Tag Archives: Mentoring

September 13, 2014 · 12:16 pm

Everwise, InovAtiva, BayBrazil Annual Conference

Ilana Robbins Gross and I from Everwise attended the BayBrazil annual conference: “Brazil in the 21st Century” yesterday on the Stanford Law School campus. I have known Margarise Correa (Founder & CEO of BayBrazil) for some years and admire both her leadership and ability to bring together the Brazilian diaspora of the Silicon Valley and San Francisco Bay Area. Ilana and I were there to learn and expand our network and also to meet potential mentors for the InovAtiva Brasil mentoring program I have been working on for the past year. Everwise just launched the mentoring platform for InovAtiva!

The conference included notable speakers, including the Honorable Mauro Vieira (Ambassador from Brazil to the USA) and Virgilio A.F. Almeida (IT Secretary, Ministry of Science, Technology of Brazil). Both the Stanford Law School and the co-sponsor Rock Center for Corporate Governance welcomed us. Big technical companies were represented by Airbnb, Uber, Evernote, YouTube, Visa, Nike, Google, and DocuSign. The entrepreneurial community had speakers from Movile, Fazedores.com, ADVANCE Medical, and SambaTech. Financial interests were discussed by BNDES, Redpoint e ventures, Valor Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Atomico, eBricks, and Silicon Valley Bank. I was not surprised to meet Lucie Newcomb (a sister TechWomen mentor) also attending the conference. It was a fascinating and worthwhile day!

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Tagged as Brazil, Mentoring, South America, TechWomen

September 11, 2014 · 2:59 pm

Entrepreneurship in South Africa: Branson SA

13 September update: 11 September Global Health Forum Recording.

Tonight, I am hosting my second show in the People to People Global Health Forum weekly radio program. The topic for 11 September 2014 is: “Entrepreneurship in South Africa: Branson SA”.

Please join People to People’s radio show – Thursdays at 9:00 pm Eastern Time.
Access the weekly show online or phone 646-595-4742 each Thursday evening.

I will be interviewing guest: Jane Rankin, Training and Development Manager at the Branson Centre of Entrepreneurship, Johannesburg Area, South Africa. The Branson Centre SA is an independent centre of entrepreneurial expertise. These entrepreneurs are making a huge difference not only to their immediate families and communities, but as the business leaders and employers of the future, they will also contribute significantly to economic growth in South Africa. Jane Rankin holds a MBA Degree from the Gordon Institute of Business Science (GIBS) and a Bachelor of Social Science Degree in Industrial Psychology from the University of Cape Town.

The Branson Centre is a customer of Everwise, for which I am the Vice President – Mentoring. I am also the (pro bono) Vice President – Social Media for People to People. People to People (P2P) is a non-governmental, non-profit organization dedicated to improving health care and reducing the spread of diseases in Africa, particularly in Ethiopia and African diaspora communities.

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Tagged as Africa, Mentoring

September 1, 2014 · 9:34 pm

US-India Panel Hosted by IIE at LinkedIn

I enjoyed hearing the “Roundtable on Strengthening Educational Ties between India – U.S.” panel from Gujarat last week. The event was hosted by the Institute of International Education, with Trish Tierney of IIE-SF as the moderator. The panel was held at the LinkedIn San Francisco offices when registration numbers outgrew the original venue. I was particularly interested in the discussion about the importance of entrepreneurship and mentoring in India.

The subject of women in technology came up several times. My favorite quotes:

“We are focused on women because men would happen in any case.”
“For women, Engineering is the last frontier.”

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Tagged as India, Mentoring, San Francisco, technical women

September 1, 2014 · 11:53 am

What I Learned in Brazil

For many months, I have been enjoying working with the InovAtiva Brasil team – developing an entrepreneurship mentoring pilot program. Even though the Everwise team was only in Brazil for a week, I took away three new cultural ideas:

Never put your purse on the floor – purses should be placed on a chair or table.
It is OK to use your whole name in business correspondence – including all of those middle names that your mother only uses when you are really in trouble.
Do not touch your food – use a napkin or toothpick when you cannot use a knife, fork, or spoon.

This last learning reminds me of my grandmother, Evelyn Louise Van Gilder Creekmore, who never broke a rule of politeness in her life. When the family was talking late at night at her home in Knoxville, Tennessee, she would sometimes share her secret plan. Grandma told us that one day she would give a formal dinner party. She would send out written invitations to all of her stuffiest social friends. Her table would be set with crystal, silver, china, linens and flowers. When the guests were seated and the dinner was served, it would be corn on the cob, olives, barbecued ribs and every food she could think of that was almost impossible to eat without fingers. Of course, Grandma Creekmore never did such a thing – but sometimes she liked to think about it.

