Best States for Entrepreneurs

It should come as no surprise that California leads the nation in the number of companies that are VC funded. In fact, in 2009, the state was home to more than 40% of the nation's venture backed companies. The next closest states are Massachusetts with 11%, New York with 6% and Pennsylvania with 5%.

Despite the obvious leaders, there are a few surprises as well. Two states in the Mountain West have a surprisingly high number of venture back companies. Colorado and Utah rank 5th and 6th, respectively, in the number of VC backed companies per capita (Colorado has 1 VC backed company for every 89,728 in population and Utah has 1 for every 89,825). Also surprising, Arizona, Florida and Nevada have remarkably few VC backed companies. Arizona ranks 35th, Florida ranks 39th and Nevada ranks 41st.

North Korea

North Korea is the most isolated and secretive country in the world with only about 100 Americans visiting the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) each year. Our trip was extremely controlled with our "guides" accompanying us every minute of our trip (even walking us to the bathroom) and restricting our visit to predetermined buildings, sites and museums. Our cell phones were confiscated at the airport and returned to us five days later when we left the country. Internet is non-existant. We are required to ask permission before taking every photograph (much of the time being denied). We were not allowed to speak to unauthorized North Koreans, and they are not allowed to speak to us, under penalty of arrest, detention and imprisonment. Propaganda is rampant, blaring from loud speakers and covering billboards. Despite having my every move and word monitored (the 43rd floor of our nearly empty hotel is reserved for foreigners and we were warned that it was bugged), the trip was fascinating and unforgettable.

Bill Clinton said it was the "scariest place on earth," The Korean Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) at the 38th Parallel. You can see the North Korean soldiers on the near side of the picture and the South Korean soldiers on the far side. The 38th Parallel is the cement line that runs through the center of the three blue buildings.

A North Korean General at the DMZ who HATES America (no big surprise).

The 38th Parallel that separates North and South Korea runs through the center of this room. I am standing on the North Korean side and the soldier behind me is on the South Korean side.

As you can see, the roads throughout North Korea are wide and empty. We drove on 10 and 12 lane roads with one or two cars on the entire road. The roads are also lined with street cleaners who painstakingly sweep and maintain the roads.

Our government handlers/guides referred several times to "rush hour." At first, I didn't quite understand because even when they said it was rush hour, the street were empty. I soon realized they were referring to the length of the bus lines. The buses in Pyongyang are as packed as I have seen anywhere in the world. The lines were often several blocks long and we were never allowed to take pictures of them.

Room #25 shows the North Koreans "Victory" and Room #26 shows the US Imperialist's atrocities.

The "Victorious Fatherland Liberation War Museum" in Pyongyang is one of the most intriguing museums I've ever visited. It is full of propaganda against the "US Imperialist Aggressors." They have re-written history showing that they were living peacefully when the US bombed them "relentlessly." Eventually, the story always ends with the American cowards surrendering and the North Koreans triumphantly winning.

Our guide showing us how the North Koreans victoriously crushed the American cowards in the Korean War.

Many of the museums and buildings through out DPRK (North Korea) show pictures of Americans surrendering and confessing to war crimes.

4.5 million people were killed or wounded during the Korean war, including an estimated 2.5 million civilians. Much of the Korean peninsula was left in ruins.

You soon realize when in North Korea that Kim Il Song (the founder of North Korea and father of current leader Kim Jong Il) is revered as a God. The "Great Leader" is featured on a pin worn by all adult North Koreans, there are over 500 statues of him throughout the country, almost every book sold in North Korea was either written by him or written about him, and you can plan on hearing his name several hundred times per day.

I traveled with a great group. There were six of us from Harvard and Wharton all holding passports from different countries: US, Canada, Germany, Brazil, England and Sweden.

Inside a North Korean home - we are only shown what the government wants us to see, so it wasn't surprising to see a pretty modern home with a nice washer and drier, karaoke machine and tv. Certainly isn't a typical North Korean home.

Rice patty fields. Over the last decade, over 1 million North Koreans have starved to death. During teenage years, North Koreans are 20 cm shorter and 20 kg lighter than their South Korean counterparts due to malnutrition. People's rations shrink or become non-existant depending on how "loyal" they are to the regime.

One of the 500 statues of Kim Il Sung throughout North Korea.

