Steven Strauss

It’s Time to Take the Anti-Norquist Pledge

Thank you!

From the Archive (October, 2011)-Steven Strauss Joining Harvard as Advanced Leadership Fellow #in

Steven Strauss (LOK, LON, LOX 02-07) will be joining Harvard as an Advanced Leadership Fellow, effective December 2011. Strauss joins Harvard from the New York City Economic Development Corp. (NYCEDC), where he has served as managing director of the Center for Economic Transformation since 2008.

Strauss currently serves on the board for the NYC Investment Fund, the NYCSeed Investment Committee, the NCY Bioaccelerate, and the NYC NextIdea Business Plan Competition. Prior to working at the NYCEDC, Strauss was a Director at the World Economic Forum and a consultant at McKinsey & Company.

The Advanced Leadership Fellowship is designed to enhance and leverage the skills of highly accomplished, experienced leaders who want to apply their talents to solve significant social problems, including those affecting health and welfare, children and the environment, and focus on community and public service in the next phase of their careers.

Is @Uber a leading indicator of a tech bubble? #in

Uber, for those of you not in the know, is a car service, which is (arguably) the first real advance in the taxi cab model in the 50 years.  Basically using a web interface or App you can order a car to pick you up at any location.  Billing is completely automated.  It is really very slick and if you have not used the service (and you make use of car services) I recommend checking it out.

Uber operates in the following cities:  SF, NYC, Seattle, Chicago, Boston, DC, and Paris.  Uber’s prices appear (to me) to be about 2x of a street taxi.  In a completely unscientific and random review of Uber users based on Uber’s retweets and my friends it appears Uber’s usage base is skewed to media/tech entrepreneurs/startups and angel/VCs.

Most of the cites that Uber serves are cities which: a) have good mass transit systems, b) existing taxi systems and c) an established black car system.  

So basically we have a situation where entrepreneurs/angels/VCs are using a car service which costs 2x of a street taxi, and maybe 10x of mass transit, somehow this does not feel like ‘Lean Startup’ strategy to me? -:)

(ok, the above is ‘tongue in cheek’, but the question of the existence of a tech bubble is meant to be serious, comments welcome)

Thoughts?

Disclosure: I actually use Uber, and think it is a great service!  I am also a fan of their ‘surge pricing’ (aka pricing to demand), which I think is a good innovation.

Go Harvard! - Harvard Launches Innovation Lab - @Harvard

Harvard Launches Innovation Laboratory (wsj, 2011)

A new laboratory for startups has started up.

Harvard University, in November, formally launched the Harvard Innovation Lab, known as the i-lab, intended to foster collaborative entrepreneurial endeavors within the Harvard and greater Boston communities

Bloomberg News
The $20 million lab, housed in a former public-broadcast building in the Allston neighborhood of Boston, is a 30,000 square-foot facility including 24 conference rooms, a workshop with a 3-D printer and power tools to create product prototypes, a 150-person classroom and more than 250 seats in a group work space. It also has a café and basketball court.

In the spring, the lab will pilot a student mentoring program to connect budding business leaders with experts in areas such as fundraising and market analysis. The lab also is also open to local entrepreneurs, allowing community members to attend school-sponsored workshops and speaker series, and boot camps run by business groups.

The laboratory is somewhat unique among Harvard programs because it is overseen by eight different schools. The coordinated effort allows members of all the schools – engineering and applied sciences, business, law, public policy, medical, dental and undergraduate – to participate and to get exposure to more experts and resources than any single school could offer, says Gordon Jones, director of the lab.

The hope, Mr. Jones says, is to expose more students to entrepreneurship and “germinate” their creative seeds earlier in their academic careers. That will allow business-minded participants more opportunities to collaborate with students who have technical skills or legal know-how, ultimately creating new products or companies and even adding jobs to the local market.