offer the unemployed extra (rather than less or zero) unemployment money if they start their own startup?

Although there are a myriad ways in which this could be cynically exploited (running a pointless business, deliberately staying unprofitable indefinitely) many would claim that these are exactly the same kinds of thing that many ‘conventional’ businesses do, and we don’t use that fact as a reason to change the system.

For example, all over the world, many ‘commercially unsustainable’ enterprises, big and small, often survive indefinitely on an exclusive, if often somewhat precarious ‘hand to mouth’ diet of public sector contracts, without necessarily ever having made a penny on anything resembling the open market.

So why not consider treating the unemployed bootstrapper with a bit more ‘laissez faire’?

Arrangements between governments which specifically favoured each other’s welfare-supported entrepreneurs could even improve such highly-prized startup success measures as export statistics.

In times of austerity, instead of cash, vouchers could be issued (for the amount which exceeded existing unemployment benefit, the ‘entrepreneurial subsidy’) which could be exclusively redeemable against the products or services of other similarly subsidised startups, thus contributing to the startup ecosystem by essentially creating ‘bootstrapper currency’.

Any other ideas of this kind, anyone?

Related articles

The replacements for the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 seem to be taking so long to appear, who knows, by the time they do arrive, we won’t be buying them, we’ll be downloading and printing them instead.

For those so poor that they can’t afford the necessary printing equipment (which will cost about the price of four Xboxes) they can (if they know we’ve got a 3D printer) ask us to print one out for them, but Microsoft or Sony will charge us a license fee for the download, so we may need to pass it (and the cost of the printing materials) on (although it should all come to less than buying one in a shop, who may themselves still need to print it out).

We can of course be creative by printing a combined PlayStation and Xbox, but of course we might need to pay three licence fees, amounting to 40% of the cost going to Sony, 40% to Microsoft and to the Google ‘maker’ who put the combination download together for us in their spare time, 20%.

Initially, the CPU, graphics and memory chips for these machines will prove to still be way too detailed to print, even for the next generation of 3D printers, but that’s no big deal, the chips will be posted, to be snugly snapped into place once the unit has been printed.

Ok, I’m kind of joking, nobody really believe this is an imminent thing, but it’s probably not as far off in the future as you might imagine, and the issues, like license fees, are no joke either.

The one thing we don’t think of as being suitable to homeworking and bootstrapping is ‘heavy industry’, but even such bulky things as cars can be made out of lots of small, printable parts.

At the moment, only 3D printers that can make quite small things are relatively cheap, but there’s no reason why we won’t build 3D printers using 3D printers, a fact which will potentially allow us to build bigger, cheaper 3D printers ourselves, which will in turn allow us to build bigger things like cars at home (even including the engines!).

It’ll take longer than buying a car, but more of us will have more time on our hands, if most of the other jobs are gone and printing the occasional printed part may be all we can afford as we gradually put together our future vehicle, Johnny Cash style.

Keeping old cars going in perpetuity is another inevitable consequence of combining the ability to make what we now think of as obsolete replacement parts indefinitely, something which will fit in with the unaffordability of new cars in a time (or place) of greater austerity.

Just like the games console manufacturers, I would be very surprised if the car firms have fully ironed out all the wrinkles in their ‘home printing license’ policies.

Ex-CEO of MySpace creates an incubator called ‘Science’

Learn about the new Los Angeles incubators/accelerators – Moderated by Dave McClure

TechStar’s Brad Feld Discusses Accelerators vs. Incubators

He ran Cisco’s corporate incubator, now he’s creating his own

The Philadelphia Enquirer starts a newspaper incubator

Women Innovate Mobile

We can see so much more now that it makes what we could see only a few years ago seem pathetic. What’s even more tantalising, is the prospect of not just seeing what the brain does, but how it does it. In order to be able to do that, we’ve got to ask a more basic question first: which as yet unidentified bits of the brain do what? New, unimaginably more insightful answers to this than we’ve ever had before are where the big breakthroughs are coming from.

Here’s a press release featuring some of Nancy’s work:

New study pinpoints areas of the brain used exclusively for language, providing a partial answer to a longstanding debate in cognitive science

New research from the McGovern Institute suggests that there are parts of our brain dedicated to language and only language, a finding that marks a major advance in the search for brain regions specialized for sophisticated mental functions.

Functional specificity, as it’s known to cognitive scientists, refers to the idea that discrete parts of the brain handle distinct tasks.

