BrownHEN interviewed Barrett Hazeltine, PhD – June 25, 2007
1. Dean Hazeltine, for thousands of Brown grads, you are known as the father of entrepreneurship who has advised and helped countless of former students start their own companies and guided them to success. What many people don't know is that you yourself have had your own entrepreneurial success. I kept hearing from different alumni vague stories about your patent way back when. Would you speak to this and share some of your experience with us?
I am really afraid to disappoint you because the actuality is much less exciting than the rumor. About 25 years ago, a Brown graduate named Dick Simon came up and said he owned a company, U.S. Billiards, which made coin-operated pool tables. In these kind of tables one gets the cue ball back if it goes down a pocket. He needed some way of distinguishing the all-white cue ball from the other balls. His competitors either made the cue ball slightly smaller or heavier but both approaches had faults.
Another Brown professor and I designed and built a device using small lights and light-sensitive detectors that recognized the cue ball. Not to bore you with the details, the hardest ball to detect was the one with a yellow and white strip but it turned out that the three detectors would work. The device worked and was deployed but the market for coin-operated cue ball dried up.
I have a vague memory of getting my name on a patent when I was working at Raytheon in 1965, but the group of people working on the project was large, and I do not remember the details.
Matt Paknis, whom you know, another Brown alumnus Ray Steele and I formed a company to do management consulting. We mostly worked on work force motivation and team building—Matt’s specialty. The company did fine, but I did not want to give up my day job (Brown) so I did not spend as much time with it as it needed. After a few years, I went off to Africa and the company got reorganized with Matt as the sole proprietor. I still collaborate with Matt on various projects.
Another entrepreneurial venture is a new charter school in Providence—called the Paul Cuffee School. I was on the original board and still am. We had our first 8th graduation last Saturday (6.23.07).
2. Time and again, I have heard from fellow Brown alumni of your creative input in helping them solve their entrepreneurial and professional challenges. When did this entrepreneurial instinct surface in your life?
You ask hard questions! One quality of an entrepreneur, I think, is curiosity about many different things and I think that came out early. A related characteristic is wanting to try new ways of doing things—which is not an endearing trait for parents and colleagues trying to get a short-term goal accomplished. But I did not think of staring a business until much later in life—did not realize how exciting, challenging, and exciting it would be. Like many aspects of a persona, the entrepreneurial spirit is present in many people, but needs to be allowed to flourish.
Did you receive support from friends and family to nurture it?
Not much. I think I got the most support later in life by watching students succeed with their own ventures. My impression is that many successful entrepreneurs start out as a lonely gladiator with perhaps a single partner; only after achieving some success will they have credibility to attract a team, or a mentor. Being strongly involved with a group early dilutes the passions and slows the process.
3. How do you advise young entrepreneurs to cultivate this entrepreneurial DNA?
In early stages inspiration is probably most important and one place to get that is reading about the efforts and successes of other entrepreneurs. I like FAST COMPANY magazine because the articles are suitable and have a nice combination of insight and brevity. I am sure there are other magazines or even books that are equally exciting. After one has read a few articles, my advice is to go out and do it—be an entrepreneur, walk the talk. The rest of what you need to know, you learn as you go.
4. What are the three common factors that you have noted among your former students, which contributed to their successes?
Persistence, desire to learn about many things, appropriate blend of wanting to be independent and a willingness to listen to others. This is turning into about five common factors. Persistence has two aspects: 1) sufficient confidence in one’s self and one’s idea to continue despite discouragements and 2) willingness to work very hard.
The entrepreneur has to make a whole lot of things work together; unless she or he really enjoys learning about each of these things a project will not come to fruition. On the other hand, an entrepreneur must be relentless in pursuing the core of her/his vision—else why work so hard? On the other hand, most of the entrepreneurs I know about seem to have benefited significantly from advice originating from outside the enterprise.
5. What advise do you have for this next generation of entrepreneur hopefuls? How has the landscape changed since 20 or 30 years ago?
Seems to me entrepreneurship is much more generally accepted now than it was even a decade ago. My impression is that it used to be the case if a college graduate went home and told her/his parents that s/he wanted to be an entrepreneur, the reaction would be horror and disbelief. I think that has changed. People recognize much more than in the past the need for this country to have new ventures and the overall social value of entrepreneurship. Loneliness used to be a big pain for an entrepreneur, “Am I the only one facing these problems?” More support and resources are now available: nonprofit groups, state agencies, as mentioned earlier, magazines, etc. There seems to be more venture capital around and more angels—certainly there are more investment firms than in the past and most states have agencies to encourage entrepreneurs.
6. You’ve given so much of yourself to your students. What do you hope that they in turn can pass on to their students and protégés?
I hope young entrepreneurs—successful or not—will encourage the next set of entrepreneurs. Not all can give advice or funds, but all can spend a few minutes listening and offering some kind and helpful words. An appropriate mixture of praise and realism is needed. The confidence of young entrepreneurs is often fragile, even if hidden by bravado; an advisor should not damage that confidence. I hope senior people will also pass on to others a need to consider the implications of what is being proposed—will it make people kinder and more generous? Will it protect the environment? And so on.
Copyright 2007 - BrownHEN.org
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