I continue listening to Yale' netcasts on Entrepreneurship. Today, my "guest speaker" is Jordon Goldberg(J.G), CEO of Stickk.com , a web service that enables people to make commitments to a variety of causes, the major one being weight loss.

Key learnings:
1. A clear distinction between invention and innovation.
The talk is almost entirely about the business of innovation, i.e. making a startup work, product development practices, marketing, networking, and etc. The original invention by two Yale professors serves as a background and media attention grabber. The public is fascinated with the idea, which is a good indicator that the problem that stickk.com addresses is very important for the society.

2. The difference between short- and long-term planning, which is measured in constraints and trade-offs, rather than time.
J.G. is acutely aware of his personal and corporate constraints, such as money, communication distances ( world is not flat!), staff interactions, and etc. For an early stage innovation company the time is almost always "now", therefore it is very dependent on earlier strategic decisions.

3. He mentions the impending move into the corporate services market, which would be a good topic for a 10X diagram exercise. The exercise would explore ideas related to the increasing scale of each target market (person, family, community, company, town, a major corporation, government, global company, etc. )

4. The VCs' aversion to encumberences.
VCs don't want to have any, even potential, committments to research, non-profit, and other goals that do not relate directly to money-making. This is a good indicator that they anticipate management (control) problems, which may arise out of non-functional resource expenditures.

On a more abstract system level, problems might stem from future resource commitments, i.e. "bad constraints". On the other hand, forming money-making opportunities, e.g. via networking, is a "good constraint".