Scientists have long known that functional specificity exists in certain domains: In the motor system, for example, there is one patch of neurons that controls the fingers of your left hand, and another that controls your tongue.

But what about more complex functions such as recognizing faces, using language or doing math? Are there special brain regions for those activities, or do they use general-purpose areas that serve whatever task is at hand?

Language, a cognitive skill that is both unique to humans and universal to all human cultures, “seems like one of the first places one would look” for this kind of specificity, says Evelina Fedorenko, a research scientist in MIT’s Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and first author of the new study.

But data from neuroimaging — especially functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), which measures brain activity associated with cognitive tasks — has been frustratingly inconclusive.

Though studies have largely converged on several areas important for language, it’s been hard to say whether those areas are exclusive to language.

Many experiments have found that non-language tasks seemingly activate the same areas: Arithmetic, working memory and music are some of the most common culprits.

But according to Fedorenko and her co-authors — Nancy Kanwisher, the Walter A. Rosenblith Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience, and undergraduate student Michael Behr — this apparent overlap may simply be due to flaws in methodology, i.e., how fMRI data is traditionally gathered and analyzed.

In their new study, published in this week’s Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they used an innovative technique they’ve been developing over the past few years; the new method yielded evidence that there are, in fact, bits of the brain that do language and nothing else.

Forget the forest, it’s all in the trees

fMRI studies of language are typically done by group analysis, meaning that researchers test 10, 20 or even 50 subjects, then average data together onto a common brain space to search for regions that are active across brains.

But Fedorenko says this is not an ideal way to do things, mainly because the fine-grained anatomical differences between brains can cause data “smearing,” making it look as if one region is active in two different tasks when in reality, the tasks activate two neighboring — but not overlapping — regions in each individual subject.

By way of analogy, she says, imagine taking pictures of 10 people’s faces and overlaying them, one on top of another, to achieve some sort of average face.

While the resulting image would certainly look like a face, when you compared it back to the original pictures, it would not line up perfectly with any of them.

That’s because there is natural variation in our features — the size of our foreheads, the width of our noses, the distance between our eyes.

It’s the same way for brains.

“Brains are different in their folding patterns, and where exactly the different functional areas fall relative to these patterns,” Fedorenko says.

“The general layout is similar, but there isn’t fine-grained matching.” So, she says, analyzing data by “aligning brains in some common space … is just never going to be quite right.”

Ideally, then, data would be analyzed for each subject individually; that is, patterns of activity in one brain would only ever be compared to patterns of activity from that same brain.

To do this, the researchers spend the first 10 to 15 minutes of each fMRI scan having their subject do a fairly sophisticated language task while tracking brain activity.

This way, they establish where the language areas lie in that individual subject, so that later, when the subject performs other cognitive tasks, they can compare those activation patterns to the ones elicited by language.

A linguistic game of ‘Where’s Waldo?’

This methodology is exactly what allows Fedorenko, Behr and Kanwisher to see if there are areas truly specific to language.

After having their subjects perform the initial language task, which they call a “functional localizer,” they had each one do a subset of seven other experiments: one on exact arithmetic, two on working memory, three on cognitive control and one on music, since these are the functions “most commonly argued to share neural machinery with language,” Fedorenko says.

Out of the nine regions they analyzed — four in the left frontal lobe, including the region known as Broca’s area, and five further back in the left hemisphere — eight uniquely supported language, showing no significant activation for any of the seven other tasks.

These findings indicate a “striking degree of functional specificity for language,” as the researchers report in their paper.

“The paper is a real advance in the neuroscience of language,” says Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University and author of several popular books including The Language Instinct and The Stuff of Thought.

“Searching for language circuitry in the brain has been an exercise in ‘Where’s Waldo?’ — it has to be in there somewhere, but it’s so small, and mixed in with so many superficially similar things, that it’s been impossible to find.

[The MIT researchers] have helped to bridge the chasm by combining fMRI with experimental psychology in a new and clever way.”

Future studies will test the newly identified language areas with even more non-language tasks to see if their functional specificity holds up; the researchers also plan to delve deeper into these areas to discover which particular linguistic jobs each is responsible for.

Fedorenko says the results don’t imply that every cognitive function has its own dedicated piece of cortex; after all, we’re able to learn new skills, so there must be some parts of the brain that are both high-level and functionally flexible.

