Back in Feb, I posted one blog about Stanford Entrepreneur Week that I went. Here are more learning from Stanford eWeek with several downloads and videos:

• Quick review of the full event agenda
• Pitching & Presenting Workshop Handouts (I found this session very practical and helpful to all of us as individuals and businesses)

• What is the Next Big Thing? (It’s a fun podcast to listen to. One thing stayed with me in my head is: “think about the big problem you want to solve; create a new kind of bank!” It’s the chat between Tony Perkins, CEO of AlwaysOn; Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Director of Draper, Fisher Jurvetson; and Michael Moe, Founding Partner of ThinkEquity - discuss the evolutions in online media, the power of partnerships, and other next-generation opportunities for the global marketplace.

• Innovation as the Crux of Entrepreneurship from Stanford University President John Hennessy

Enjoy!

Tags: entrepreneur, eweek, stanford

I’m attending Annual Haas Women in Leadership Conference today at Berkeley. It’s the first time for me to sit among another 200-300 professional women, who all look nice and intelligent. I will try to make my sentences short during the day, since this audience loves talking for sure…I’m sure that it will be a very inspiring and fun day!

• Morning session started with the presentation from Judith Estrin, CEO of JLABS, around Innovation and Entrepreneur. She is the author of Closing the Innovation Gap: Reigniting the Spark of Creativity in a Global Economy (McGraw- Hill; Hardcover, September 2008). Estrin serves on the Board of Directors of the Walt Disney Company (since 1998) and the FedEx Corporation (since 1989). Formerly, she served on the boards of Rockwell and Sun Microsystems. She also serves on the advisory boards of Stanford’s School of Engineering and Bio-X interdisciplinary program, and is a member of the University of California President’s Science and Innovation Advisory Board.

• I attended two sessions in the morning:

Personal Evolution Throughout Your Career. Tips that I picked up from this session are:

Bonnie Wild (consultant, corporate director, Johnson & Johnson): Constantly build the bridge (between where you are and where you want to be); Plan! Plan! Plan!

I asked her after the session, “what’s your dream or goal in your life?”Bonnie answered immediately: “help other women. I knew that since I was 18.”

Susan Bernstein (Career Management Coach): Don’t only measure your ROI in terms of money; look at your return on your energy; Listen to the good voice from yourself (good voice feels good; bad voice feels bad); she also recommended a book “women don’t ask”.

Industry Session-Marketing. Tips that I picked up from this session:

Use your marketing skills to market yourself; when you look for a job, do some primary research around the job/company/product, not only secondary research; build your own marketing tool boxes.

The moderator, Lynn Upshaw (lecturer, Haas), opened a question to the audience, “how can you market yourself as a marketer”. My answer to the audience was: I think the best technique is to apply what we(marketers) do everyday to ourselves, which I found not many marketers do well. Create a high level of strategy for yourself, develop a list of tactics to execute your strategy -find out what your target audience is, utilize all the channels to market it all the time. One important channel is to utilize the social networking tools (Facebook, LinkedIn, meetups…).

Below is the full-day agenda in case you are interested.

Tags: entrepreneur, haas, innocation, leadership, live blogging, women, women entrepreneur, women leadership

During the weekend, I went to one event as part of the Stanford Entrepreneur Week. Most of the events are free. If you are interested in anything related to startups or entrepreneur, do check it out. It is a good event to learn, share and network with people in the entrepreneur fields of business and research.

The event I went is “Pitching and Presenting Workshop: How to Make Your Story Compelling”. The material from the workshop and presentation was nothing new, but very practical. What amzaed me is the fact that there are so many people are interested in “pitching”, yet there are few people who really knows how.

Here are my key learning that I would like to share from my own experience:

• Pitching happens every day on almost everything we do.

Pitching is not only a business activity. It happens at work, at home, at movie theatre, among colleagues, between wife and husband, among friends, online and offline…You and your friend were discussing if they would all go to the movie you want, it’s a pitch. Your husband or wife wants to buy a Graco car seat versus a Chicoo brand, it’s a pitch. You have an innovative idea on how to improve one project and you need to get your boss’ buy in, it’s a pitch. You run into a person at a bar, who could be your potential client, and you want him/her have more interests in your offering, it’s a pitch…

• Practice your pitch skills when ever you can.

With your wife, your boss, your colleagues, or someone you run into at a bar…

• Develop your pitch on your own brand - who you are - and always keep it in your back pocket

Have a short 2-3 sentence long pitch around your self: who you are, what you do, what might be interesting to your audience at the time. I found this tactic really helpful. It’s like the real and juicy inside-content of your “business card”, that helps others to know about you and what you do as a real person.

• Other common successful pitch elements:

The workshop summarized 3 main tips on how to create a compelling pitch from business perspective:

1. what’s the problem you are trying to solve
2. why it matters /why it is a problem
3. how you are going to solve the problem and why it’s different

I broadened these tactics to the general use for our day-to-day activities, not only business activities. The methods is actually quite simple: make it interesting to your audience at the time and keep it short.

Tags: entrepreneur, event, pitch, stanford, story telling

Sequoia Capital recently made a presentation to its portfolio companies. Not sure how real this presentation is, but it’s interesting to take a look.

Tags: entrepreneur, vc, venture capital