New Florence. New Renaissance.

VC for Spytech

Fortune (sub required) on some of In-Q-Tel's portfolio

Palantir builds tools that can bring massive amounts of disparate data into one place, allowing users to find patterns -- in phone records and financial transactions, for example -- that would otherwise be invisible.

(Sonitus Medical) is developing a miniature wireless-communication device that sits in a person's mouth where no one can see it. (Photo of its SoundBite in the mouth hearing device which uses bone conduction to imperceptibly transmit sound via the teeth)

Oculis software uses a webcam to check whether anyone nearby is looking at a computer screen and, if so, alerts the user with a pop-up window.

(Adapx's) digital pens allow users to record information in real time, then connect the pen to a PC or cellphone and share the info.

Dean Kamen: the restless entreprenuer

Nice Fortune (sub required) interview with the serial inventor where he talks about Segway, Slingshot, First Robotics and his views on educating our young 

"If you have an entire generation of kids growing up who are immersed in a culture that creates superheroes from the worlds of sports and entertainment and nothing else, then these kids will work hard to emulate the skill sets of those role models. The problem is very, very few kids will ever make it in those fields.

We started this thing in 1988 in a gym in Manchester, N.H., with 28 teams. This year we'll have more than 23,000 schools from about six countries competing. We have 120,000 corporate volunteers and 3,500 corporate sponsors. I'm working with will.i.am and his i.am.angel foundation to try to get First into every school in the country."

Photo credit of Kamen with his energy-efficient Stirling engine (being branded Revolution) that he used in Bangladesh to create electricity with methane gas generated by cow dung.

 

Seth Godin on the Creative Entreprenuer

I recently wrote about the emergence of the Creative Entrepreneur

Seth Godin’s latest book is a cheerleader for this entrepreneur. As he says in this interview

“…I called it the Icarus Deception, [because] people think the story says don’t fly too close to the sun,” he says. “But that’s not what it used to say. 150 years ago, it used to say ‘don’t fly too low’. Because if you fly too low, the mist and the water will weigh you down, and you will perish.”

But how does a Greek fable apply to Godin’s new book? He explains.

“It’s about not settling – for 100 years we lived in an industrial economy, where people who ran the factories, made shoes and cars and life insurance policies, and amusement parks, they wanted us to fit in,” he says. They wanted us to be compliant, they wanted us to do what we were told, and that’s why they invented school. To teach us to sit still, and listen and regurgitate. But that industrial age is dying, right before our eyes.”

Yves Behar – a serial designer

Born in Switzerland and educated at the Arts Center College of Design, in Pasadena, Calif., Béhar, 45, has worked on a wide range of projects. These include the recent rebranding of Nivea, the global skin care and shampoo giant owned by German conglomerate Beiersdorf; the Sodastream Source, a new model of the home seltzer maker; and the $100 XO “One Child Per Laptop” computer, with Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, which first won him broad acclaim in 2008. In 13 years since Béhar has founded Fuseproject, he’s emerged as something more than the sum of his projects, too. Along with Apple’s Jony Ive, he has become the face of the idea that designers can be entrepreneurs as surely as Silicon Valley engineers can—and, moreover, are essential to business growth

Bloomberg Businessweek

Jawbone, Miller Heiman, GE - his string of projects keeps going. In a really interesting interview below he describes how Design went from not being respected by technology vendors to a critical function

 

Guy Kawasaki: The Art of Innovation in 10 steps

Guy was one of the most popular speakers at Cognizant Community this week. That’s impressive given the awesome slate at the event.

What’s even more impressive is the slides he used have not changed much over the years - see a similar presentation from a few years ago in the video below.

What has evolved is the examples he presented in his voice over (including funny episodes with his growing kids) and his own appearance. He is slimmer, and more energetic (I saw him briefly after his talk and he had a big smile and said “It’s only 9 – whole day to play with”).

And he is more author/blogger and less VC and product evangelist as the years roll by.  Selfishly, I am convinced that makes you a better presenter:)

Elon Musk: The Iron Man

“That Musk feels no shame dismissing the efforts of vastly larger competitors would not surprise his friends and colleagues, who describe him as Steve Jobs, John D. Rockefeller, and Howard Hughes rolled into one. “He’s a throwback to when people were doing less incrementalist things,” says Peter Thiel, the tech investor who co-founded PayPal with Musk. “The companies he’s started are executing against a vision measured not in years but in decades.” Bruce Leak, a veteran Silicon Valley entrepreneur who once worked with Musk at a video game company, says, “He has that Bill Gates energy where his foot bounces and he’s wiggling just because he’s so smart.” Jon Favreau, a friend and the director of the Iron Man movies, has called Musk the basis for his version of comic book hero Tony Stark, the playboy inventor who builds a flying weaponized suit.”