Tens of thousands of people practicing marches, card flipcharts and "the wave" from dawn till dusk (in the rain) in Pyongyang's most recognizable plazas.

We were taken down to take the subway for one stop (weren't allowed to go any further). It descends nearly 350 feet below ground and doubles as a nuclear shelter.

The "Great Leader" and the "Dear Leader" are everywhere in NK, even in all the subway cars.

Beautiful subway stop (since were weren't able to see the other stops, it is tough to know what the remaining stops look like). NK is know for creating a great facade for the outside world, but behind the scenes everything is in shambles.

One of the prides of North Korea, this olympic sized swimming pool at Kim Il Song University, sits empty.

One of the MANY massive portraits of Kim Jong Il.

Two newspapers, almost a month apart, with nearly identical headlines and content.

You can see some of the hundreds of grey colored apartment buildings were all the North Koreans live. Every building is painted grey and most look identical to each other. The tall pyramid shaped building in the background is a hotel which was started in 1987 and would have been the tallest hotel in the world had it been finished. It currently sits partially built and empty.

Pyongyang's Rungrado May Day Stadium, the largest stadium in the world, with capacity of 150,000. The stadium is primarily used for the Arirang Mass Games, but has also been used for executions (several military generals convicted of attempting to assasinate Kim Jong Il were burnt alive in the stadium in the late 90's).

Arirang was an incredible show - they were shooting people hundreds of feet through the air with large rubberbands. Some of the performers were as young as 5 yrs old. They perform on a nightly basis and many will perform until retirement.

Arirang, Mass Gymnastic Games. The background/backdrop is actually tens of thousands of people holding large colored flipcharts- they flip them constantly to change the backdrop of the show.

The "Great Leader" and the "Dear Leader" watching over a music class. This large school was built to showcase the talents of the young NK children. Many start learning music, art, gymnastics at just a couple years old.

Brunei

There a few trips that one does during their life that they know they'll never make again. This was one of those trips for me. Most people have never even heard of Brunei, much less would they be able to point it out on a map ... and that's exactly why I wanted to go.

Brunei is a small country on the northern part of Borneo, in Southeast Asia. It shares the third largest island in the world (only smaller than Greenland and New Guinea) with Malaysia and Indonesia. Brunei also happens to be one of the richest countries in the world. Thanks to large oil reserves, they have made their Sultan one of the richest men in the world. The country is also predominantly Muslim.

The Sultan Omar Ali Saifuddin Mosque is a royal Islamic mosque located in Bandar Seri Begawan, the capital of Brunei. It is also one of the most spectacular buildings I've ever seen.



Jame'Asr Hassanil Bolkiah mosque in Kampong Kiarong in Brunei is the largest mosque in the country. I was able to spend Friday morning at this mosque during the call to prayer, which was an incredible experience.

These boys arrived at the mosque with their fathers and seemed quite pleased that I would ask them to model for me in this picture.


It may be hard to tell from the pictures in the city, but Brunei is in the middle of a tropical jungle. We took a boat tour into this mangrove forest and watched long-nosed monkeys swing from the trees. We later saw about 20 more of them on the golf course at our hotel (playing on the green).

Lauder - Global Knowledge Lab

Is an entrepreneur born or made? As a team of global entrepreneurs, we set off to the Philippines, determined to explore this Nature vs Nurture debate.

As part of our MA degree requirements, Lauder students are required to form a team across language tracks and conduct research in different regions of the world. There are four of us in Lauder this year who were entrepreneurs before coming to Wharton, and we teamed up to further explore entrepreneurship in the developing world.

Will, an American in the Spanish track, is a former investment banker who moved to Mexico to open his own chain of ice cream stores. Stephan is a German, also in the Spanish track, who worked for McKinsey and Bain as a management consultant and also participated in several start-ups. Aymeric, a Belgian in the German track, was involved in several start-ups including a mid-sized pharmaceutical company in Europe. Last, and most certainly least, is me, the founder of PoolTables.com, the largest pool table retailer in the US.


