The Secret of Successful Entrepreneurs

I'm nearly salivating in anticipation of deconstructing it. But, before I do, there's a worthwhile TED talk I saw recently [1] that makes a similar point (but doesn't fail at it): http://www.ted.com/talks/ethan_zuckerman.html

So, yes, I do agree to some extent that there are some liabilities involved in homogeneity of social networks. However, relating that to a criticism of "meritocracy", or relating it to innovativeness, or imagining that the world would somehow be better off if talented people didn't surround themselves with other talented people ... that's just dumb.

> ...the best and brightest (as measured by their SAT scores and GPA)...

Way to open, man. I took the PSAT when I was in the seventh grade, as part of a controlled social experiment, and supposedly scored OK on it (I was only given percentile scores relative to high school seniors). So I suppose my SAT score would've been OK if I'd ever bothered to take it, but my GPA was 3.0 at best. I'd hesitate to consider myself "best" or "brightest", but I'm not dumb by a long shot. This metric manages to simultaneously ignore bright, motivated people who do not follow traditional paths of success, while including people who do follow traditional paths of success who are nowhere near best or brightest.

> ...we naturally construct our social network so that it consists mostly of people like us. (Sociologists refer to this failing as the self-similarity principle.)

This is a failing? No, it's how people construct support networks.

One of my hats is as a programmer. I've had a terrible, time-consuming, neverending project lately. If I get to feeling the need to decompress over this -- or to get help wrangling it -- I am not going to go chat up a lady in a bar. I want to find another programmer instead. Lawyers find lawyers, doctors find doctors, mechanics find mechanics, etc.

This guy is failing to see a social network as anything other than an information stream, a way of exposing yourself to as many new ideas and experiences as possible. While that's one aspect of it, it is not the totality of a social network.

And, hell, if my friends are anything to go on, most people maintain at least two completely different social networks anyway: one for each of their active interests.

> The executives were invited to a cocktail mixer, where they were encouraged to network with new people. Not surprisingly, the vast majority of executives at the event said their primary goal was to meet “as many different as people as possible” and “expand their social network”. Unfortunately, that’s not what happened.

First off, he's wrong about that article (which I do not have access to except in abstract, dammit). From the abstract: "There was no evidence of homophily (attraction to similar others) in the average encounter, although it did operate for some guests at some points in the mixer."

Second, he's wrong in his analysis of it. Also from the abstract: "They were much more likely to encounter their pre-mixer friends, even though they overwhelmingly stated before the event that their goal was to meet new people." Well, duh. While I might say that I'm attending an event to meet new people, if I run into someone there that I already know, I'm going to spend some time with them. If I haven't seen them in a while, I'm going to catch up with them.

You know what else I'm going to hope for? An introduction. My social network rarely, rarely expands by meeting random people without any common ground and then making friends with them. More likely, it expands in a degrees-of-separation way: one friend introduces me to someone they know, who I don't know, and so on and so forth. I think this is painfully obvious to anyone that's ever attended a party with friends.

> What they found was that people tended to interact with the people who were most like them, so that investment bankers chatted with other investment bankers, and marketers talked with other marketers, and accountants interacted with other accountants.

It surely couldn't be because they had an easy common ground to launch conversations from.

> Instead of mixing with new people, the leaders made small talk with those from similar backgrounds; the smallness of their social world got reinforced.

What? So these subjects attend a party, which contains other friends and acquaintances of theirs, and they meet people, and it's somehow reasonable to conclude that,

a: meeting new people did not expand their social network;

and b: that they had small social networks anyway, because of a pigeonhole view of one social event they attended?

> According to Ingram and Morris, the only successful networker at the event was the bartender.

Bullshit. I'm sure that bartender has really gone on to keep in touch with anyone from that party. Assuming that the author's interpretation of this experiment is correct -- a tenuous assumption at best, considering the abstract -- the experiment would be a failure of selection bias, where the only metric for "success" is talking superficially to lots of different people, in a setting where nobody is motivated to talk to lots of different people.

> He noticed that most entrepreneurs had a rather homogenous collection of contacts. They might have lots of friends, but all of their friends came from the same place and were interested in the same things.

I'm sure this has nothing at all to do with the massive demands of entrepreneurship. Assuming that the average entrepreneur needs funding to be successful, then of course the majority of entrepreneurs are going to know investors and other "money" people, or other resourceful individuals. Are we really trying to equate the social networks of entrepreneurs to, say, travel agents here?

> ...an elaborate metric of innovation ... the number of patents they’d invented and ... all their trademarks.

smirk

> If someone has a brilliant idea for a new company, we assume that they are inherently more creative than the rest of us. This is why we idolize people like Bill Gates and Richard Branson and Oprah Winfrey.

