Over the weekend, I learned that one of my heroes, Lee Davenport, had just passed away. Lee died of cancer at the age of 95 in his longtime home of Greenwich, CT. That’s where I first met him in 1994, when I was researching a book about the MIT Radiation Laboratory, the World War II lab where some of the nation’s best and brightest physicists secretly developed microwave radar—the most important technological weapon the U.S. and Britain brought to bear in the war.

Lee was an X-ray spectroscopist and all around electronics wizard. He interrupted his doctoral work in physics at the University of Pittsburgh to join the Rad Lab, where he helped lead development of the SCR-584 fire-control radar that tracked planes and buzz bombs and automatically relayed their position to anti-aircraft guns, saving a lot of Allied lives, soldiers and citizens. After the war, he helped build the Harvard cyclotron, and then went into industrial research, rising to become the head of research at General Telephone & Electronics (GTE) Laboratories.

All told, I did six formal interviews with Lee, three for the World War II book (The Invention That Changed the World), and three more for Engines of Tomorrow, a book about the management of corporate research. Afterwards, I saw him a time or two at conferences and when helping with two documentaries about the war, but we fell out of touch in recent years.

The New York Times ran a very nice obituary of Lee on Saturday. There are also some nice details in this article posted by Union College in New York, one of his alma maters. I urge you to read these for more of his story. But I wanted to share a few details that weren’t in those articles that showcase this remarkable and always-humble man—and I especially want to share his principles of innovation, which I think American corporations (or any corporation) would be well-advised to consider.

To start, here are some souvenirs of Lee Davenport’s life:

—Lee was once in a commuter plane crash, I think in upstate New York. He made it off the plane, but realized others were still inside. Dazed and hurt, he risked his own safety to go back and help several passengers or crew members escape. His wife showed me a newspaper clip recounting his actions, but I haven’t been able to track it down for this article.

Lee Davenport. Photo courtesy of Union College

—The GTE lab Lee oversaw was based in Bayside, NY. He spent 15 years as director in the 1960s and 1970s before retiring in 1980. GTE at the time owned Sylvania, and under Davenport, the lab created and patented the bright red phosphor later used universally in color TVs. I believe the patent was later sold or licensed to Sony and became part of its Trinitron technology.

—In 1963, as a publicity stunt while at GTE, Davenport appeared on the live television show I’ve Got A Secret, his secret being a way the lab had developed to transmit TV signals via lasers. The panelists failed to guess the secret, and he brought out the laser. Smoke was blown across the stage so the audience could see its light. Then Davenport interrupted the video portion of the live broadcast by blocking the light with his hand.

—Lee stayed incredibly active. One of the things he did in retirement was restore vintage cars in his garage. He then drove them all around in road rallies well into his 80s.

Lee, as I noted above, also knew some things about innovation. He came up with some basic principles about the subject for a series of lectures at the University of Virginia’s Darden Graduate School of Business Administration. Based on his lecture notes, and with his permission, I distilled them for Engines of Tomorrow and my own talks. I’d like to share them again with you here.

Lee Davenport’s Seven Principles of Innovation

1) Success is based on schedules and results—not effort, job difficulty, or loyalty. “You must expect your R&D people to produce results and reward them accordingly.”

2) Since most projects last several years, managers must break them into shorter segments, with measurable goals at each phase.

3) Never allow general goals. Avoid such words as: approve, advance, increase, investigate, study, explore. All are false goals—immeasurable.

4) Look for idea people. Only a few individuals have truly unique, even hare-brained ideas. Encourage them.

5) Find product champions—internal entrepreneurs who understand technology, explain it clearly, and can push ideas through corporate barriers. These traits typically elude top researchers.

6) Keep a little something on the side. A bootleg research budget is sometimes the only way to pursue ideas that break the mold.

7) Hire young blood. A research staff’s average age must not increase even one year per annum. In a high-tech lab, a nice average is under 35.

As I once wrote of Lee, “as a physicist and industrial research director, he has enjoyed a ringside seat on the electronics age—from tubes to chip, analog to digital. In war and peace, he’s seen ideas come and go—and come again. That gives him an all-too-rare commodity: perspective.”

Here’s to you, Lee.

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It’s an idea people love the instant they hear it: movies stars have their Walk of Fame out in Hollywood, so entrepreneurs should have one, too—and what better place than right here in Kendall Square, the most fertile, concentrated ground for entrepreneurship in the world?

Last August, Xconomy was first to report on the idea for an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame—the brainchild of Xconomist Bill Aulet, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Now, almost a year later, I am pleased to report, the Walk has moved beyond the talking stage, it is walking the walk, so to speak. The idea has advanced in the Cambridge, MA, City Council, attracted at least one founding sponsor, nomination and selection committees have been formed—yours truly is an official curator, charged with nominating candidates for the Walk—and a launch date of September 16 has been targeted.

“The time has definitely come,” says Aulet. “The idea just resonates. Getting from idea to execution is always a challenge, but the idea has been so good that people have been lining up at all levels.” He says the first entrepreneurs selected would be given tiles in the plaza outside the Cambridge Marriott hotel, in the heart of Kendall Square.

There are still several moving parts to this, details being worked out (dare I say, nothing has been set in stone?)—including the definition of what, exactly, qualifies someone for the Walk, and how many inductees will be named this first year. But here are the key elements that appear to have been decided on so far:

—Each entrepreneur would get a tile, emblazoned with their name and a star. Aulet was vague about how big the tiles would be, whether the tiles would include a picture of inductees and what else would be listed—such as their company name, year it was founded, etc. One idea being considered, though, is that a QR code would be embedded in each tile, so that anyone with a smartphone camera and a reader app might be able to take a picture and have it open a web page with, say, the bio of the entrepreneur, videos of them in action, and other features. The design firm IDEO is working on the tile design now.

—The number of first-year inductees has not been set. But it could be as few as five.

—Aulet says 25 or so people have been named as curators, charged with nominating candidates for the Walk. I don’t have all their names, but here are some from the Boston area: Paul Maeder, general partner and co-founder at Highland Capital Partners; Joi Ito, the newly named director of the MIT Media Lab; Leon Sandler, executive director of the MIT Deshpande Center for Technological Innovation at MIT; John Harthorne, co-founder and CEO of MassChallenge, and Howard Anderson, founder of the Yankee Group.

—The selection committee, which will make final decisions about those who have been nominated, to date consists of seven people: Aulet; Desh Deshpande, founder of Sycamore Networks and chairman of A123Systems; Forester Research founder and CEO George Colony; Yankee Group chairman and former CEO Emily Green; Carl Schramm, CEO of the Kauffman Foundation; … Next Page »

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I recently had dinner here in the Boston area with Craig Mundie, Microsoft’s chief research and strategy officer. With just one other guest present, it was an unusually personal and far-ranging discussion. Most of the talk was of a general nature—more background than anything else. Still, a few things stuck with me as noteworthy. I thought I would share them here.

Mundie, as you might have guessed from his title, serves as Microsoft’s long-term technology strategist and visionary. His domain includes basically anything and everything that Microsoft is eyeing in the 3-10-year time horizon, and even beyond. This includes the sprawling Microsoft Research (MSR) organization (six major labs around the world), the Health Solutions Group that oversees the company’s growing health IT efforts for healthcare enterprises, providers, and consumers, the Startup Business Group that incubates new technologies with the aim of creating new MS products, and a host of smaller operations and groups focused on various aspects of future technology identification and development. In this role, Mundie serves on a couple of government technology committees, including President Obama’s council of advisors on science and technology, and acts as a top Microsoft liaison to major governments such as China, India, and Russia. Even the famous Microsoft Home of the Future, an ever-updated exhibit on the main corporate campus, is part of his realm.