Still, she says, the results give hope to researchers looking to draw some distinctions within in the human cortex: “Brain regions that do related things may be nearby … [but] it’s not just all one big mushy multifunctional thing in there.”

Here’s an episode of Charlie Rose with Nancy Kanwisher:

and this next one takes us into the future:

In apprenticeship, the apprentice is mentored and managed by the master.

In startups, the apprentice, not the mentor, is the both manager and the master.

In apprenticeships, there is a business model that the master is bound to protect and preserve, and the relationship is based upon the master teaching and the apprentice learning and the apprentice doing exactly what they are told, ‘or else’.

In innovative startups, there is a business model to be discovered and the relationship is based upon sharing, not command or control.

The novice startup founder chooses the direction and destination of the ship and steers it themselves by holding the tiller, while the seasoned mentor shows them how to read ocean charts and navigate by the stars whilst listening to the founder’s dreams about what they want to do when they arrive at the promised land.

The perceptive mentor will be learning how to think like a novice, struggling to learn how to reacquire the unfettered beginners mind that they lost as they gained the experiences that they are sharing.

In this way, the adventure-seeking founder has as much to offer the mentor as the mentor has to teach the founder.

What the mentor is learning is how to be a valuable co-explorer, ultimately discarding their ‘best practice instincts’ of advising subordinates and novices to ‘stick to the tried and tested’ and instead treating their experience of best practice as a body of knowledge which needs to be shared with the founder as a resource to be drawn upon, challenged, or consciously disregarded, rather than be followed with blind obedience.

The accomplished startup mentor should eventually become just as adept at coping with the unexpected consequences of traversing uncharted water as the startup founder, not by ‘battening down the hatches’ as a master in a traditional business would instruct their apprentice to do in the face of an approaching operational storm, but by ‘imagining a world of new possibilities’ that the founder opens up before them, in the course of braving the unknown in a way that the mentor would, in a more traditional role, have felt was foolishly imprudent, or unnecessarily reckless, wasteful or pointless.

Although all teachers recognise the fact that they are learning as they teach, the difference in the ‘power relationship’ of founder and mentor has its own unique dynamic.

The founder is not like a tot whose power needs to be curtailed in order to prevent them doing themselves harm, or a student who can ultimately be threatened with expulsion if they disrupt the class enough.

The founder brings enthusiasm and determination, they bring imagination and creativity, but they also bring a fierce sense of independence and autonomy which the mentor is usually powerless to override.

It is precisely this interaction between the force for innovation which is embodied in the startup founder’s uninhibited determination to succeed in the face of inexperience, combined with the mentors capacity to impart experience without the otherwise inevitable capacity (and often imperative) to inhibit innovation, that finally offers us a credible way to solve the innovator’s dilemma.

Experience-free startups may dream up the most radical innovations, but their inexperience will hold all but a few of them back from bringing them successfully to market.

Experience-rich established businesses may employ brilliant inventors who are sometimes even better at dreaming up innovations, but the threat that they pose to the existing business will usually hold them back.

So neither of these one-sided models work reliably.

Only systematically combining experience with the power to challenge it really produces disruptive innovation.

And this is something that the ‘elective’ aspect of mentoring offers innovative startups.

Whilst no-one is suggesting that current apprenticeship schemes should be abandoned in recognition of these realities, the fact that there is a groundswell of new-found appreciation and support for apprenticeship, combined with the fact that it represents a resurgence of a time-honoured tradition, means that it is probably a good idea to see if these recently introduced apprenticeship schemes would benefit from some of the new insights that we are gaining from the experiences of startup mentors.

What mentors gain, in this peer-based, rather than authoritative role, is the opportunity to keep up to date with the latest thinking, stimulate the most enthusiastic, if somewhat capricious and volatile research resource they have ever worked with and follow exploratory trajectories no conventional business would ever have deemed worth considering and usually for good reasons.

They will be exposed to investment opportunities that will often seem to have come from nothing but impetuous audacity and obstinate contrarianism, they will become expert in things which are sometimes at frontiers of knowledge and that overturn all received wisdom and at other times they will seem to be threatening to break the world record for the number of (for old hands, easily foreseeable) blind alleys and cul-de-sacs encountered in a single marathon problem-solving brainstorming session.

All these things are the rewards and penalties that they can reasonably expect when they hand their mighty apprentice-master’s cudgel to the startup founder and in return they accept that humble symbol of the mentor’s metier: the wishbone.

