Good vs. Bad Entrepreneurs (instead of Old vs. Young Entrepreneurs)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-innovations/the-case-for-old-entrepreneurs/2011/12/02/gIQAulJ3KO_story.html


(This is a reaction to the speech by Mr. Vinod Khosla, who segregates entrepreneurs based on their age).


I think we all look for generalizations that can help us focus on what makes an individual or a venture more successful. Age, gender, race, nationality, wealth, qualifications, grades and experience are just some of the filters people use.  
 
Imagine, if you are lucky enough to get 200 new business plans emailed to you every day along with emails, phone calls and plenty of encounters with hopeful entrepreneurs from all over the world, you can feel compelled to develop a framework, a guiding principle regarding how you say no to people. Also when you do invest in hundred's of entrepreneurs and only a small minority succeed, you end up developing a formula that allows you to filter.


People like Mr. Khosla are super successful, intelligent and networked. They have created their short-cuts based on experience acquired over many deals. Everyone is entitled to his or her views. But I think Mr. Khosla represents a very dangerous point of view (age as one of the most important metric for deciding where to invest) that leads to prejudice against thousands if not millions of highly qualified, generous, hard working people. 
 
Today, more people are starting new ventures and even more want to start new companies but find it difficult to raise money. This is because the venture model has not been adapted to our age. It remains surprisingly "Industrial". Committees find it difficult to understand Innovation so they force the entrepreneurs to write business plans and develop prototypes. In others words, they buy time so they can figure out what to do. So number of companies that "make it" vs. "projects initiated" is around 1%. These so called successful companies attract billions in investment and most fail to do anything that will make the world a better place. And the BIG problems - 300Million people unemployed; 600Million people underemployed; 3Billion people trying to make a living on $2.50 a day - continue to confound us.  
 
What we need is a new way to support entrepreneurship. A new peer2peer approach, where Good People can dis-intermediate the bad people and directly working with other Good People; helping each other to solve the big problems irrespective of your age, gender, race, nationality, wealth, qualifications, grades or experience. Where thousands of entrepreneurs can work with millions of students and revolutionaries to start something good. The only thing that should matter is the power of the Idea. That is what we are trying to do with majamba.me