Taken as a whole, this is quite a realm, from advanced technology to fundamental research that’s about as pure as you can get in industry these days. Viewed another way, you could say Mundie was the yin to chief software architect Ray Ozzie’s yang—that is, until Ozzie announced his impending departure from the company last month. That’s because Ozzie’s job was to focus on Microsoft strategy and technology in the present to near term—meaning less than three years out. Together, as Mundie also said, they split most of Bill Gates’ duties (I think Mundie got the fun part, but that’s just me).

My dinner with Mundie took place in early October, less than two weeks before Ozzie’s announcement (so yes, I was admittedly slow to write up my notes). Now, with Ozzie soon to be heading out the door, I decided to go back to my notes and supplement them with some commentary and a follow up question or two to draw out the things I found most interesting:

—Microsoft is getting more secretive about its futuristic pursuits: This was really interesting to me—I think of it as the Steve Jobs effect, since the Apple kingpin is notorious for keeping things under wraps with dire penalties for those who leak. The way this came up was we were talking about TechFest, the technology fair for Microsoft employees where everyone in the product groups can see what is going on at the research labs (and to a degree, vice-versa) and other parts of the company doing advanced technology. Some outsiders, including a few press like me, were previously invited to this. But when I remarked to Mundie how I hadn’t seen much about TechFest lately, and certainly not been invited in recent years, he said that was deliberate (I didn’t take it personally).

“Everybody we compete with has plenty of notice of what we’re going to do next,” he told me. “Microsoft has little surprise value with the consumer.” Therefore, he says, “I’ve been a little bit more parsimonious about revealing the inventions I believe will be important.” He also said his goal was … Next Page »

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On the last day of September, San Diego-based Avalon Ventures announced a closing of $161 million for its new fund—Avalon IX—on its way toward an upper target of $200 million. Avalon is an 18-year-old firm—storied in San Diego but not fantastically well known nationally—still led by founder Kevin Kinsella. Avalon made its name in biotech. But increasingly it has diversified into digital media investments, largely thanks to the work of managing member Rich Levandov, who joined the firm in mid-2007 to lead its East Coast activities after some five years with Masthead Venture Partners.

Levandov, who still works out of his old Masthead office just blocks from Xconomy’s headquarters in Cambridge, MA, has led Avalon’s investments in a suite of Internet startups, among them Cloudant, Cloudkick, Pictela, and Simulmedia. But it was his November 2007 Series A investment in social game developer Zynga—which he co-led through Avalon VIII—that really put Avalon on the digital map.

Kinsella told Xconomy this spring that Zynga, which has recently been valued at a reported $5.5 billion, might be Avalon’s most successful play of all time. And even though Avalon is still known primarily in biotech circles, having Zynga in its portfolio gave the firm real momentum during the raise of its new fund. In fact, Avalon’s new focus on digital investments may be the leitmotif of Avalon IX.

As Levandov says, “To me, the thesis on which we raised the fund was on increasingly technology-enabled Web services—social media applied broadly, not just to games but to every facet of Internet life.” That means e-commerce, enterprise computing, publishing, and retail, he says.

Levandov is quite a character in a profession with some great characters: you can read about him in Extreme VC: Tale of the Tacoda Tattoo (he hasn’t gotten the tattoo yet, by the way, but that’s another story). A bit scruffy, completely casual (usually wearing jeans), and iconoclastic, he just isn’t what comes to mind when you think venture partner. For instance, we were set to meet one recent morning at Henrietta’s Table, the favorite Harvard Square breakfast hangout of VCs. But he buttonholed me in the waiting area and took me down a nearby alley to the funky, hippie-yuppie Hi-Rise Bread Company, where we had the upstairs pretty much to ourselves—absolutely no suits. While we ordered, Levandov gave me a quick gourmet coffee tutorial: It turns out he is a coffee connoisseur the way most VCs are wine-ophiles.

But that’s another story, too. The point of this story is Zynga. Levandov co-led the Series A with Brad Feld of the Foundry Group and Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures. But while you hear a lot about the other two, who have become VC superstars, you don’t hear that much about Levandov. I wanted to ask him how that investment came about, with an eye toward gleaning some insights about the direction in which the Internet and social media might be heading—and for entrepreneurs trying to come up with the Next Big Thing. Below is a summary of what we talked about—organized around what seemed to be the key areas or themes Levandov identified.

The Hunt for the Next New Platform—In Levandov’s view, there have been a couple of really significant platforms in the modern history of IT—namely, the PC and the Internet. “All sorts of companies,” he says, were built around each platform. With the PC they ranged from Lotus to Electronic Arts—not to mention Microsoft, which provided the operating system. With the Internet, Levandov says, “The real jewels that were built on that platform were companies like eBay and Amazon and Salesforce.com.”

Enter Mark Pincus and Zynga. “It was an interesting coincidence,” Levandov says of … Next Page »

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[Updated and corrected, Aug. 26---see below] Just a few years ago, the Michigan Women’s Foundation was truly your mother’s philanthropic foundation—putting on fund-raising dinners, tapping corporate sponsors like the Big Three automakers, and then giving away small chunks of money to a wide array of charitable groups—totaling some $3.5 million to 420 entities to be pretty exact.

But that was before Carolyn Cassin and her Power of 100 Women movement came to town—or, rather, back to town in Cassin’s case. The Michigan-bred president and CEO of the foundation, returned from executive stints in Arizona and New York, has turned the foundation on its heels, so to speak. She’s reinventing the way the foundation does its job— and in the process, she hopes, showing the way for other non-profits to rethink their models.

Today, the foundation is geared to investing, rather than sprinkling out funds. It plans to make fewer awards, but of greater dollar value. And it plans to provide money to individuals, especially to women entrepreneurs. It’s even putting together a small angel investment fund culled from some of the most powerful and successful women in Michigan. Gone, you might say, are the days only of tea parties and fancy dinners. Enter power breakfasts, due diligence, and term sheets.

Here’s the gist of this unfolding story of innovation. The foundation, which is based in Grosse Points Farm, MI, about 10 miles up Lake St. Clair from downtown Detroit (the area’s zip code 48236 is said to rival 90210 in wealth), was formed back in 1986. Cassin calls it a “traditional, kind of old-school foundation.” It raised money primarily from “the autos” and other big businesses, and then redistributed the funds in chunks of $1,000, $2,500, maybe $10,000, to a variety of do-good groups.

Like many smaller foundations, the MWF was absolutely rocked by the recession, which caused roughly half its funding to dry up. That was basically the situation when Cassin was recruited for the top job in 2008. She was already well known in Michigan non-profit circles, having served for a decade as CEO of what is now called Hospice of Michigan. She had left the state in 1998 to work as COO of VistaCare, a venture-backed, for-profit hospice based in Arizona, and then became CEO of the Jacob Perlow Hospice (now Continuum Hospice Care) in New York. That’s where she was, a national figure in hospice care, when she was approached to run the Michigan Women’s Foundation. Wanting to give back more to the community from which she came, Cassin embraced the opportunity.

It was immediately clear, says Cassin, that the foundation as it had been conceived was in trouble. “It was hard to figure out what value proposition we brought,” she says. “I had a sense that the old model of running a foundation wasn’t going to work in the new economy that we were trying to create, or we were just going to all die in the old economy here in Michigan.”

Cassin didn’t have the answer herself, so she did what she knew best and took a business approach to her new role. “I went on what I called the listening tour around the state,” she says. “I applied the same model of what I would do had I bought this company.” She talked to people all over Michigan about what frustrated them most about economy and about the business model of philanthropy, trying to get a grasp on how to revitalize the foundation.

One place she turned was the W.K. Kellogg Foundation of Battle Creek, MI. Kellogg gave the Michigan Women’s Foundation a grant that helped Cassin keep things going. But it was really an almost offhand remark by Kellogg VP of programs Anne Mosle that put Cassin on the path to what she thinks is salvation. Mosle challenged Cassin to go out and see if there were women who cared enough about the organization to really step up and help her reinvent it, saying something along the lines of: ‘If there aren’t a hundred women who really care about this, you should really distribute the money and go home.’

