Adeo Ressy of the entrepreneur College
Adeo Ressy (Adeoressi) believes he can predict the future. The 6-foot-5-inch Adeo leaned over the laptop, his fingers parked on a list of numbers, each of which was like an entrepreneur's genetic marker. With an incredibly accurate analysis, Adeo Ressy insists he can predict the success of the entrepreneur in the four-month course and subsequent stages. "This is worse than we predicted," he said, pointing to someone who failed the test, "he may be leaving the project." ”
Entrepreneur College, headquartered in California State Mountain View, the founder of the Entrepreneur Training Institute, Adeo Ressy is trying to determine the mathematical relationship between the personality characteristics of the entrepreneur and the future return of the company's investment. The premise of his idea is that, for example, there is a verifiable correlation between the entrepreneurial fluid intelligence (fluid FDI) and his success. Finally, he wants to see tens of thousands of aspiring entrepreneurs each year accept one-hour aptitude tests, and the algorithm will calculate their results in seconds, not just from the future Dorsey (Jack Dorseys), And can roughly calculate the valuation of the company they started a few years later. "If we can do that, it will be the most important financial innovation I've ever heard of," Adeo Ressy said thoughtfully. ”
but can we really find the psychological elements of entrepreneurship? No one has relied on the exact analysis, confidence and metrics of the entrepreneur College to apply social science to start-ups. The practice of the Silicon Valley training body is being questioned.
, a 40-year-old Adeo Ressy, seems to be young forever. He was tall, with a light head and a thick black-rimmed glasses, and he liked to grin and laugh. Adeo, who grew up in Manhattan, spoke in a slow and cadence way, more sunny than his home in Palo Alto. At the University of Pennsylvania, he rented a 17-room house near the campus with his roommate, Tesla Motor (Tesla) and the founder of Space Exploration Technology (SpaceX), Ellen Mouske (Elonmusk), and opened a nightclub. The two men charged 5 dollars to each student, who could drink as much as they wanted. The Musk who is in charge of money always has a clear head.
Since then, Lacey with his roommate, who has created eight companies and sold three of them. After dropping out of college in 1994, Adeo founded Total NewYork, which was sold to AOL three years later. He founded the Web Development company method Hep in 2000 at a price of 88 million U.S. dollars sold. After starting a gaming company, he set up the funded in 2007, where people can score anonymously on the site, and he still runs the site.
as the 2008 recession hit, Lacey learned that data showed that only one of the 1,000 start-ups had a good level of valuation. "I think, ' Well, if we can change that, it's going to be very helpful, '" he recalls. ”
now, the entrepreneur College offers courses in 35 cities in 22 countries-the latest bridgehead in Alexandria, Egypt, which is a school for entrepreneurs. The for-profit training agency helped students set up 650 companies, 90% of which are still running. A total of about 5,000 trainees were trained. Online education website Udemy and mobile phone positioning marketing company Retailigence are the famous companies founded by its graduates.
students are still working on their daily work, taking 3.5-hour classes a week, and lecturing mentors including Evernote CEO Fille Liebing (Phil libin) and Mint.com founder Allen Paz (Aaron patzer). They have 15 lessons to learn about marketing, fundraising, product design, and legal issues. Adriana, a graduate Adriana Herrera, now runs the fashioning change, which offers environmentally-friendly man-made products to replace popular fashion fabrics, she says, "unless you can turn the course into an introductory step, you will be halfway." ”
every week, entrepreneurs have to take turns to evaluate their progress by mentors and classmates. "Sometimes, criticism can make people cry," Herrera recalls. "In order to graduate successfully, students have to run a company that has a clear revenue model and growth target." Less than half of the students are able to graduate from the college.