The whole subject of startup expenditure is beginning to get unbearably repetitive and boring.

If one more person tries to tell me ‘the costs of starting a business have collapsed’…

Well, once you get down to zero, is there any further to go?

Well, for a start, there’s the whole ‘one founder, many startups’ thing, even when they’ve still got a day job, or no job and no other means of support other than welfare or parents, and are still ‘pre-revenue’ with their startup(s).

Sort of a ‘fractional cost of living per-startup’, I suppose, but wait:

Another, perhaps even more extreme possibility is the ‘negative cost startup’.

That means getting paid to start a startup.

No, I don’t mean equity investment from friends, family or fools (er, business angels).

And no, I don’t mean a grant, at least not in the sense where you have a specific, identified project, addressing a specific identified requirement, that you have to apply for and successfully be awarded.

No, that’s too much like a contract project, something which would have to have a defined outcome.

That’s too much like a normal project, for a normal startup, or established contractor, or consultant.

So that comprehensively disqualifies it from falling into this brand new category that I am putting forward:

The negative cost startup

The negative cost startup, is the startup that you are paid to start, not because of anything to do with the nature or outcome of whatever the heck you are doing, but purely to keep you busy, or off the streets, or ‘gainfully employed’ and (yes, here it is, this is the political punchline) excluded from the unemployment statistics.

No exit requirement, revenue requirement, profitability requirement, return on investment.

Do I really need to say any more?

I probably do, because ultimately, all the practicalities of this little wheeze are inevitably going to need to be dreamt up by politicians and implemented with considerable relish by civil servants.

Whilst it would seem almost inevitably self-defeating to require dole-substitute startups to be measured by their outcome, there would undoubtedly need to be some bureaucratic process established in order to distinguish between ‘not bothering to try getting a job with an employer’ and ‘working on my startup’.

I can see it all now:

• government run startup mentoring schemes (complete with suitable startup mentoring training, qualification and accreditation requirements)
• mandatory mentoring requirements for startup founders (a certain number of hours per week needing to be spent being mentored by accredited mentors)
• online startup founder progress reporting requirements (have you pivoted since the last time you logged on?)

Some cynic out there is going to read this and cry ‘recipe for a disaster!’ or ‘yet another ridiculous waste of taxpayer’s money!’

Personally, I would be pretty darned sure that anyone who reacts that way will be entirely innocent of two highly relevant kinds of experience:

• the incomparable exhilaration of participating in a vibrant startup accelerator program
• the depressing hopelessness of long-term unemployment in a run-down area

Social impact, anyone?

Oh, and just in case anyone doesn’t think this makes commercial sense, let’s just do the sums.

What if each one of these negative cost (to the founder) startups is only one thousandth as likely to be successful as those in Y Combinator, even if the mentoring does turn out to be competent?

The cost to the taxpayer is no less than unemployment payments and little more than the additional mentoring if everything else is done online.

There’s nothing that dictates that you have to pay the mentors, they could be ‘big society’ volunteers and there’s nothing to stop the founders offering the mentors equity in their startups, an incentive mechanism which perhaps offers the potential to make the startup’s success prospects a lot better than one thousandth of Y Combinator.

But one thousandth of the success of Y Combinator, for a cohort of startups say, one thousand times the total number (less than 500) of YC startups (i.e., half a million formerly unemployed founders)?

That’s half a million Y Combinators, with the value of (at least) one.

How many Y Combinator-level accelerators are there in Silicon Valley? Or the US? Or the world?

And when you do those sums, don’t just evaluate Y Combinator by the value of their stake in the  billion dollar valuation of AirBnB, or even ten billion dollar DropBox.

Instead, take into account the value to the economy of those startups themselves.

Take half a million off the unemployment statistics, call them self-employed, create half a million jobs, each one engaged in the ‘business model discovery process’.

And what could be more credible than an entire economy seriously investing in finding the next FaceBook, Google, Apple or Amazon?

If it works, maybe the only people left on the unemployment register will be those who would rather go looking for a job than create one.

The more successful we become at decoding the ancient melodies of protein biology, the clearer it becomes that the talents of the composer will be needed, in order to orchestrate exciting new material using the primordial instruments we unearth

Here’s an extract from a press release from the US National Academy of Engineering, who in January 2011 awarded Frances Arnold its most prestigious prize:

Frances H. Arnold and Willem P.C. Stemmer will receive the prestigious Charles Stark Draper Prize

— a $500,000 annual award that honors engineers whose accomplishments have significantly benefited society — “for directed evolution, a method used worldwide for engineering novel enzymes and biocatalytic processes for pharmaceutical and chemical products.”

