Interview with Dan Isenberg, author of "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid"

Dan Isenberg is the executive director of the Babson Entrepreneurship Ecosystem Project and the author of the great new book "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid: How Contrarian Entrepreneurs Create and Capture Extraordinary Value," a very valuable book on the subject. We had a wide-ranging conversation on failure, mistakes, lean startups and whether entrepreneurs need to try to get very big. Enjoy!

Access the podcast here (30 minutes).

Summary:

1:15 What "Worthless, Impossible and Stupid" is about
3:10 On the emerging "Failure Culture"
7:30 The fine line between success and failure in new ventures
8:20 Is the first mover advantage really an advantage?
9:25 Do entrepreneurs have to be innovators to succeed?
10:00 Dan's failed venture
11:30 Lessons from the failure - the sixth sense of business danger; the speed of failure; reading the macro situation; the "Dersu Uzala" story
13:33 Is there a scarcity of capital for entrepreneurs?
17:00 On the Lean Startup movement; not so novel - "that's the way our grandparents did business"; "a lot of really good ventures will require a lot of capital"
18:55 Is a flower-shop owner really an entrepreneur? "There's not a continuum between self-employment and entrepreneurship."
22:30 Entrepreneurs as job-creators - and public policy (please be patient with the interviewer's 90 - 90! - second question. He got carried away.)
28:05 A bit more on the book - great entrepreneur stories without even one about Steve Jobs