That remark stuck with Cassin as she drove back to Detroit. “I know 100 women,” she recalls telling herself. “I can find 100 women.” And that was the birth of an initiative Cassin called … Next Page »

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If ever an idea has, um, hit its stride quickly, it’s the one we wrote about last week to create an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame in Kendall Square to honor local and regional entrepreneurs in much the same fashion as the Hollywood Walk of Fame honors movie stars.

As Xconomist Bill Aulet, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center and the idea’s originator, puts it: the Boston Celtics have retired the jerseys of greats like Larry Bird and Kevin McHale, and so have the Bruins, Red Sox, and Patriots. “There are people who deserve recognition like that, here in Kendall Square,” he says. And those peoples are entrepreneurs, who like sports greats not only elevated their company (or team), but inspired others—grownups and kids alike—around the world to try to do great things themselves (more on this later on, as the inspiration aspect to the Walk of Fame is extremely important).

Our story drove a slew of comments on our website—including a number of potential candidates for stars to go with the initial list I advanced. It also generated an onslaught of private e-mails, not only to me, but to Aulet and Cambridge city councilor Leland Cheung, who is championing the idea at city hall. A variety of other media, including the Boston Globe (a syndication partner with Xconomy) picked up the story—and today (Monday) WBUR is planning to air a radio interview with Aulet taped in the plaza just outside the Marriott Hotel in Kendall Square where the first stars might be established. “This story has captured the imagination of people,” Aulet says. Agrees Cheung, “It’s really getting around. People love the idea.”

That’s all good news. But along with the extremely positive response, some potential stumbling blocks are arising as people consider the details of making this idea reality. Here’s a recap of what I’ve learned from Aulet, Cheung, our readers, and various sources, including entrepreneurs. Bottom line: it is a great idea, but nothing like this is simple to implement:

—For starters, there’s currently a prohibition in the city against naming things like street corners (a tried and true Cambridge tradition) that extends to the Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame, Cheung says. “The problem is we’re just held up right now with the whole thing…the council right now has a moratorium on naming anything,” he says. This stems from the fact that apparently some councilors went a bit overboard on this naming tradition, Cheung says—to the extent that things were named without much due diligence about who they were being named after (I guess this means my idea for Xconomy Square won’t be going anywhere). Cheung says the council is working to come up with a better system, “so it should be cleared up in the next couple of months.” That’s politics for you.

WBUR's Deborah Becker with Bill Aulet in Kendall Square

—The Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame idea is nevertheless being advanced in the council’s Economic Development Committee (which Cheung chairs), which could bring it to the full council for approval as soon as early October, Cheung says. The committee’s next meeting is set for 4 pm on September 15 in the main chamber of city hall at 795 Massachusetts Avenue. “Everyone who has an idea should come to the September 15 meeting to hammer things out,” he says.

—The phrase “hammer things out” is more apt than we might have realized at first blush. A good idea spurs lots of other ideas and thoughts—and boy are they coming. Some are from people who might be seeking to grab credit for some part of it (as reader George McQuilken humorously pointed out in the comments), others from those who are genuinely interested in advancing the idea but realize the devil is in the details. Here are some of the biggest potential sticking points, with a few thoughts from local innovators.

Who, exactly, do we want to honor? Is it specifically entrepreneurs, or … Next Page »

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Local legends Matt Damon and Ben Affleck rose from the bowels of Cambridge Rindge and Latin School (the high school’s drama department really is in the basement) to become international movie stars—and Damon was chosen three years ago to get a star along the famous Hollywood Walk of Fame. But the business leaders who have arisen from places like Harvard University and especially MIT, creating jobs and changing the world in areas from health to education, energy and the environment, office productivity, and home entertainment, are ultimately far more heroic than movie stars. So why not create an Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame right here in the world’s densest innovation zone, Kendall Square?

That’s the inspired idea from Xconomist Bill Aulet, managing director of the MIT Entrepreneurship Center. Aulet’s concept is now being championed by Cambridge City Councilor Leland Cheung (who’s also expected to graduate in 2012 with a dual MBA/MPA degree from MIT’s Sloan School of Management and Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government), who says it’s being considered in committee and that he hopes to bring the proposal to the full Council this fall.

Aulet likes a good celebration (he and I and a contingent of other touring basketball players once paraded through the streets of Donegal Town in Ireland, but that’s another story). The idea behind the Entrepreneurial Walk of Fame, he says, “comes from my belief that successful entrepreneurship is about spirit as much as it is about skills…Our model is Educate-Nurture-Network-Celebrate. The stars on the sidewalk falls right in line with the ‘Celebrate,’ which we should do more of. If you want to keep a culture of risk-taking and entrepreneurship, then we should treat our entrepreneurs as stars, and what better way than this?” Aulet cites two pieces he wrote for Xconomy that explain more of his thinking along these lines: Celebrate Entrepreneurs Like the Red Wings Winning the Stanley Cup, and How to Build a Successful Innovation Ecosystem: Educate, Network, and Celebrate.

For his part, Cheung says that “every community should take the time to celebrate what makes it great. In Hollywood it’s actors; in Cambridge it’s entrepreneurs. That Kendall Square is the most innovative square mile on the planet is something everyone who lives or works in Cambridge can be proud of. Innovations born in Cambridge have changed the world countless times; I’d like to memorialize a few of those to help inspire everyone who might walk by them.”

Cheung says he sees the courtyard around the Marriott Hotel and the Kendall Square T Station as the perfect place to put the first stars, which would celebrate the entrepreneurs, researchers, and visionaries behind “the great innovations or achievements that have started or taken place in Cambridge.” The squares containing the stars would include the name of the entrepreneur or innovator, the core contribution he or she made, and possibly other details such as the date of the innovation and even its outcome. “Handprints would be great as well,” he says.

I love this idea—and I don’t see any reason it couldn’t be adapted in any of Xconomy’s cities of Seattle, San Francisco, San Diego, and Detroit, or any other tech cluster around the world. Imagine going to Tokyo or Singapore or Basel or Cambridge, England, and finding tributes to innovators you might never have heard of, but who changed your life or cured your disease. Since learning of the Kendall Square idea last week, I’ve been thinking about the top entrepreneurs and innovators to come out of Cambridge over the last century or so, trying to identify the best 25 to 30 to start things off. Here are some names I came up with, in order of their appearance in my mind. But I’d love to hear your thoughts about this list, or who I missed—just drop them in the comments section below.

Edwin Land — prolific inventor and Polaroid co-founder

Harold “Doc” Edgerton — inventor of the strobe and co-founder of EG&G (originally known as Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier)

Phil Sharp — Nobel Laureate biologist at MIT and co-founder of Biogen (and several other biotech companies)

Wally Gilbert — Harvard Nobel Laureate and co-founder of Biogen; also a venture capitalist

Bob Langer — prolific MIT inventor and founder of more than a dozen companies

Rod Brooks — longtime MIT professor and robotics visionary, co-founder of iRobot

Helen Greiner — co-founder of iRobot

Colin Angle — another iRobot co-founder, now its CEO

Leo Beranek and Richard Bolt — former MIT professors, founders of Bolt, Beranek and Newman

Desh Deshpande — co-founder of Sycamore Networks; prolific entrepreneur and angel investor

George Whitesides — legendary Harvard chemist; co-founder of Genzyme and other companies

Tom Leighton — MIT Professor of Applied Mathematics, co-founder of Akamai

Danny Lewin — co-founder of Akamai, killed in 9/11 attacks

Ed Roberts — MIT Sloan School professor, angel investor and co-founder of many companies

Alex D’Arbeloff — co-founder Teradyne, former Chairman of MIT Corporation

Robin Chase — co-founder of Zipcar

Nicholas Negroponte — founder of MIT Media Lab and One Laptop Per Child Fundation

Clay Christensen — Harvard Business School innovation guru

Pattie Maes — computer scientist, entrepreneur

Mitch Kapor — founder of Lotus Development Corporation

Ray Kurzweil — inventor and futurist

Dean Kamen — legendary inventor, founder of FIRST Robotics competition

Ken Olsen and Harlan Anderson — founders of DEC

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Every venture capital firm and every venture capitalist touts itself/herself/himself as adding value to the entrepreneur’s quest to build great companies. But when it comes to backing up that talk with action, few venture capitalists have the track record of Henry McCance, now chairman emeritus of Greylock Partners.

