I try to write all about the next leap. Sometimes, it would be nice to stop, take one step back and look at what I am trying to do. This week, I started a great class on hi-tech start-ups in Stanford Business School’s entrepreneurship track. It is taught by Mark Leslie and Andy Rachleff. Both of them are highly accomplished people from the industry with impressive backgrounds. Mark Leslie is best known for founding Veritas, and currently sits on boards of very well-known companies such as Avaya. Andy Rachleff was a General Partner in Benchmark Capital since its inception in 1995 to 2004, after which he started teaching at Stanford Business School. I already had very high expectations for the course, but it easily exceeded my standards with the first session. The case was about John McAfee founding the McAfee Anti-Virus company, and my take-outs are extremely valuable. Mark Leslie opened up the discussion with a quote, which perfectly resonates with the way John McAfee realized that he needed to start an Anti-Virus company, while reading a small news story in San Jose Mercury News. Apparently, among hundreds of thousands of people reading the paper that day, John McAfee was the best-prepared one to seize the opportunity hidden inside the story. Here is the quote:

To see what everyone sees and to think what no one has thought.

from Albert Szent-Gyorgyi

Would the story, and the quote, change the way you read your daily paper? It certainly changed mine.