New Florence. New Renaissance.

"A business of one"

 "A lot of new venture flowers are about to bloom and Google and Amazon are liberally applying the watering can. No government initiative or five-year strategic plan could have hoped to have achieved anything so profound - Google and Amazon are literally pushing the frontiers of global capitalism right down to the teenager’s bedroom. Forget cutting lawns or waiting tables to earn some money, the next generation of college kids are more likely to pay for tuition by showing the world how to play the riff in Weezer’s Sweater song by Rivers Cuomo..."

via Larry Dignan at ZDNet

Under the Radar

Jeff Nolan reports from the conference.

What recession? Entrepreneurial juices continue to flow.

10 Overachievers under 21

PC World Canada identifies the next generation ofBill Gates and Michael Dell like entrepreneurs

The Serial Entrepreneur
The Youngest 'Old Pol'
MySpace Millionaire
The Quizmaster
The Junkyard Genius
The Alchemist
The Chair Man
The Master of Domains
The iPhone Hacker
The Social Director

Stanford Entreneurship Week and Innovation Tournament

Via Guy Kawasaki

"For Entrepreneurship Week 2008 (which starts February 22). SEN has again planned a series of exciting events to engage students in various dimensions of entrepreneurship. Events include presentations by prestigious speakers; roundtable discussions; mixers; VC/student "speed dating" allowing students to pitch their ideas; and a start-up job fair."

Startup Buffet at DEMO

For 16 years, the DEMO event (which starts today)has brought together a bunch of promising start ups with investors and potential acquirers.

A list of this year's presenters is here.

Fortune rates some of the candidates here.

Wall Street Journal and TechCrunch profile a few others.

A Tour of Xerox PARC

Xerox PARC was the center of the universe for the development of many personal computer and Internet technologies. For example: Ethernet, laser printing, personal computer (Alto), graphical user interface, and object-oriented programming. Maybe “center of the universe” is an exaggeration, but at the very least, it’s one of the main trees as you can see by downloading this diagram or looking at this timeline.

Guy Kawasaki, with plenty of photos from his visit

The changing face of Venture Capital

InsideCRM catalogs some of the biggest VC writeoffs in the last decade.

In meantime, one of the Valley's storied firms, Kleiner Perkins has been diversifying out of information technology into green initiatives. In an article on Veep and now Nobel Prize Winner, Al Gore joining the firm, is a listing of the firm's green investments in startups innovating in solar, bio-fuel, CO2 reduction to microbes.

Finally, Fortune has an article on the entrepreneurs who founded PayPal (later sold to eBay) who have gone on to incubate and fund some of the hottest web 2.0 properties today. Different kind of angels and VCs.

"Part Warren Buffett, part P.T. Barnum."

Richard Branson has made a living being under-estimated - in air travel, mobile phones and a number of other markets - over 200 startups!

Business 2.0 profiles Sir Branson's next bets - from space travel to more earthly clean fuels.

BTW - the story about his first plane and impact on his fledgling business is fascinating...

More amazing economics in new Florence

Infoworld has an interview with Kraig Swensrud, whose company Kieden was recently acquired by salesforce.com.

"We ended up doing our hosting and e-mail through Yahoo small business. We ran our CRM system on Salesforce.com and used a service from Jotspot.com for document sharing and collaboration."

And Jotspot's own economics - a fraction of those a few years ago, as entrepreneur Joe Kraus points out here.

If the Valley can get such great economics, only a matter of time before the ultimate corporate customers do too.

The VC Web

Courtesy of Guy Kawasaki, I came across Dean Krikorian's CapitalBlog which has a series of plots around investments of key VCs and Valley companies and interlocking management and board relationships across the Valley.

Dean calls it "Relational Capital".