I recently visited McCance in the firm’s Harvard Square offices. Yesterday, I reported on Greylock’s origins and legacy, and McCance’s views of why the firm moved its headquarters to California and what New England can do to reclaim a greater portion of the center of startup gravity. The legendary investor was objective in his assessment that New England lost its edge with the setting of the minicomputer sun some 25 years ago, but he doesn’t think the situation is irreversible. Harvard and MIT aren’t going away, he says, and a new wave of startup energy in emerging areas such as cleantech might change the game.

Whether we’re talking about a New England resurgence, or generally raising the odds for startups to grow and become successful and boost the economy wherever they may be, VCs, of course, can help—by investing in the right firms and people and providing great connections and guidance. And a big part of my conversation—and follow-up e-mails—with McCance was about what makes a great VC. In straightforward fashion, he laid out four criteria or elements. I thought they might be of great interest to other VCs, but especially to entrepreneurs looking for investors.

1) Find the Visionaries—The best VCs are not reactive, McCance says. “They instead are proactive.” That means they proactively identify and recruit the visionaries in emerging fields. “We want to work with the best entrepreneurs on the ideas they are most passionate about. That’s how you get the great talent,” McCance says. One quick example he gave involved pioneering biotechnology firm Genetics Institute, which was formed in 1980. “We realized in the late 1970s that a new industry called biotechnology was going to be created on top of important advancements coming out of academic research in chemistry and biology,” says McCance. “This was going to enable new approaches to drug development, which before then had been very much a trial and error approach at ‘big pharma.’ Mark Ptashne and Tom Maniatis were world-class Harvard scientists with an entrepreneurial itch. Walter Cabot, the chairman of Harvard Management, had recently invested in Greylock and wanted to be sure Harvard’s key, but perhaps naïve, scientists were in good hands, therefore he steered them towards Greylock. I believe J.H. Whitney and Venrock were our partners. Kleiner Perkins funded Genentech at about the same time, and Amgen was founded a year later. All three companies had their pick of the best and brightest researchers coming out of Harvard, M.I.T., Stanford, Caltech, and UCLA, because there was an exciting, free form, entrepreneurial research environment that big pharma could not replicate.”

Henry McCance

2) Support the Visionaries With Top Executive Leadership—Visionaries, and you have heard this before, are great at identifying and pursuing a big view of the world and how it will change, but sometimes they are not so good at going to market. VCs must be able to step in and constructively find executive leadership for a firm that complements the visionary’s strengths. In the case of Genetics Institute, says McCance, “Greylock identified Gabe Schmergel, through a recommendation from another Greylock portfolio company CEO, to become Genetics Institute’s first and only CEO. Gabe was a graduate of Harvard Business School, and a fast-rising executive at Baxter International.”

3) Instill a Culture of Frugality-– “We initiate a culture of frugality” to take “the money as far as we can,” says McCance. This is especially true early on in a startup’s life. “We try to keep the burn rate low in the early years of a venture when the cost of capital is highest. Hopefully, enough milestones or progress will be met with a Series A financing that follow-on rounds of capital can be raised at significantly higher valuations. However, again luck is involved, and market conditions can be favorable (as they were for Genetics Institute, permitting an IPO in 1984) or unfavorable, as they are now.”

4) Dare to be Great—”The fourth and very important things successful VCs and entrepreneurs do is, ‘Dare to be great,’” says McCance. “To me that means that successful new businesses will not … Next Page »

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Greylock Partners is one of the world’s premier venture firms and a hallmark here in New England, so it was no small news in May 2009 when the storied firm announced it was moving its headquarters from the Boston area to Silicon Valley—giving New England yet another reason for Valley envy.

I recently sat down with legendary investor Henry McCance, now Greylock’s chairman emeritus, in the firm’s new Boston-area offices at One Brattle Square, just across the alley from Casablanca restaurant in Harvard Square, where it moved late last year from Waltham, MA. It was a rare interview for McCance, and we covered a lot of ground, backed up by some follow-up e-mail exchanges. McCance gave his own take on why the firm moved its center of gravity, his views on Boston’s innovation and startup scene (and hopes for a resurgence thereof), and, perhaps most interestingly, the four things great VCs can do to help startups (and therefore also the four things startups should look for in a VC). I’ve laid out my writeup in two parts. Today: what happened and how Boston can grow again. Tomorrow, McCance’s four-point list of what great VC firms do and some philosophical principles to guide them.

First, some history. Greylock Founder Bill Elfers, McCance told me, had been the No. 2 employee at American Research & Development, which was formed in Boston in 1946, right after World War II, and is widely considered the world’s first professional venture firm. But ARD operated as a public company, and when Elfers started Greylock & Co. in October 1965 with $10 million of capital, he created what was possibly the first venture firm that operated as a limited partnership, now the typical structure for venture firms.

“He [Elfers] had no template,” McCance says. “He was offered the entire funding by one family, which was the model used by the Rockefellers and other families, but he declined, preferring to raise the initial fund from six roughly equal limited partners.”

A second fund followed in 1973, and last November, what’s now called Greylock Partners announced it had closed the $575 million Greylock XIII (in contrast to the ever-smaller funds you mostly see these days, the 13th fund was bigger than the $500 million Greylock XII, which closed in 2005).

A rundown on all the star investments Greylock has made since its founding could by itself make up an entire article. But here is a very short list that spans tech and life sciences: Continental Cablevision, Teradyne, Prime Computer, Apollo Computer, Mentor Graphics, Tellabs, Stryker, Ascend Communications, Xircom, Spyglass, Raptor, Red Hat, Avid Technology, Data Domain, Vertex Pharmaceuticals, Millennium Pharmaceuticals, United Healthcare, Genetics Institute, Wise Technology, Constant Contact, LinkedIn, Facebook, Zipcar. Suffice it to say that, in the eyes of many, Greylock has been the premier East Coast venture firm, on a very short list of the world’s best, along with firms such as Sequoia, KPCB, and Accel.

Greylock has long maintained an office in Silicon Valley (right now it’s in San Mateo, but next month the firm is opening a new headquarters in Palo Alto). But given its roots here in New England, and its legacy, how could it move its headquarters there?

McCance’s basic answer won’t surprise anybody: it has to do with critical mass. But he still provides a lot of great perspective, and the insights of such an informed investor and builder of companies are important.

“We’ve concluded that the Boston area has not been as successful in spawning and sustaining great companies,” McCance sums up. He then ran through the last quarter century or so, comparing New England to the West Coast as an incubator for stellar companies in important fields. Take enterprise computing software: The biggies of Oracle, Peoplesoft (later acquired by Oracle), Microsoft—all are on the west coast. CAD/CAM software leaders like Cadence, Synopsis, and Mentor Graphics are also out west. Same thing for semiconductor leaders like Intel and personal computing/mobile computing leaders like Apple. Ditto for data and communications, where the leaders are companies like Cisco and Juniper. Then there’s the Internet: Amazon, eBay, Google, Facebook…You get the drift. “Even…in biotech,” McCance says, “Boston would come in second to the left coast.” And all too often, he says, Boston area firms in these same areas “merged or sold out.”

All of this fed into the Greylock decision to move its headquarters to the Valley. Of course, there are exceptions. McCance points to storage (where EMC is a world leader) as a notable one. And it isn’t that nothing happens in New England in other areas. But, he concludes, “You got to fish in the pond where the fish are, and there haven’t been many big fish in New England in the last 25 years.”