“The NAE is delighted to honor these awardees,” said NAE president Charles Vest.

“Their contributions as engineers have advanced health and quality of life in the U.S. and around the world, and have enhanced the education of future engineering leaders.

Recognizing these outstanding engineers not only rewards great accomplishments but also shines a light on the importance of work that may inspire others to build on their achievements.”

Frances H. Arnold and Willem P.C. Stemmer individually contributed to a process called “directed evolution,” which allows researchers to guide the creation of certain properties in proteins and cells.

The process is used today in laboratories around the world.

At the heart of directed evolution is the concept that the mutation and selection processes that occur in nature can be vastly accelerated in the laboratory to obtain specific, targeted improvements in the function of single proteins and multiprotein pathways.

Arnold showed that randomly mutating genes of a targeted protein, especially enzymes, would result in some new proteins having more desirable traits than they did before the mutation.

She selected the best proteins and repeated this process multiple times, essentially directing the evolution of the proteins until they had properties desirable for a particular use.

Taking his cues from traditional breeding of plants and animals, Stemmer focused on a different natural process for creating diversity, concentrating on the recombination of pre-existing natural diversity, which he called “DNA shuffling.”

Instead of causing random mutations, he shuffled the same gene from diverse but related species to create clones that were as good as or better than the parental genes in a given targeted property.

One of the most important aspects of directed evolution is that it allows for a practical and cost-effective way for improving protein function.

Previous efforts, particularly those involving a design based on the structures of enzymes and the predicted effects of mutations, were often not successful.

They were poor at improving the sought-after complex combinations of properties and were labor- and cost-intensive.

Both techniques — and several variants — are in wide use, impacting the fields of engineering, chemistry, and biochemistry.

Directed evolution has been used to find solutions in such areas as food ingredients, pharmaceuticals, toxicology, agricultural products, gene delivery systems, laundry aids, and biofuels, among others.

“Arnold and Stemmer’s joint development of directed protein evolution was a milestone in biological research,” said George Georgiou, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It is impossible to overstate the impact of their discoveries for science, technology, and society; nearly every industrial product and application involving proteins relies on directed evolution.”

Arnold is the Dick and Barbara Dickinson Professor of Chemical Engineering and Biochemistry at the California Institute of Technology.

Here’s an interview with Frances, not long after she received the award:

Buckle up for some mind-blowing animations at 2m16s into the video. Yes, this talk is right at the edge of intelligibility for the uninitiated: biophysics legend Ron Vale does occasionally use the odd unexplained term (e.g. motility, which is spontaneous self-movability) but he mostly explains things clearly enough for those of us with a general interest in keeping up to date with science and technology.

Here’s Ron’s introduction to the talk:

Molecular motor proteins are fascinating enzymes that power much of the movement performed by living organisms.

In the first part of this lecture, I will provide an overview of the motors that move along cytoskeletal tracks (kinesin and dynein which move along microtubules and myosin which moves along actin).

The main focus of this lecture is on how motor proteins work.

How does a nanoscale protein convert energy from ATP hydrolysis into unidirectional motion and force production?

What tools do we have at our disposal to study them?

The first part of the lecture will focus on these questions for kinesin (a microtubule-based motor) and myosin (an actin-based motor), since they have been the subject of extensive studies and good models for their mechanisms have emerged.

I conclude by discussing the importance of understanding motor proteins for human disease, in particular illustrating a recent biotechnology effort from Cytokinetics, Inc. to develop drugs that activate cardiac myosins to improve cardiac contractility in patients suffering from heart failure.

Here’s Ron’s second talk on the subject:

Here’s his intro to that second talk:

In the second part of this lecture, I will discuss our laboratories current work on the mechanism of movement by dynein, a motor protein about which we still know very little.

This is a research story in progress, where some advances have been made.

However, much remains to be done in order to understand how this motor works.

Here’s the final talk in the series:

Here’s Ron’s intro to the third talk:

The third (last) part of the lecture is on mitosis, the process by which chromosomes are aligned and then segregated during cell division.

I will describe our efforts to find new proteins that are important for mitosis through a high throughput RNAi screen.