BusinessWeek

Marc Benioff as Charlie Rose

Two of the more enjoyable sessions during Dreamforce this week were fireside chats CEO Marc Benioff did with Sir Richard Branson, and then with Jeff Immelt of GE and Gen. Colin Powell.

Both sessions touch on leadership topics, and Branson has plenty of entrepreneurial viewpoints, and Immelt and Powell have strong views on major policy matters.

Benioff does a very good, deferential job navigating the heavyweights. Both are well worth a watch.

MIT Technology Review’s Annual List of Young Innovators

“Some members of our latest list of young innovators from around the world have developed consumer Web services you might have used, such as Spotify or Dropbox. Others are making more fundamental breakthroughs that have yet to be commercialized, such as more efficient engines or improvements in optical communications. And a few are blazing trails in fields that didn’t exist before, like pop-up fabrication of tiny machines, or cameras that can see around corners. But all 35 of them have something significant in common: their work is likely to be influential for a very long time.”

MIT Technology Review

“Activist Capitalism”

With $275 million under management, Palihapitiya’s fund isn’t particularly big—billion-dollar funds aren’t uncommon in Silicon Valley. What sets him apart is his ambition to create a working model of what he calls “activist capitalism.” Unlike a Bill Gates or an Andrew Carnegie, who made their fortunes then devoted themselves to philanthropically spending them, Palihapitiya sees no reason to separate those two missions. He wants to continue to make millions, if not billions, through investments that serve high ideals. Social+Capital will mostly limit itself to investments in three sectors—health care, education, and financial services—because he has decided those are the sectors most in need of, and resistant to, fundamental change.

This purpose-driven fund requires purpose-driven money. So rather than raising capital from faceless institutions such as pension funds and university endowments, as VCs typically do, Palihapitiya has assembled a group of individuals—extraordinarily wealthy ones who share his crusading streak. He recruited billionaires such as Germany’s Nicolas Berggruen, Hong Kong’s Li Ka-shing, Brazil’s Jorge Paulo Lemann, and the U.S.’s Eli Broad because he admired the focus of their philanthropy. He enlisted venture capitalists such as Thiel and Doerr, David Bonderman, a private equity investor, and Chase Coleman of hedge fund Tiger Global Management because of their track records as investors. Palihapitiya brought in technologists and entrepreneurs such as Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn (LNKD)), Sean Parker (Napster, Facebook), Kevin Rose (Digg), and Joe Hewitt (Mozilla Foundation, Facebook) to help his companies build their products. And he lined up a few strategic partner investors such as Facebook and the Mayo Clinic because they were institutions whose missions, he thought, meshed with his own.

BLoomberg Businessweek

Peter, the provocateur

Watch the video below. It’s longish, but it will force you to re-evaluate what the tech industry’s priorities should be.

Replace Eric Schmidt of Google in the video and put Tim Cook of Apple or Steve Ballmer of Microsoft and Peter Thiel would likely have made most of the same points he did at the Fortune event in Aspen this week. While the tech industry pats itself on the back for all the mobile, social and other progress (and Peter was one of the earliest investors in Facebook and could be gloating), the reality is in many aspects of life, we have not seen much progress at all. As one of Peter’s papers says “We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters”.

And he does unconventional things, not just talk about them. From my book:

In May 2011, The Thiel Foundation announced fellowships to 24 recipients “younger than 20 years old at the end of 2010—each will receive $100,000 and mentoring under the condition that they stay out of school for two years to build their businesses. . . . The grant winners are pursuing a range of businesses, from alternative energy to education and e-commerce.” That’s Thiel as in Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal and successful investor in a string of successes such as Facebook, LinkedIn, and others.

Thiel clearly subscribes to what the coaches say—“start them young.” The Thiel fellowship’s requirement that the winners stay out of school for two years is, of course, controversial. Indeed, the mother of one of the winners, who will leave Harvard, was quoted as saying, “This is a different paradigm from what I grew up with.”

The industry needs more like Peter who periodically push it to seek a “different paradigm” - not just keep investing in safe or “popular” sectors.

Dinner and Debate with Eric Schmidt and Peter Thiel from Fortune Conferences and Fortune Conferences on FORA.tv