BusinessWeek writer Ashlee Vance recently interviewed the Founder Institute's Adeo Ressi. In the interview they cover Adeo's begginnings as an entrepreneur (starting an unlicensed nightclub at UPENN with roomate Elon Musk), the Founder Institute's ability to mold employees into entrepreneurs ("We try to find people who have the raw material and have been put into situations where they are employees and recondition them"), and the idea of "Globalizing Silicon Valley".
According to Adeo, "Silicon Valley has very little to do with the weather or the fact that there’s Stanford. If anything, we probably have fewer universities than Boston. But at the end of the day, a lot of it is the collaborative culture that exists here. We try to recreate that. When we opened a chapter in Bogota, Colombia, there was a huge number of successful technology people who’d never met one another. When I say huge number, I’m talking about 10. Ten of the top 10 people had never met one another. How does that happen? We had a lunch for our program’s mentors, and they were, “Oh, I know all about your company. Nice to finally meet you.” I’m sitting there, I’m like, “How do you not know one another?” It’s just different levels of evolution in these markets."