I asked him what he thinks happened to cause this situation. Part of the reason, he says, … Next Page »

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Call it market research, Xconomy style. On Wednesday, we initiated a poll asking our readers to weigh in on whether the rebranding efforts of eight New England startups that had changed their names in the past year worked for them. Readers were asked to pick whether the new name was better, worse, or the same as the old name.

The results are now in (you can find the poll and the results in detail here—voting has been turned off, so the polls are closed). Of course, for those checking in regularly, the results could have been seen at any time, as we have made no effort to hide them. But presuming you aren’t the obsessive type who checks in five times a day, we summarize the findings for you below, along with a bit of interpretation.

Now, I have to put out some caveats. There isn’t much room for nuance and shades of gray in our poll. For instance, while everyone might agree Name B is better than Name A, we have no real way of assessing whether people think Name B is actually a good name. It could be that name A was so bad in the first place that anything else would seem better. Take the Harvard startup originally called Get Out of Cambridge. No doubt GOOC was not intended as a real working name; it sounds more like a student project. But as a company name, it is pretty awful. I am amazed that 19 percent thought the new name—gtrot, short for globetrotting—was worse.

But with caveats aside, let’s look at how things shook out. First, here is a list of the old and new so you can see everything at a glance:

Paragon Lake – Gemvara (Online jewelry customization and sales)

uLocate – Where (Local search apps for mobile phones)

RunMyErrand – TaskRabbit (Errand running service)

HopSkipConnect – Healthrageous (Mobile health technology and services)

Datanetis – Pursway (Influencer marketing)

Droid Works – CyPhy Works (Unmanned aerial vehicles)

TwitVid – Vidly (Video sharing on Twitter and the web)

Get Out of Cambridge – gtrot (Social media application for booking and sharing travel plans)

The good news is that in our readers’ view, the majority of company name changes—five out of eight—were clear improvements. The biggest exception was Cy Phy Works (old name Droid Works), the unmanned aerial vehicle startup founded by iRobot co-founder (and Xconomist) Helen Greiner. Some 61 percent of our readers saw the new name as worse than the original. Only 28.5 percent saw it as better, with the rest saying there was no real change.

The other non-winners were Where (old name uLocate) and Pursway (previously Datanetis). In Where’s case, 46 percent of voters saw the new name as an improvement, 39 percent saw it as worse, and 14 percent thought there was no real difference. A slight victory for Where, but not really, considering all the trouble and expense of rebranding. For Pursway, only 34 percent saw the new name as better, while 42 percent saw no real change. My own assessment is that the company has shifted from one bad name to another. You really don’t get what the startup is about from either name, and there isn’t anything memorable about them. (By the way, Wade, who edited this piece, thought the new name was supposed to be about persuading or swaying influencers, and therefore should have been spelled “Persway,” whereas I thought it was about getting people to spend more, evoking the word “purse.” Obviously, there is some big confusion there.)

The runaway winner was Gemvara (old name Paragon Lake). This startup is focused on online jewelry customization and sales, which you definitely don’t get from Paragon Lake. So no surprise that such a vast majority thought something with “gem” in the name was an improvement. An impressive 71 percent of our voters saw the new name as better, with only 18 percent seeing it as worse. Right behind it was gtrot (nee the aforementioned Get Out of Cambridge), with 69.5 percent of voters seeing the new name as an improvement. I personally don’t think gtrot (too close to “gspot?”) is very good, but like I said, it is better than GOOC.

My own choice for best name change was TaskRabbit. I actually liked the original RunMyErrand just fine. But I think TaskRabbit is friendlier, more memorable, and better captures the psyche of the Internet age.

Thanks to our readers-poll takers for helping us out on our market research!

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What’s in a name? Well, an awful lot, of course, and perhaps especially when it comes to companies and their brands. A good name evokes what the company does, and it is memorable—creating a virtuous cycle that reinforces the brand and leads to increased sales and other good things.

I got thinking about this, specifically as it relates to New England companies that had recently rebranded themselves, in connection with a private breakfast Xconomy held last week around health IT.

One of the firms present was mobile health technology company Healthrageous, which recently changed its name from HopSkipConnect. Correspondent Ryan McBride and I got talking about the name change, and that sparked the idea of surveying readers about that and other moniker reboots. A quick canvassing of our editors, and behold the list below of eight New England companies (two, TaskRabbit and Vidly, have now moved to the Bay Area) that have rebranded in the past year.

I personally think some are home run changes, while others…not so much. But we’d like to see what you think, and I’m sure the companies would, too. (Right, companies?) So take the poll and we will review the results in a few days with the help of some expert commentary as we look at which companies were most successful in their rebranding, and which might have fallen short of the mark.

And in the meantime, if you know of any other examples of notable name changes—for better or worse, and in any of our Xconomy cities of Boston, Detroit, San Diego, San Francisco, or Seattle—please send them along to editors@xconomy.com. We might just use them in a future poll.

Here are the companies, old name first, with the new name after the hyphen, followed by a brief description of what they do. You choose whether the new name is better than, worse than, or essentially the same as the original.

Company No. 1:

Company No. 2:

Company No. 3:

Company No. 4:

Company No. 5:

Company No. 6:

Company No. 7:

Company No. 8:

Thanks for voting. Again, answers and commentary coming on Thursday.

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If you know me, or have followed some of my increasingly sporadic posts or tweets, you know I love sports. Few people know, though, that I was a physical education major in college—part of a double major with psychology, it being the mind-and-body ’70s. I was either going to be a basketball coach or a journalist.

Obviously, I chose journalism. But it won’t surprise anyone to learn that I took notice when John Wooden died last Friday. He was the greatest basketball coach in history, everyone says, citing his 10 national championships at UCLA, including seven in a row. But to the extent that’s true, folks are citing the wrong reason—and Wooden would have been the first to agree with me.

Being a great basketball coach has nothing to do with how many championships you win or your win-loss record. It has to do with how well you coached. Did you make the best of the situation you were given? Did you help those you coached get better and make the best of their abilities? Did you help your players learn the core values of hard work and teamwork that serve them well in life and in their dealings with others? Wooden happened to be a great coach by conventional yardsticks. But his true greatness came from his ability to help players fulfill their potential, and from the lessons he taught them about life. As one person (a former player I didn’t recognize, I am guessing) in this ESPN video says, “He might have been more like a Methodist minister than a basketball coach.”

Along the way, Wooden uttered many platitudes and pithy sayings that expressed his philosophy. After he died, I found myself digging them up and poring through them. I couldn’t help but see them as relating incredibly well to entrepreneurship and innovation, although of course they relate to life in general. So I’m sharing my favorites here:

—”Failing to prepare is preparing to fail.”

—”Never mistake activity for achievement.”

—”Be quick, but don’t hurry.”

—”Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

—”Failure is not fatal, but failure to change might be.”

—”It’s about what is correct, not who is correct.”

—”Things turn out best for people who make the best of the way things turn out.”

—”It isn’t what you do, but how you do it.”

—”Happiness begins when selfishness ends.”

—”Sports do not build character, they reveal it.”

—”You can’t live a perfect day without doing something for someone who will never be able to repay you.”

I’m sure there will be a John Wooden sayings book coming out. I hope they give the proceeds to a good cause.

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An avalanche of new technology promises to transform healthcare. You’ve heard a lot about it: Electronic medical records. New ways to mine genomic data to match patients with the right medicines. Everything from iPhone apps and robots to help you exercise or take your meds. Not to mention relatively “old” advances like digital imaging and telemedicine video hookups that connect those in remote places with doctors.

All this and a lot more fits under the broad umbrella of healthcare IT—and in Frank Moss’s view all of it (except maybe the robot part) falls far short of the mark of what technology should do for healthcare. You can find illustrations of many of his ideas—and he’s got a lot of them—in a corner of the MIT Media Lab, where Moss has set up a doctor’s table next to a living room arrangement as part of a research group called New Media Medicine.

