There's Hope For Me Yet

In my quest to become Mayor of Mountain View, there seems to be hope for me yet. An American born Indian guy named Bobby Jindal just won the Governor's seat in Louisinia a week or two back. That's a pretty amazing commentary on how far the U.S. has come in the past decades. Just 15 or 20 years ago, David Duke (a leader of the KKK) was in the running for Governor in Louisiana. It was a landslide victory in favor of Bobby Jindal. So, to go from David Duke to a landslide victory for an Indian guy is simply amazing. Jindal has quite an interesting background, including a stint at McKinsey & Co. after he got his Masters degree from Oxford.

Comments

gnp said…

You've got my vote.

October 28, 2007 at 9:07 AM

The Fortunate 400

So there's rich, and then there's super rich. I recently read an article in the WSJ about the top 400 taxpayers based on income. Pretty incredible statistics. Those top 400, or what they call the "Fortunate 400", pulled in $85.6 billion in income in 2005. That's over $200 million each ... in one year! Here's a quick graphic to drive that home: Very impressive. There's all the obvious jaw-dropping statistics to go with that. For instance, to make the cut to be in the 400 you had to pull in at least $100 million. With an average of $200 million, that means there's people pulling in well over that number. Obviously, quite crazy numbers, and generally speaking not necessarily anything to be concerned about. I'm all for capitalism. But one of the more disheartening statistics was that adjusting for inflation, the minimum income to make the cutoff into the Fortunate 400 has nearly tripled since 1992. That's probably not a good sign as I imagine that...

Nine Prescriptions for Building the Duke Entrepreneurial Community

I think Duke can have one of the strongest entrepreneurial communities in the world. Are we there yet? Well, not yet. But there's a tremendous amount of momentum that I saw build in just the past two years while I was getting my MBA at Duke. While leading Duke's 10th annual business plan competition, the Duke Start-Up Challenge (DSC) , last year, I witnessed a near doubling of participation on campus in just a single year. The interest on the ground was clearly there and building rapidly. But now that I'm an alum, I'm looking back and wondering ... how do we rev-up the Duke entrepreneurial community even more? I read a great article by Daniel Isenberg, a professor of management at Babson, called " How to Start an Entrepreneurial Revolution " in the June edition of the Harvard Business Review. Isenberg outlines nine prescriptions for governments that want to create entrepreneurship ecosystems in their countries. Although he was focused on governments an...

A Possible Solution to the Mortgage Crisis

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