Today I have many thoughts that are a continuation of the conversation at dinner last night, here in this university town of Aveiro, Portugal, where I am here with the Carnegie Mellon contingent to inform and instruct the Portuguese on the subject of “entrepreneurship, American style.” Since the government in Portugal is in crisis, we Americans wonder about the effect of the instability on the people. What I am exposed to here, however, belies that instability. The talk continues, the laughter continues, people still do their jobs and think about the present and the future in the same way. And I witness a vibrancy regarding entrepreneurship – in this tiny country, they are trying to make entrepreneurship happen.
We give a vibrant all-day workshop to about 21 attendees at the university regarding university valuation for licensing to existing companies and to startups. While it might sound dry, it was anything but, given the interactive exercises that Tara Branstad, CMU’s Associate Director of the Center for Technology Transfer and Enterprise Creation, has created. With Tara representing the university, Raymond Vennare, CEO of Thermal Therapeutic Systems, representing the entrepreneur, and me representing the venture investor – and the Portuguese as willing participants – the discussions were very lively!
But, I note that there are some key issues here in Portugal that make me question the entrepreneurial future. One is that the young entrepreneurs that I am meeting are not doing their homework on the market and the competition. I look at their opportunities and think that they have to be thinking of a larger context than Portugal. Europe perhaps? The US? But to do that, and to do that well, you have to really delve into the market and the competition. These young entrepreneurs, far east of Delaware, are not being mentored in how to do this analysis and why it is so critical.
The second thing that bespeaks much is exemplified in the current inability of a university in Portugal (a public institution) to raise money from a donor for naming rights. An example was CMU’s Gates Building, our awesome new home for the School of Computer Science. Mr Bill didn’t pay for all of the building, sure, but enough to get naming rights. That happens all the time in the US, right? In universities, stadiums, all kinds of places. But it doesn’t happen here in Portugal. At all. So the universities (the government?) hamstrings itself by not being able to raise funds from its alums, high net worth individuals (read entrepreneurs). Which leads to a lack of that give back mentality that we have in abundance in the US – we call it mentorship. From my perspective, Portugal is making it harder to create and build companies by not having embedded in its culture an entrepreneurial spirit that trumps bureaucracy!