The group’s goal is to help incite a revolution in healthcare by bringing patients front and center in controlling their own health. “We’re literally looking to break the 500-year-old asymmetry that exists between the high priests of medicine—the clinicians and the physicians—and ordinary people,” is the way Moss puts it.

That’s Frank Moss. Catchy phrases, bold vision, shaking up the establishment. Which is funny in a way, because he is the establishment. Moss isn’t just some upstart researcher in MIT’s vaunted factory of the future. Since 2006, he’s been the lab’s director. But after a few management-only years, he started his own research effort to look at new ways technology could transform healthcare.

This was an intersection he knew well. Before joining the Media Lab, Moss co-founded Infinity Pharmaceuticals, a cancer-drug company formed around the idea of using technology to find radical new ways of discovering drugs. And before that, he ran Tivoli Systems, a computer systems management software company that merged with IBM. So Moss (his own PhD is in aeronautics and astronautics) has spent a lot of time on aspects of technology and health and medicine, which is largely why he decided to study the convergence of these fields. To learn more, I recently visited Moss (who’s an Xconomist) in the Media Lab’s new home, which is right next to its original building, on the corner of Ames and Amherst streets in Cambridge, MA. It turns out I was one of the first outsiders to visit the spectacular facility.

New Media Medicine got going in 2008, after Moss got a call from George Demetri, a leading researcher at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. Demetri was working on LAM, a disease of the lungs, kidneys, and lymphatic system that primarily strikes women in their child-bearing years and for which there is no known cure. He was interested in using technology to create ways to speed up the hunt for drugs for LAM—in large part by involving the patients themselves in the effort. And he introduced Moss to Amy Farber, a Harvard Medical School physician and founder of the LAM Treatment Alliance who herself has been diagnosed with LAM.

From that seed, Moss’s group has since expanded to span four core areas:

—Biomedical research: The direct result of the partnership with Demetri and the LAM Treatment Alliance, the idea is to help patients with rare diseases participate in the process of finding cures and treatments—what Moss and PhD student Ian Eslick, who heads the work, call “collective discovery.” As you might expect, patients often seem to know things about their own disease that doctors don’t. They try out non-prescribed treatments, experiment with diet and exercise programs, and find ways to share information amongst themselves.

Moss’s group wants to enlist and assist that energy through new computer interfaces, social media tools, and other technologies. Moss stresses that the goal is not to develop better ways for people to commiserate or exchange tips, but to help in accumulating valuable data that can inform treatments and drug discovery. Of traditional drug discovery, with trials, placebos, and such, he says, “In some senses it treats patients like lab rats. What we’re really trying to do is explore through radically new technology how we can unleash the power of patients with rare diseases, or any disease, to really transform the drug discovery process, speed it up, by taking down the barriers between patients and clinicians and drug and biotech companies.” In the scenario he envisions, “Patients use data to create hypotheses and reach conclusions. In other words, they become scientists.”

—Primary care and chronic care transformation: The goal here, says Moss, is to … Next Page »

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The end of the year is a time when compensation is on a lot of people’s minds—particularly with company committees busy working to set executive salary, bonus, and equity compensation for the coming year. Last week, I gauged Xconomy readers’ thoughts on the subject with a short quiz on tech- and life-sciences-executive compensation. The questions were drawn from the latest CompStudy, a survey of cash and equity compensation for top management at private technology and life sciences companies that is conducted annually by executive search company J. Robert Scott in partnership with Ernst & Young.

Now it is time for the answers, along with some commentary from Aaron Lapat, a managing director of J. Robert Scott, and Michael Greeley, a general partner with Flybridge Capital Partners and chairman of the New England Venture Capital Association. Both helped me choose the questions in the first place.

First, some high-level perspective from Greeley. “There was kind of a cascade over the past year of plans being reset,” he says. That means targets established a year ago are almost “completely irrelevant today,” making it extremely hard to determine whether an executive did well or poorly in 2009. Greeley says the focus of compensation discussions has shifted from being very quantitative (based on achieving or missing financial targets) to looking more at a person’s relative contributions to the company and whether he or she did a good job in a tough environment—as well as what it will take to keep good people motivated for the coming year. “The discussions, I think, have become much more difficult,” he says.

It is pretty safe to say, though, that with companies still in cash preservation mode, cash bonuses will be down significantly this year, Greeley says. That has led some companies to hold out hopes of bigger-than-normal bonuses in 2010, so that their execs have a chance of making up some ground. Greeley acknowledges, however, that this might not be possible for many companies, because the general outlook is still for slow growth or no growth.

One big frustration for Greeley as an investor and director is that people being recruited for senior executive positions are putting a lot less value on equity. Traditionally, he says, when people are being recruited from a big company to a startup, they don’t look to match their cash salary and instead figure they will come out far ahead in the long run thanks to the equity component. In this environment, he says, the attitude is often: “Hey I need basically what I was getting at the big company if you want me to join your early-stage company and I want the equity.”

Greeley calls that “disappointing,” and says it arises from the general lack of liquidity in markets today. In the past, recruits always knew people who had made a killing in a startup, “and that hasn’t been the case in a while.”

So, if that isn’t enough to make you nervous about your own year-end bonus and next year’s package, here are the answers to last week’s quiz, along with commentary from Greeley and Lapat.

1) Across both life sciences and technology companies, which founder position, other than CEO, gets the most equity?

Reader responses:

Correct answer: COO

Commentary: Both Lapat and Greeley were surprised by this answer. “Intuitively I would answer that question with CTO,” says Lapat. And in fact, he points out, some 70 percent of respondents in the compensation survey came from companies with less than $5 million in annual revenue—companies so small they don’t typically even need a COO. So why are COOs on average so well compensated? Lapat and Greeley say the numbers could reflect a number of instances when a founder/CEO has been replaced and given the COO title instead.

2) Which technology management position [other than CEO] has the highest compensation package (bonus and salary)?

Reader responses:

Correct Answer: Sales

Commentary: Our readers’ top choice was CTO. But, say our commentators, it … Next Page »

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The Boston area is a breeding ground for life sciences and technology innovation. Startups and more established companies are everywhere—and so are the engineers, scientists, CTOs, and operating, finance, and sales whizzes that make these enterprises hum.

But what are all these folks paid—in salary, bonus, and stock? Are CEOs really the best compensated? How does life sciences differ from tech? And how have things changed over the last year, given the financial climate?

These questions are addressed in detail by CompStudy, an annual survey of the cash and equity compensation for top management at private life sciences and technology companies that is conducted by executive search company J. Robert Scott in partnership with Ernst & Young. We’ll be reporting soon on details of the study, which is rich with information. But meanwhile, I’ve worked with with Aaron Lapat, a managing director of J. Robert Scott, and Michael Greeley, a general partner with Flybridge Capital Partners and chairman of the New England Venture Capital Association, to cull some highlights from the study’s 2009 findings.

To test your knowledge about about the state of management compensation, take the quick 7-question quiz below. (The questions don’t get at any of the year-over-year changes in executive comp; our story next week will do that.) I’ll post the answers, along with some commentary from Lapat and Greeley, right after the Thanksgiving break—I imagine they’ll provide a yardstick you can use to assess your own compensation situation, or, let’s just say it, that of those around you.

Question No. 1

Question No. 2

Question No. 2a

Question No. 3

Question No. 3a

Question No. 4

Question No. 4a

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When they write the book on great libraries of the world, a few legendary names will come to mind: Alexandria; Pergamum (the city where papyrus is said to have been invented) in what is now Turkey; the British Library; the New York Public Library; and of course, the U.S. Library of Congress. The new public library here in Cambridge, MA, will not be on anyone’s list. But I have been driving down Broadway past its construction site for several years now, watching as it went from a hole in the ground to a beautiful ultra-modern structure that opened Sunday afternoon. And the same thought passed through my mind each and every day: A great library for a great innovation city.