I will discuss how we technically executed the screen and then focus on new proteins that are we discovered that are involved in generating the microtubules that compose the mitotic spindle.

I also discuss the medical importance of studying mitosis, including the development of drugs targeted to mitotic motor proteins, which are currently undergoing testing in clinical trials.

Apart from his legendary early work in the discovery of Kinesin in 1984, here’s a very brief bio:

He is the William K. Hamilton Distinguished Professor of Anesthesia and Professor and Chair of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology at the University of California, San Francisco.

He’s also an Investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI)

He received a B.A. degree in biology and chemistry from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a Ph.D. degree in neuroscience from Stanford University.

His postdoctoral studies at the NIH Marine Biological Laboratory were on microtubule-based motors.

Dr. Vale’s honors include the Pfizer Award in enzyme chemistry, the Young Investigator Award from the Biophysical Society, and election to the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

I tackle each of the main issues that she raises in the interview in the video.

Question Number One

Co-founder relationships: do the founders of your startup actually get along?

My thoughts:

Founder matching is now a recognised startup investment and formation discipline, with its own systems, social networks, software, business models and startups (e.g., StartupWithMe, CoFoundify, Cofounderslab and FounderDating) addressing it as a lucrative and growing requirement.

In case you were wondering, ‘Solo-founder’ applicants to accelerators are now almost universally seen as profoundly problematic, so Drew Houston, as solo founder of what many consider to be Y Combinator’s ‘biggest hit’, DropBox is seen (especially by Y Combinator themselves) as an unrepresentative anomaly and is not accepted as being a reason not to insist on startups having co-founders.

Solo founders are seen as ultimately representing ‘too many eggs in one seed investment basket’ with no accommodation for illness, time to breathe or any other life-based crosswinds on the accelerated startup’s flight-path.

The lone founder may often feel and talk as if they’re an unstoppable one-person army, but accelerators are focussed on ensuring backup is there for when it’s needed and that founder burnout is not even more of an occupational hazard than it needs to be.

Then there’s the issue of ‘the rest of the startup team’ that raises questions, not just about the same issues as those which affect the founders, but about such things as ‘buried entanglements’.

Do, for instance, the ‘early hires’ (non-founder startup team members) have unexpressed but strongly felt ‘co-founder in all but name’ expectations, based upon a history of ‘unpaid and unspoken debts’ in terms of ‘service beyond the call of duty’ given to ultra low or non-paying penniless bootstrappers?

Such things only tend to surface unheralded and without fail when seven figure VC money is on the table.

This kind of ‘baggage’ needs to be either systematically teased out and addressed by the accelerator (in order to prevent them taking on startups whose unresolved founder conflicts only come to light when a VC shows sufficient interest) or in the absence of satisfactory answers, used as a basis for rejection.

Question Number Two

Creativity track record: have they actually they made anything that they can show you that’s cool, and have they built something impressive for its own sake, to solve a problem, not just to sell it, but for fun, obsession, curiosity, just to see if they could do it?

My thoughts

The applying founder(s) may ‘talk creativity’ very impressively, but being able to look independently at what they’ve actually done can give the accelerator the kind of insight into what they’re actually capable of (and proud of) that no interview, no matter how probing and extensive, could ever fully reveal.

Notice that there’s a profound implication here: creativity is seen an essential part of what the accelerator is ‘accelerating’ and investing in.

This goes way beyond the creativity represented by ‘the startup idea’ that the applicants are offering.

When taken together, both the idea and the ‘submitted creativity exhibit’ above, rather than being decisive in themselves, are seen as signs (which will still need further checking out) of something which is ultimately much more important to the accelerator than the ‘current viability/imaginativeness’ of the startup’s idea ‘at the time of induction into the program’.

The kind of creativity that an accelerator is looking for is pretty special.

It’s a kind of ‘meta-capability’, the kind of resource that will be the only thing that will have any chance of getting a startup out of trouble when the ultimate nemesis of genuine innovation strikes: the fact that when things go wrong, drawing upon experience is not an option: the creative founder will almost inevitably have to invent their way out of the problem.

The clues that the applicant has not got this unusual indispensable kind of creative capacity will be something an experienced accelerator will have developed a strong sensitivity for.

Question Number Three

Flexible-mindedness: are they really open to new ideas, and not too stubborn?