Each student pays 1,000 dollars for tuition, including the cost of the training program. Unlike the start-up incubator TechStars and Combinator, the college does not invest directly in companies – it needs as much capital as the largest VC company. Instead, each graduate has to contribute 3.5% of the shares they create, 85% of which enter the stock pool and distribute between mentors and trainees. The entrepreneur College gets the rest of the shares. Startups that raise more than 50,000 dollars will need to pay another 4,500 dollars to fund the development of the college.
since the founding of the entrepreneur College, tens of thousands of people have filed applications. To eliminate admissions bias--in fact, venture capitalists are largely funded by a more than 20-year-old white male who has graduated from an Ivy League prestigious school--which makes Lacey feel unhappy--the entrepreneur College and the psychology professor have established a partnership to develop the entrance examination system. They initially focused on IQ and responsibility, followed by the psychological discipline of the standard, which is a measure of personality characteristics of one of the five characteristics. They tracked the original 72 applicants in 18 months and found that the character had nothing to do with the success of the venture and adjusted the test content.
two years later, they thought they had mastered the ropes. The designer of the Test, a professor of psychology, Lacey his identity strictly ("he is our secret weapon"). "It turns out that entrepreneurs and artists have more in common than they do with managers," the professor said. As one of the five personality traits, openness is associated with curiosity, creativity and passion for innovation, more important than responsibility. The entrepreneur College requires testers to evaluate their relevance to the state of a text description, such as "I am not interested in abstract concepts", in this way to identify whether the applicant is open.
IQ tests don't make much sense. However, fluid intelligence and the ability to analyze abstract situations involve individuals who have an important role to play in the application of a series of new rules. 17 of these features, accounting for One-third of the test content, require applicants to select the most suitable shape to fill in a complex pattern.
Entrepreneur College has also punctured the pop culture bubble of cyber prodigies, who say that entrepreneurship in the young is not necessarily beneficial. Older entrepreneurs who are nearly 40 years of age are performing better than younger entrepreneurs, according to the data. Lacey two theories: As people grow older, they gain more experience and are able to accomplish increasingly complex tasks. People's social networks are important resources for seeking support and expertise, and will increase with age.
according to the applicant's score, the entrepreneur college measures their openness and fluid intelligence from high to low, as well as other characteristics-responsibility, affinity, extraversion. The final score ranged from 1 to 5. Lacey and the majority of instructors in the training program scored around 3.5 points, and applicants with a score of less than 2.2 points were eliminated. At present, the correlation coefficient between the results of this test and the participants ' course performance is 0.45 (roughly equivalent to the correlation coefficient of the SAT score and the average of college scores). This coefficient also applies to the relevance of course performance and entrepreneurial success.
Although Areci claimed that 85% of the students met or exceeded expectations, recent data from 240 founders of the project showed that nearly half of the students ' courses performed better than the expected results-which meant that the ability tests underestimated the potential of many applicants. Lacey retorts that these results suggest that entrepreneurial courses effectively push students to achieve more than expected success. At the same time, the graduate rate at the entrepreneur College is only 40%.
Some people are skeptical: Paulgraham, founder of Silicon Valley's renowned start-up incubator Combinator, says he does not believe in formulas to capture the character of successful entrepreneurs. His business incubator still relies on a seven-member admissions committee to mark tens of thousands of applicants and then take them on average. As for predicting the value of a group of companies, he certainly said it was impossible. "There's no such thing as a lot of randomness," Graham said. ”
Lacey says the entrepreneur College is expected to help students set up 1,000 companies in 2013. The new entrance examination will adjust the content, focusing on the degree of diligence of the applicant-measuring the attitude of the work and identifying the applicant's subversive spirit. The training program, which spans the world, means that Lacey is learning about neglected markets such as Colombia, Vietnam and Ukraine. Lacey says Ellen Mouske can have space, "I'll get the earth." ”
you have the gene for an entrepreneur?
The
Entrepreneur College tested a number of personality traits, but these factors are crucial:
Fluid Intelligence: the ability to learn and apply a range of new rules. Are you good at solving puzzles and brain teasers? You may meet this requirement.
Openness: Open people are passionate about new ideas and experiences. Manifestations include the likes of traveling around, having tasted soft drugs and creativity.
affinity: measure enthusiasm and cooperation indicators. But it can't be a grin--the best entrepreneurs have a medium level of personality.