So you can bet I was there Sunday for the official opening (although I waited until halftime of the Patriots game)—and joined hundreds of others who had descended on the place. Everyone was oozing excitement. And although the checkout line stretched from the spectacular lobby halfway up the stairs to the second floor—it turns out some 1,750 visitors passed through in the three hours the library was open Sunday–no one was complaining. The director, Susan Flannery, couldn’t be happier. “Yesterday, in three hours, we checked out over 4,000 items,” she told me on Monday. “We had a ton of high school kids here today.”

I know writing about a public library is a stretch for biz-tech news blog like Xconomy. But at the same time, education and learning is the source of innovation—and I was personally so inspired by the library that I couldn’t help writing about it. Given the way it was drawing students, especially, I even asked Flannery if we could expect a renaissance of learning and innovation here in Cambridge as a result of the library. Cambridge has always been rich in learning, she responded, not quite taking the bait. “We’re just making it more appealing and easier to do.”

But there are a few things on the technology front worth mentioning that at least go toward that end. Free public Wi-Fi is available throughout the building. The library has nearly 100 publicly accessible computers (a few are dedicated to online catalogs, but the vast majority are unrestricted). About 20 are in a dedicated computer room, another dozen in the teen room, 10 or so in the children’s room, 8 in the research room, and the rest spaced throughout the facility (sadly, they are all Windows machines—no Macs!). There is also an extensive digital media catalog for downloading e-books and audiobooks—but that’s part of the overall Minuteman Library Network that serves 42 libraries in the Metrowest region of Massachusetts and is not special to the new Cambridge library. Flannery says the library has a grant that will allow it to buy some handheld electronic readers (a la Kindle) that may be available for loan, and that it also plans to add Nintendo Wiis to the teen room and purchase a couple of interactive white boards for the general library that can be used for everything from watching movies to collaborating on projects through their touch interface.

4,000 items were checked out in 3 hours.

But back to my tour. There are three floors above ground and two below—and the modern new structure connects to the old main library, which itself has been completely redone. (Cambridge Rindge and Latin School, the public high school, is the next building down—and it is fantastic that this great library is within such easy reach for students. I can happily report that both my kids, who attend Rindge and Latin, can’t wait to go and study there—and if their peers feel the same, the project might have already paid for itself.) I roamed all over the building: the only place I couldn’t go was the lowest level, which houses meeting rooms and a 230-seat auditorium and was closed off for the day. “It’s fabulously gorgeous,” says Flannery of hte auditorium. She says that in addition to state-of-the-art audio/visual system, the space is equipped with an audio enhancement system for the hearing impaired.

The total cost of the project was $90 million, Flannery says (though that included other, non-library work done in conjunction with the renovation). The state contributed a $10 million grant, and the rest was paid for by the city of Cambridge, she says. The lead architects of this great library are William Rawn Associates of Boston, with Ann Beha Architects, also of Boston, as the associate architect. With no floor or carpet glues or other volatile organic compounds, a lighting system that shuts off when there is enough light from the sun, and bamboo flooring in the children’s room, it will be LEED certified as a green building. And here is the landing page for all sorts of other information about the library.

But I didn’t really interview anyone in depth for this story. I just went in, scribbled notes, and took a bunch of pictures. And I reveled. Below are my photos (the first two were taken earlier this fall) and some impressions: the captions come above the images. Click on any image to make it larger.

The long view from Broadway.

Old library meets the new. A glass hallway and courtyard connects them.

Opening day, Sunday, November 8, 2009.

In we go. The place was ablur with action. Really—it isn’t the photo.

To continue viewing photos, go to the next page. … Next Page »

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[Updated and corrected, see below---Also see end of story for news of Google announcement of Nov. 4] In May 2008, Google moved into colorful (hey, it’s Google) new offices in the heart of Kendall Square. Governor Deval Patrick played ping-pong at the grand opening with Google site director Steve Vinter. And since then, Google Cambridge has grown to some 200 people spread over four floors, and about evenly split between sales and engineering.

But while engineers at the local Googleplex are working on key infrastructure components such as BigTable and MapReduce and consumer-facing offerings like Google Books and Google Images, only one effort to date has been conceived, developed, and released entirely from here in Cambridge, MA: Google Friend Connect.

GFC is a social media tool that makes it extremely easy for website owners to add social features to their sites—without the need to learn programming. These features include gadgets or plug-ins that allow visitors to automatically import their personal profiles from Google, Yahoo, and other places without having to do it manually for each new site they want to join, as well as widgets for letting users rate and review things. Website owners simply select the features they want, fill out an extremely short (three-item) form, and the code is generated for them to cut and paste into their site. The idea is that such as easy tool will make sites more interactive and interesting, thereby helping site owners attract and retain their users. (We’ll get to Google’s motives later on).

[Editor's note: the second sentence of this paragraph was amended to reflect the correct number of monthly GFC websites and users.] And it seems to be working. Since the public beta launch last December, Google Friend Connect has grown to some 8 million websites a month spread across what are estimated to be hundreds of millions of users. Google isn’t exactly sure how big GFC has gotten. “It’s big,” though, is how tech lead manager Sami Shalabi sums things up. And there is apparently more news coming. Google says it is planning a big announcement in the near future about GFC.

Besides being the only Google product entirely born, bred, and weaned here in Cambridge, I found the GFC story interesting because it illustrates how entrepreneurship can flourish inside a big company (yes, Google is officially a big company). A small team was allowed to run with a product idea, much like a boot-strapped startup might do—but when the project showed promise, the corporation stepped in with marketing clout virtually impossible to match in the startup world. If done right, that kind of one-two (startup-giant) punch can make up for the overall bureaucratic sluggishness that often permeates big companies (and yes, Google has been known to exhibit some big company bureaucratic traits).

The story of Google Friend Connect begins, fittingly enough, with two friends. Shalabi and Mussie Shore met each other in 1998 at Iris Associates, an IBM subsidiary where they worked on a suite of Lotus products, most notably Lotus Quickplace and LotusNotes. I visited the pair on the sixth floor of Google Cambridge, where their 11-person team (counting them) occupies a funky, open workspace in a prime corner area. We then retreated to a “huddle room” (what non-Googlers call a conference room) named Magic Hat. It turns out that all the huddle rooms on the sixth floor are named after beers or breweries, which is cool with the GFC crew because three of the team are microbrewers. (Click on the team image to enlarge it and see a full caption.)

In 2006, Shalabi and Shore got the entrepreneurial bug and, together with Martin Fahey, co-founded Zingku, a social networking startup that made it easier to share things like photos, polls, and invitations via instant messages, e-mail, the Web, and (especially) cell phones. You know who purchased Zingku in fall 2007 (for an undisclosed sum). And it was just a few months after … Next Page »

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Bosses come and bosses go. Great bosses can inspire and mentor and lead through the toughest times. Really bad bosses can poison and divide an organization, and lead it to ruin even if things aren’t that bad.

In the course of my career I’ve come across many a successful person with a bad-boss tale to tell. Which means that bad bosses have mentored numerous entrepreneurs and future leaders—though maybe not in the way they intended. So what do these awful managers have to teach us? I asked a few leaders in the Boston innovation community for their best worst-boss stories, and the lessons they learned from the experience.

My own “worst-boss” is really an amalgamation of several bosses rather than a single person—and includes traits I sometimes observed in a boss’s boss, rather than someone I reported to directly. But I was watching.