Evelyn Louise Van Gilder Creekmore in 1940

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Tagged as Brazil, Mentoring

August 17, 2014 · 9:48 pm

Embrace an Oak

Kristoffer is a 7th grader at St. Andrew’s School (Saratoga, California). He presented his Heritage Oak Initiative today to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church. Kristoffer collected 1,000 acorns from the immense oak tree that dominates the church-school campus. These acorns were grown into 250 starts that are being sold to collect donations for Embrace.

The award-winning Embrace Warmer is designed for hypothermic infants in developing countries. It costs a fraction of the price of a standard incubator, doesn’t require constant electricity, and is portable, hygienic, and reusable.

Embrace now works in 11 countries and has helped over 87,000 low birth weight and premature infants. Kristoffer wrote on the Heritage Oak Initative website:

The Heritage Oak Initiative was founded with two objectives: First and primarily, I wanted to help people who are less fortunate than me, and second, I wanted to give the church and school community a living memory of Saint Andrew’s. The Oak provided a perfect opportunity to do both through its annual production of acorns, which means that the program can live in perpetuity benefiting a separate charity each year.

In addition to being an impressive and generous project by a very young man, today’s presentation was of particular interest to me because Everwise CEO Mike Bergelson and I and used Embrace as our example for quick and successful product development when we presented at the FutureNow event last month. I just bought two of Kristoffer’s oaks today for my own garden!

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Tagged as garden, Mentoring, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church

August 2, 2014 · 2:05 pm

Watching New Cities Grow

I grew up in San Francisco and live in San Jose, California, two relatively-old cities – for the American west. SF was founded in 1776; SJ was founded in 1777. Both were incorporated in 1850. I have recently returned from an Everwise business trip to run a Mentoring Design Workshop in Brasilia (Brazil). Brasilia was founded in 1960 and had a population of 2.8 million in 2013. A few years ago, I worked for Huawei in Shenzhen (China). Shenzhen was founded in 1979 and had a population of 10.4 million in 2010.

Besides being new cities, Brasilia and Shenzhen have in common that their quick creation is associated with a great leader. I was last in Shenzhen in 2010, the 30th anniversary of the Shenzhen Special Economic Zone. During that time, there was much honoring of Deng Xiaoping. Deng lead China 1978-1992. In Brasilia, we stayed at the Kubitschek Plaza hotel – whose name honors Juscelino Kubitschek de Oliveira, Brazil’s President 1956-1961.

Both Brasilia and Shenzhen are still in a skeletal stage of civic development. That is, I saw big buildings and well-developed districts like good bones providing form and identity but also large areas of open land that were marked with actual or virtual/mental “Under Development” signs.

My son and son-in-law like to play the virtual land development game Minecraft together. Minecraft in multi-player survival mode has the concept of identification/ownership “waypoints” to mark areas someone plans to build on – even if nothing is there now. I think Brasilia and Shenzhen are full of waypoints where development is under long-term consideration. It will be fascinating to watch the flesh of mature cities grow up over the coming decades around their lovely young bones.

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Tagged as Brazil, China, Huawei, Matthew, Mentoring, Paul, San Francisco, San Jose, South America

July 26, 2014 · 7:29 pm

InovAtiva Brasil: Core Team and Video

Ilana Robbins Gross, Colman Lydon and I from Everwise just got back to the USA from a week-long trip to Brazil. In Brasilia, Ilana and I managed an InovAtiva Brasil Design Workshop. We were joined by Colman to discuss the new mentoring program with stakeholders and potential mentors in São Paulo. You can watch some of our discussions in the new YouTube video “Webinar – A Mentoria (reinventada) Para Empreendedores” – an hour-long discussion between me, Rafael Campos (Wenovate), and Felipe Gasko (Endeavor). Note that only the video introduction and closing are in Portuguese – the rest is in English.

Our InovAtiva Mentoring Program Core Team is remarkable and diverse. It was an honor and pleasure to work with them during our trip:

Secretariat for Innovation, Ministry of Development, Industry and Foreign Trade: Marcos Vinicius de Souza (Director), Igor Manhaes Nazareth, Maycon David Stahelin, Samuel Meireles Dias e Sousa
Endeavor: Carolina Stochhe Barbosa
Wenovate Center: Bruno Rodani, Rafael Campos, Carla Colonna
Everwise: Ian Gover, Katy Dickinson, Jesse Soslow, Ilana Robbins Gross, Colman Lydon