My thoughts

This is especially important in an accelerator, because there’s something about early stage projects which make them voyages of discovery, so stubbornness can block out openness to exploring new possibilities which are opened up by discoveries made in the course of the program which the accelerator partners see as worth pursuing and a too-single-minded founder may reject out of hand.

This kind of inflexibility will be seen as having the potential to undermine the benefit of the collaborative and co-creative nature of the acceleration environment.

If it is detected at the application stage, will reveal the applicant as almost inevitably being unsuitable.

Being a true visionary in this context is not just about having a single vision, but about having the capacity to effortlessly envision limitless possibilities from an single newly-conceived idea.

An accelerator is not looking for someone who has a single great vision of a brilliant idea, but instead wants someone who has the kind of mind which has ‘innovative visions’ pretty much all of the time and loves exploring them more than just about anything else.

Question Number Four

Determination/determinedness: have they got what it takes to see this thing through?

My thoughts

Paul Graham, Jessica’s husband, talks about this elsewhere as commitment.

The founders need to unequivocally demonstrate a strong tendency towards extreme perseverance, in order to convince the accelerator that they will be able to cope when things go wrong, or things are just much harder than they expected.

Watch out, they know only too well that some founders try to fake this!

The founders mustn’t get bored too easily, when boring work needs to get done and can only be done by them in person, or when things are moving along more slowly than they would like.

They mustn’t be too lazy, mustn’t get too depressed, mustn’t need breaks which are too long or too frequent.

They mustn’t let bad moods get in the way of getting things done, or get in the way of keeping the people around them feeling positive about the venture.

They mustn’t be too easily distracted (a really tough one for those with creative minds) and mustn’t give in to procrastination, mustn’t tend to seriously lose focus or be too focussed too often or too irretrievably on irrelevant or low-priority things.

They must be able to juggle family, friends and lifestyle so that those things don’t get in the way, slow things down, or mess things up.

They mustn’t allow themselves to get confused too easily or give in to a need to party too hard too often, or stay under the influence when they need a clear head.

They need to want to find a way to manage their time well and to treat deadlines with respect and to treat the need to see promises to get back to people as being absolutely mission critical, in the face of things going seriously crazy all around them for long periods.

This determinedness is not just about motivation, but is more about personal discipline: it should go hand in hand with ‘the accelerated startup lifestyle’ and accelerators are always looking closely for warning signs that it isn’t really there.

Jessica talks about programmers, but I feel that this takes us into territory where there really are no more fixed rules that apply to all startups.

Why not?

Some startup solutions don’t need programmers, because they don’t involve software or online services.

In those circumstances, things like website development are mostly outsourced anyway and the skills required to handle this turn into managerial ones which, if the founders have the capabilities above, are something the accelerator can help them acquire relatively painlessly and any shortcomings on this front will probably not be seen as a basis for rejection.

Are there any other big questions that applicants need to tackle?

There’s one big one that many startups ask themselves.

How do I find and fix whatever’s wrong with my startup before I apply?

Check out people who have already been on the accelerator program that you’re thinking of applying to.

Alumni of previous batches of startups who have been on that program will usually be easy to find online, successful applicants almost always proclaim their triumph to the world.

Try to speak to a founder.

They obviously won’t be able to give you any reassurance that you will be accepted, but they will probably be able to tell if there’s something obvious that will be almost guaranteed to get you rejected, and if you manage to get them interested in what you’re working on, they might just give you some helpful tips that are going to be even more valuable to your startup’s future than ‘how to get into an accelerator’.

My own pet theory is that the very best accelerator experiences turn most startup founders into capable future startup accelerators, irrespective of whether their accelerated venture succeeds or fails.

It’s that serial entrepreneur thing.

Well, someone (working with a leading business school) has now bothered to check, and surprise! the results include phrases like “all time low” and “no loyalty” and “no effort to understand customers”.

The video below covers a creditable attempt at making sense of some fairly devastating findings.

If you’ve “bounced off” that video because you’ve found it way too full of management-speak, my advice for anyone who’s really interested in the subject is to first watch the three videos below and then go straight back and watch the first one.

First is veteran social media advocate Chris Pirillo, offering some thoughts about the online service versus offline service conundrum:

This clip on trends in CRM highlights the impact of mobile:

This one gives quite a different perspective on the issues, from a renowned futurologist:

The details of the first video can be found in a press release covering the research:

Research by Henley Business School and CDC Software reveals current customer service levels fail to meet customer expectations

As retailers enter the busiest shopping month of the year, research by Henley Business School and CDC Software reveals that UK retailers, leisure businesses and service providers are failing to meet customer service expectations.