Our mission was to further investigate an entrepreneurship school in the Philippines (The Academy for Creating Enterprise - ACE). A retired entrepreneur, named Steve Gibson, and his wife moved to the Philippines in 1999 to establish a non-profit school where they could train young, poor Filipinos on how to start and grow profitable businesses. They purchased a home large enough to house 25 students and they began teaching an intense eight week, in-residence program to young aspiring entrepreneurs. There were only two requirements: 1. They had to agree to pay a registration fee of about $20, which showed their commitment and sacrifice to become part of the program (all other costs for books, room, board, etc. are covered by ACE). 2. They had to be a returned missionary for the LDS church - as a devout Mormon, Steve had a strong belief that young people who had learned to work hard and serve others for two years (unpaid), were uniquely qualified and trained to become entrepreneurs.


As part of our visit to the Philippines, we were asked to teach the current batch of 25 students about entrepreneurship, our businesses and what had made us successful entrepreneurs.

Several groups at Wharton (Lauder Institute, Wharton Entrepreneurial Programs, and the Wharton Store) were kind enough to donate items to these students. Every student received a Wharton tote or backpack, a Wharton t-shirt, mugs, Wharton pens/pencils/pads, etc. The items might seem insignificant, but you should have seen the look on the faces of these students as they received the gifts. It was well work the extra space it took up in our luggage!

I was fortunate enough to be in Cebu during this batch's graduation, so I attended the ceremony. It was a unique and touching experience to see each of them graduate. Most traveled to Cebu from islands quite a distance away, so only a few had family there to support them at the graduation ceremony. Despite this, without fail, when an individual's name was called, the audience erupted and if there was nobody there to support a recent graduate, several other students would run up to accompany the graduate for some picture taking. Of all the traveling I've done, I have to say that the Filipinos are the happiest people I've ever seen. I asked a taxi driver during my trip why Filipinos are always so happy. His response: "We can't afford much, but we can always afford to smile!"

One of my favorite classes at Wharton was an entrepreneurship classes where we participated in an innovation tournament, which we decided to duplicate during our visit. We didn't have a lot of time, so we did a condensed version. A week before our visit, I emailed the students and asked them to each come up with ten new business ideas which they weren't to discuss with their classmates. Upon our arrival, we had the 25 students divided into five groups of five. Each person presented their five favorite business ideas to their small group, followed by silent voting by each individual on a scorecard. After each person had presented their five ideas, we compiled the scores and revealed the top two ideas in each group (ensuring that they were from two different individuals - not surprisingly, several group's top ideas were generated by the same individual).

So with the top two ideas coming from the five teams, we had ten ideas which were the best out of an original 250 ideas. Each candidate from the top ten ideas formed a team of two or three individuals which helped them further develop their idea and create a poster which summarized the idea visually. We then had each of the top ten ideas pitch to the entire class. Upon completion, we gave every person two stickers that they could place on their top two ideas. This then gave us a winner, two runners-up and some very excited winners!

In addition to visiting current students, we also visited with ACE alum throughout the Philippines. Stephan and I visited with a few alum in Manila. These alum were all neighbors ... one runs a t-shirt printing and design company, another started a successful tamarind candy company, and the one on the far left is a regional coordinator for ACE, who oversees alumni affairs and other ACE activities in the northern region of the country.

This entrepreneur and his wife run a 30+ store business called Cellular City where they sell refurbished cell phones and service. He is one of ACE's most successful entrepreneurs.

Many of ACE's alum return home and start small businesses which provide an income sufficient enough to sustain their families. This ACE alum and his wife run a small barbecue stand together which supports their small family and a few older relatives.


This ACE alum actually owns three small businesses in Manila.


We met with a handful of ACE alum on the small island of Bohol one afternoon. The one standing up in the green shirt was in the first batch of entrepreneurs to graduate from ACE. He started a very successful online real estate company in the Philippines while a student at ACE. He now has over 30 offices around the Philippines and targets mostly Filipinos who live/work abroad who want to own island properties back home.

One of the fun cultural things we experienced in the Philippines was the transportation. These Jeepneys rule the roads in Manila and throughout the Philippines. They are old Jeeps that were stretched and converted into mini-buses where you can easily climb in and out the doorless-back of the vehicle.

Another common form of transportation are the "tricycles" which are modified scooters. As you can see, they often fit quite a few people on one scooter. We had 8 people on this scooter (I somehow ended up fitting right behind Stephan, in the pink shirt).

Mangos ... need I say more?

We somehow fit in some scuba diving at the end of our trip. Life is rough!