It’s never easy to take an entire business day out of the office, but the annual Cornell Entrepreneurship Summit is well worth it. The 2014 edition, dubbed “Beyond the Horizon”, was no exception. One thing that struck me about this year’s summit was that, unlike previous years, none of the entrepreneur speakers were Cornell alums, demonstrating that the summit has evolved from a Cornell entrepreneurship event to a Cornell event about entrepreneurship. As to the speakers, here are some of the more memorable and meaningful takeaways for me.
- How did a startup succeed in creating a real-time Google-Earth? Skybox Imaging CEO Tom Ingersoll asked the audience, “Have you looked at your house on Google Earth? Disappointed it was two years old?” Because satellites are so expensive to build and launch, most of the pictures that we see are of poor quality and years out of date. Until now. Skybox knew that real-time satellite imaging would require dozens of satellites, a prohibitively expensive endeavor with the cost of a single satellite being around $850 million. So Skybox needed to find a way to build satellites for a fraction of that, and created a lightweight, nimble satellite in-house for about $10 million. Ingersoll insisted that the key to Skybox’s success is in execution, and evoked the line mostly attributed to Thomas Edison (also a favorite of Steve Jobs): “Vision without execution is hallucination”. Ingersoll said that another key to Skybox’s success is that it has had a patient board of directors, which enabled Skybox to say “no” to Google twice, before finally agreeing to be acquired earlier this year.
If a company offered its employees unlimited vacation time, would anyone show up to work? Return Path CEO Matt Blumberg revealed that when his company instituted that policy it experienced no higher vacation rates. The author of “Start-Up CEO” said that his employees are encouraged to take as much time off as they can while maintaining high performance and achieving milestones. “We don’t count the hours they work, so why should we count the hours they don’t?”
“We went from the cobbler to standardized mass manufacturing and now today we are going to change all that with digital manufacturing”, announced Kegan Schouwenburg, CEO of Sols Systems. Sols captures a 3-D model of a patient’s foot, makes therapeutic adjustments in a web-based app and manufactures a final product with a 3-D printer. Schouwenburg also demonstrated the direct to consumer version of the service where a customer can scan his or her own foot with a smartphone and order a custom fit insert. “One super cool thing about digital manufacturing: no waste”, Schouwenburg said.
Despite recent mega-exits like WhatsApp, Tumblr and Waze, billion-dollar exits are rare, so much so that they’ve been designated the name of a mythical creature, a unicorn. Every VC chases them. “Birthing a unicorn is hard”, proclaimed CB Insights CEO Anand Sanwal. Sanwal’s data shows that only one percent of exits are unicorns, while 72% are below $200 million. Sanwal said that we may not be in a bubble yet, but valuations are “frothy”. Although billion dollar valuations require lots of capital raising, some of the recent unicorns raised money late at higher valuations, or never, including Shutterstock and former Cornell Entrepreneurship Summit presenter Wayfair, and Anand said that “these are the companies we should celebrate”.