OK, stop. Just, stop. People idolize celebrities because they are powerful, wealthy, famous, or otherwise successful in some metric that appeals to the desires of the average person. I seriously, seriously doubt that any survey would rank "creativity" in the top 10 reasons that such people were idolized, and I certainly don't think that Bill Gates deserves to be described as a pillar of "creativity". Branson, for another of the examples, has been quite open about his strategies, tactics, and the desires that drive him, and plain ol' stubbornness would probably rate a lot higher in a description of his personality than "creative".

And by the way, just what sort of creativity are we talking about here? This guy seems to be trying to draw a parallel between creativity and his definition of success, but there are an awful lot of really creative artists in music, sculpture, photography, and art that are pretty close to broke.

If creativity is the primary driver for this notion of success, why aren't these artists all millionaires? Could it possibly be that there's something else that qualifies as the "secret of successful entrepreneurs"? I think so!

> Unless we take our social circle into account – that collection of weak ties and remote acquaintances who feed us unfamiliar facts - we’re not going to really understand the nature of achievement.

This article has not convinced me that examining social networks has led to any insights in the "nature of achievement".

Finally, to swing my Great Hammer of Justice, let's travel back to the quoted bit at the top of the article:

> ...and that tends to huddle together rather than spreading out to enrich the country as a whole. This is Christopher Lasch’s lament in “The Revolt of the Elites” — that meritocracy co-opts people who might otherwise become its critics, sapping local communities of their intellectual vitality and preventing any kind of rival power centers from emerging.

This is completely and totally backwards. When smart, talented, ambitious people huddle together, great things happen; by gathering together, they are able to tackle together all of the obstacles that make great things difficult. [2] This has been borne out over, and over, and over again in history. Redmond, Silicon Valley, Detroit, England, India, Rome, Greece ...

Taking talented people and somehow "encouraging" them to spread out and associate themselves with as many diverse other people as possible is the very definition of homogeneity.

I am so relieved that poorly-thought-out, unresearched screeds like this are a dime-a-dozen these days, and that by this time tomorrow, nobody is likely to be discussing this article at all. [3]

[1]: I've just discovered that I'm capable of having TED on in the background on one computer, and concentrating on coding on another computer, while keeping reasonable track of the video. This is really neat to me.

[2]: In fact, is this not the primary motivation for every single co-working space and other common environments shared by like-minded people who want to be more effective?

[3]: With general respect due the author, who appears to have written some otherwise worthwhile stuff.

Certainly, having a diverse network is a point of leverage for entrepreneurs, but the that network is caused by the same motivations that drive entrepreneurship, rather than being an impetus for success.

The study of social networks is incredibly fascinating, but the discipline is definitely in a nascent state. I think one of the biggest issues is that there is operational definition of a social tie. If you a create a network of people that a person has interacted with over a lifetime, it will likely look very different from the network of people the same person has interacted with over the last 30 days.

That's just one of the big problems to solve in the discipline. Since it's not a perfect science, it's going to be hard to provide "just the facts."

But what this has to do with meritocracy and the identification of the "best and brightest" is a little questionable. These factors should correlate - to some extent - with being successful, regardless of whether or not an individual is one of his so-called "best and brightest" who went to Harvard or whatever.

If he had just said "If you want to be a successful entrepreneur, then make it a point to build a diverse network of connections with people of different backgrounds and interests" then I'd be saying "right on." But the harping about GPAs and SAT scores and Harvard just seemed to muddle the article up and distract from the point.

I say b*. We all talk to strangers. A lawyer meets countless of clients who are not from the same background he is, think criminal lawyer, or negligence, or the guy who writes wills, or deals with trusts, not necessarily the commercial lawyer. So too a doctor's patients are as diverse a people as they can be. I think too enterprenours. Their customers could not be more diverse. We all chat to random strangers once in a while, we all meet complete strangers in very diverse settings.

I am not saying that people do not get together with people who have same interests. I do not however think that is all such people do, that their entire universe is "same tired thoughts".

Its nonsense. I hate opinion pieces. More facts please. Please just tell us the cold hard facts with possibly no commenting whatsoever. I have my friends to do the commenting, the best of which is of course my brain, and seeing as I have had my brain for 22 years it must be a tired and old same brain, so perhaps I should try and find a new brain.

Interestingly, it turns out poor "cream" whites and Asians are excluded from elite private institutions. Other races get preference for being poor, but only rich white kids get into Harvard.

http://www.mindingthecampus.com/originals/2010/07/how_divers...