Over 200 people were interviewed including customers and customer service professionals from all sectors including retail, travel & leisure, banking, finance and automotive.

The summary research findings are as follows;

• 75% of consumers believe customer service standards in the UK are at an all-time low
• 62% feel no loyalty to retailers or service providers as a result of feeling under-valued as a customer
• Over half have been driven to complain about a product or service in the last 12 months, most of these making a complaint for the first time
• 67% believe retailers, leisure providers and service providers are arrogant, make no effort to understand their customers and as a result fail to supply against customer demand
• As a direct result, 55% say this failure to tailor stock and services loses sales
• 80% of customers revealed that they would like immediate reassurance and evidence that a complaint will be taken seriously and a satisfactory conclusion achieved
• Over 50% of UK consumers think businesses should be fined for consistent poor service

However, it’s not all bad:

• 69% of travellers and shoppers say self-service check-ins and check-outs improve the customer experience
• 50% of consumers are happy with the customer service information provided on websites
• Of the 80% of customers wanting to speak with a ‘human’, 60% are happy with the customer service received from a call centre and do not ask for face-to-face interaction

Research conclusion

The project: “The Future of CRM – a Market Study by CDC Software in association with Henley Business School”, combined the research with an expert panel debate which can be viewed at www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOEAhVakGL8.

The overall project was managed by customer complaint and feedback management solution provider, CDC Software and overseen and analysed by Professor Moira Clark, director of CRM at Henley Business School.

In conclusion, the research found that Britain’s consumers are increasingly dissatisfied with standards of customer service across the retail, leisure and service sectors. The on-going economic constraints facing consumers were found to be contributory in the rise of customer service complaints, but not the cause.

People are simply demanding better all-round quality.  Where at one time a faulty item might have been thrown away, or an alternative meal ordered if the quality was not good, customers will no longer effectively pay twice and are now demanding, not just their money back, but compensation too!

With the number of complaints rising consistently, and awareness of this being spread in the media and via social media channels, over 50% of consumers believe businesses that consistently provide poor service should be penalised.  The key reasons cited were: “there’s no excuse for poor service”; “customers should get what they are paying for”; “by listening to customers businesses should know what’s acceptable and what isn’t” and, “if more than one customer makes the same complaint the root cause should be established and changes made”.

However, the introduction of self-service supermarket checkouts and airport and train station check-ins has improved the customer experience for nearly 70% of people.  The research found that 92% of customers like to interface with humans on their own terms and 79% found it intrusive to be approached, making self-service the ideal customer solution!

When it comes to making a complaint, 80% of customers want to deal with a person and not a machine, whether in person or via a call centre.  60% of people are more than happy with the response they receive from a call centre, although the remaining 40% said they “feel anonymous” when calling a call centre and fear being passed from department to department.  They also dread being asked to repeat their details and complaint over and over again.

The research also found that customer loyalty has become a thing of the past for all but 17% of consumers.  Competition from online sources, independent customer reviews and more public complaints channels mean people use and trust independent reviews and user comments on social media channels when making a purchasing decision more than they do advertising.

It was also established that customer complaints now play a greater role in the purchasing process; poor customer service can be broadcast globally with a single Facebook status update and therefore the research revealed that it is vital for retailers, travel companies and service providers to have a strong social media element in their overall customer service strategies.

About the research project

The objective of the project, entitled “The Future of CRM – a Market Study by CDC Software in association with Henley Business School”, looked at common customer service practices in the UK and the public’s reaction to these.www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOEAhVakGL8

The findings of the research were presented to a panel of industry customer service practitioners, each involved in face-to-face customer service practice or policy setting.

The panel comprised of Professor Moira Clark, director of The Henley Centre for Customer Management, Henley Business School and Jo Causon, chief executive of the Institute of Customer service representing the CRM industry.

Representing the retail sector were Mathew James, at the time, customer care manager at Argos FS and now director of Customer Care Solutions, working on a long-term project with Shop Direct Finance Company, amongst others and Michael Wallis, former customer services manager at the Page & Moy Travel Group and now Customer Services Manager, University of Cambridge.  From the wider industry were CRM experts Martin Baker, managing director of MicroFocus and Jonathan Pyefinch of CDC Software.