These Worst Bosses Ever did several things I vowed never to do. First, they pointed fingers at others when problems arose rather than look at their own management or strategy. Second, and even more insidious, they would bully subordinates by pointing to the successes of other companies—sometimes competitors, sometimes not—as proof that their reports were not successful, without taking into account the fact that ours was a totally different organization, with far different (and usually much more modest) resources. They even would sometimes employ the dark art of “lying with statistics” to make it look like people—their own colleagues—weren’t performing. But when you examined the facts behind the stats, it was clear that oftentimes people deemed to have failed actually had succeeded stupendously given the resources at their disposal or the time they were given for a project. These kinds of practices created a huge atmosphere of distrust inside groups or companies—and many good people either left or did not feel at all motivated to do their best work.

One big lesson I learned from these various “un-mentors” was to take into account the whole picture of a group or organization as best as possible—its role in the company or world, its resources, and so on—and to set goals and expectations based on that, not what others are doing. Another was to play absolutely fair with metrics. Lastly, I vowed to take responsibility when bad things happen, and to try to find a constructive solution, rather than blaming colleagues.

What follows, then, are My Worst Boss Ever stories from five leading members of the innovation community—two CEOs, two venture capitalists, and a member of academia. They aren’t intended to embarrass anyone. We don’t name names, and we have tweaked descriptions to protect people’s identities. And I would stress that these are perceptions and opinions that are colored by specific circumstances, the employees’ own makeup, and other factors—and that bosses sometimes make decisions based on factors that employees can’t be privy to, or can’t fully appreciate because they aren’t the boss. Indeed, one person’s worst top dog might well be another’s best.

The point isn’t to condemn the bosses—it’s to provide some insights and lessons that might make us all better bosses, and maybe even better employees who can help our bosses! See if these experiences ring true with you.

Bill Aulet, Xconomist and Acting Managing Director, MIT Entrepreneurship Center: “It’s not obvious, because you’d think it is the most incompetent one—but the worst boss I ever had was smart and political, but lazy.”

“If they’re incompetent, then you don’t have to worry—you just go do your thing. When they’re smart, political, and lazy it just drives you crazy. They’re capable of being helpful and they … Next Page »

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The second big thing in the genesis of Twitter app store oneforty (the first being proof that a real economy was possible on Twitter—see Part 1 of the oneforty story) was that Laura Fitton couldn’t find anyone besides herself to manage the company.

As readers of the initial installment of this story will remember, Fitton (Twitter handle: @pistachio) was a single mom with a consultancy to run and a book to write. She didn’t want to work full-time on a startup. “Entrepreneurs are nuts and out of touch with reality, and they have to be to survive the process of believing they can do what they need to do,” Fitton says. She really didn’t want to go there.

But at the same time, Fitton couldn’t sleep because this idea of creating an app store for Twitter—what is now Brighton, MA-based oneforty—would not go away. Her solution: find a dedicated team to run the business, and she would serve as an advisor.

Fitton spent the early part of this year trying to do just that. But by early March, Fitton accepted that if oneforty was going to get going, she would have to do it herself. She hadn’t intended to go to the annual South by Southwest music and media conference in Austin this year: it wasn’t a good place to market her Twitter consulting business, because everybody there already embraced social media. But now that social media awareness meant people would understand her idea. Two days before the event, she decided to fly to Austin after all and look for angel investors.

One of the first people she sought out was Guy Kawasaki of Garage Technology Ventures, an early-stage venture firm in Palo Alto, CA. Fitton had an in with Kawasaki. Back in August 2007, she had been watching the live stream of him speaking at the Gnomedex tech conference, where he remarked that Twitter was stupid. In response, Fitton had e-mailed him her Ode to Twitter post and said, “I think you’re wrong.” They had a short conversation—and about three weeks later Kawasaki posted: “God help me, I’m going to start Twittering. Dave Winer and Laura Fitton convinced me to take the leap, so it’s their fault.” (That’s Dave Winer, the RSS pioneer.)

So Fitton met with Kawasaki in Austin and asked point black: would he invest in oneforty? Recalls Fitton: “He said, ‘No but I’ll advise. When I invest the company usually doesn’t do well, so advising is what you want anyway.’”

Having Kawasaki’s name to drop was nice (he’s still an advisor). Entrepreneurial strategist Dan Martell suggested she set up an angel pitch call, which allowed interested investors to dial in to hear her spiel, saving her one-on-one meetings. She did the call a few weeks after SXSW, and it proved extremely helpful. While no one invested directly from the initial call, everyone who was on it has “stayed involved in some way, shape, or form,” Fitton says. She learned a lot from the experience and the questions asked. And she put an edited recording of her pitch on a secure site that other potential angels listened to—and not only did several of them invest, she later learned it helped convince one of her first employees to sign on as well.

The buzz and momentum around Fitton built fast. Between mid-April and mid-July, Fitton … Next Page »

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“Ohh, Twitter needs an app store.” It was coming up on Christmas of 2008. Laura Fitton was writing a chapter on the top 10 applications for Twitter for her book Twitter for Dummies when the thought struck her like a tweet out of the blue.

She jumped up from her office in Brighton, MA, and ran to share the news with a friend. When she couldn’t find him, she went back to her desk and tried to forget the whole idea. She had a ton of things on her plate. Besides the book, she was a single mom with two little kids. And she had worked for a startup before and found them “really scary.” Launching her own startup to sell Twitter apps seemed even more scary. “I tried to shut my brain off,” Fitton says, but it was no use. “It just lodged in my head, and I couldn’t get rid of it, and I couldn’t sleep.”

[Editor’s note: This is Part 1 of a two-part story about oneforty. Part 2 will run on Tuesday, October 13.]

And that’s pretty much how Fitton, aka @pistachio (her Twitter user name), gave birth to her third child: oneforty. The startup, which indeed is an app store for Twitter and a bit more, is named of course for the 140-character maximum allowed in a tweet. The company, which now has four employees, three developers and Fitton, officially closed its long-extended angel round yesterday. Fitton isn’t saying how much she has raised—only that the extension builds on $250,000 she took in earlier in the year—but I’m guessing it is somewhere in the $750,000-$1 million arena. That was only a few days after oneforty dropped its beta status (under which an invitation was required in order to access the site) and opened up to the world. “oneforty is your Twitter outfitter, with tons of resources for all things Twitter. Currently tracking 1719 apps that make Twitter even better,” the home page read as of last night.

To say oneforty is the new darling of the Boston tech startup scene is hardly doing it justice. Fitton’s presentation was the highlight of the TechStars Boston (it’s actually here in Cambridge, MA) investor day in early September (she was part of the group’s inaugural class). Last week, she shined again at TechStars’ Bay Area investor day. Hubspot co-founder Dharmesh Shah, John Landry of Lead Dog Ventures, and Laura Rippy, former CEO of Handango, are three prominent Boston-area angels who have made their investments in oneforty public. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Fitton has been deluged by would-be investors from all over. Her funding round was vastly oversubscribed; she says she simply couldn’t take any more capital for fear of extreme dilution. She has a stack of invitations from the media and VCs requesting meetings, invitations for event appearances, and more. Her inbox is “unparsable,” she says. “It’s a great problem to have.”

And one more thing. Given that Twitter and a whole bunch of cool Web 2.0 folks are out in San Francisco, a lot of people who hear about oneforty suggest that Fitton should relocate out west. But great developers are everywhere—New York, London, Canada, and so on, she points out. “They’re in San Francisco, too, but they’re not only there.” Bottom line: oneforty is staying put in its Brighton HQ, at least for now. “Maybe oneforty will be the case that proves New England can do it,” Fitton says.

This, then, is the oneforty story. It’s not containable in 140 characters. It’s the story of a wild ride from motherhood and (relatively) peaceful consulting to mayhem, with a bit of altruism thrown in (Fitton says she is just not solely motivated by making money—read on). When I first interviewed her, Fitton was just coming off an East Coast-West Coast run where she hadn’t slept for 35 hours. So the story’s got insomnia and workaholism, too.

Smart People are Using Twitter?

You can without hesitation call Fitton an unlikely Internet entrepreneur. She puts March 2007 as the beginning of her awakening to the powers of the Web, and ultimately, Twitter, to promote … Next Page »

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