How To Teach Teachers For A Better Future - Ozan Sönmez

Welcome everyone again. We are with Ozan Sonmez. Welcome to you too again. How are you?

Good, good. Excited. 3rd day. I think this is the middle of the sessions. This is the 5th, 10th, 12th, 13th session. Ah crap, this is the 13th session. So I hope I don't bring bad luck. Let's not jinx the whole thing. I'm excited. This is something I care about, the topic of teaching entrepreneurship. And also right after this, we're going to do another session with a dear friend of mine who's currently teaching in UC Berkeley and also had the pleasure to study in Harvard while Clayton Christensen was teaching. So, but we'll have to wait for Mark to come in about half an hour. But before that, let's talk about how we can help teachers teach, or if anybody else can teach.

Well, actually, it's kind of an exciting topic. So today's sessions are kind of— when we combine all of them together, there we can see kind of like a really big proportion of the education, tomorrow's education puzzle maybe, because we have informal learning and academic learning at the same time. And in this session, we have planned to talk about the practice and the, maybe the academic part of education. So the session's name is actually How to Teach Teachers for a better future. So, would you like to explain your opinion about especially the the situation of academic entrepreneurship? Like how do you see it and how do you define it? Let's move on after the definition.

That's a good one. So, the entrepreneurship, the whole idea of teaching entrepreneurship. was delayed for a long while because a lot of the times people were under the impression that entrepreneurship are traits that you are born with. So if you're an extroverted person, if you are charismatic, if you are a geek, a nerd, that's how you become an entrepreneur. Entrepreneur, and a lot of people, especially I think in the 2000s, were comparing the very successful entrepreneurs of our time, like Steve Jobs, Wozniak, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, founders of eBay, and everything else. Like when this whole dot com boost bubble kind of boosted in 2000s, a lot of people were not looking very good on entrepreneurship. They always had the sense that strong engineers, and that's a tradition of Stanford, that's a tradition where the whole Silicon Valley started by after World War II, 3 people had played a huge role in how Silicon Valley started, and those were all associated with universities, mostly Stanford. So everybody was like, oh, Stanford creates a lot of entrepreneurs, but none of these are having any formal entrepreneurship training. They're all engineers. So that was the idea where entrepreneurship is not something you can have a lecture about. You teach people good engineering, you teach people good skill sets, you fund them. That's how the whole Silicon Valley ethos came about, even before then the West Coast to East Coast ethos came about. So not everybody was really enthusiastic about teaching entrepreneurship because most of the examples had not been going through formal entrepreneurship training, even in MBAs. And most of the entrepreneurs were like, Oh, we don't hire MBAs because MBAs are just bean counters. They don't understand what's going on. We do our own things. And the entrepreneurial ecosystem did not look very keenly and kindly towards the teaching of entrepreneurship. But I think in the last 20 years, this has changed primarily because I think people understood there is A-type entrepreneurs, like people who will be entrepreneurs whether you lock them in a cell, they'll find a way out and they'll become entrepreneurs.

Yeah, this is maybe the spirit.

Yeah, exactly. So a lot of people have the spirit, have innate abilities to become entrepreneurs. And same, by the way, was discussed about innovators, like, can you be an innovator? Can you teach people to become innovative? or inventive. And that's— that was a lot of the debates were like, oh, Tesla never had a training, Edison didn't have a training, um, Einstein was a genius but he wasn't even in school. So a lot of people were downplaying why schools are important and the entrepreneurship training.

Yeah.

But I think it, it started changing, especially with a lot of the business schools creating impact, a lot of the, uh, institutions that played a huge role like Stanford and Berkeley and MIT and Harvard in the US played a role in bringing about a new generation of entrepreneurs and started building ecosystems. So that's kind of the change.

Well, can we say that, because when you are an entrepreneur, you first try something, you assume something, and you try it, and if you fail, you give up and you pivot. I don't know, you take another direction or move on. So when it comes to entrepreneurs, first thing is to try, not to maybe learn. Like, you try and you learn after that. So when we look at the structure of the whole entrepreneurship thing, maybe it's not the change, it is the nature that, yes, there were some people who didn't learn anything and do something that works, and then— when we look at it in a societal cumulative way, we didn't know, somebody tried, now we know, and we can learn something from that. Maybe can we see the situation like that?

I think so, but on the other hand, it's also very important to look into knowing how academia works. So academia works with research, like They don't work with anecdotes, much like the entrepreneurship ecosystem works. So one of the things I think was missing from the whole entrepreneurship education, entrepreneurship training mindset was not many of the entrepreneurs had been studied. Not— there were a lot of books about how HP came about, Silicon Valley came about, Fairchild Semiconductors, A Treacherous Eight, Intel, and everything else, but not many of the people created theories about how innovation works, how entrepreneurship works. And I think what we will discuss in the next session with Mark, when Innovator's Dilemma first came about, it was a previously unthought of experience that Clayton Christensen unraveled. that there is a theory of entrepreneurship, there could be a theory about innovation economics, and that started impacting a lot of people, like the Good to Great books and Crossing the Chasm. So there are a lot of academics, entrepreneurs turned academics, that started writing and researching entrepreneurship.

Yeah.

I think academia was missing that research element, that theory element a lot, and even the theory of innovation, disruptive innovation, and theory of market access, the beachhead market mentality, what Steve Blank did with his first book with Bob Dorf. I think that started building up an academic curriculum, an academic structure to understand the phenomena of teaching entrepreneurs. And then we started seeing more practical ways of doing entrepreneurship with accelerators and incubators.

Yeah.

And it became a little bit more of a movement, so to say.

Yeah, actually, you're so right with all the things that you said. And it was a great conclusion, kind of really explanatory, and at the same time, like a summary. So can we— I don't want to be like approaching the whole process with an analytic way because I am in the social field, but I—

Sure.

The things that you said made me think that, so the functions doesn't always— so the function doesn't always serve the same answer, but there is a pattern. That gives something else when you put something else. So, the academic part is trying to figure out that formula, the function. But in here, so do you think that the entrepreneurs, while they're active entrepreneurs without having kind of an academic, they don't seek academic something, but do you see a correlation between them? Correlation and some working, do they work together nowadays?

So I think what's happening in the entrepreneurship space, we're still debating, is the research that the universities, the academicians, are doing help build a theory on how to do the practice. For example, when The Lean Startup book came about, it wasn't an academic book. It was written by an entrepreneur for entrepreneurs.

Right.

But it was inspired by an entrepreneur who has became an academic and was teaching in business school. So the whole movement of new entrepreneurial thinking had its roots in academia. For example, Business Model Canvas, it's a PhD thesis for Alexander Osterwalder. Business models, he did not invent business models. He was studying in his PhD to make it more understandable. And I think that's one of the most influential PhDs ever that had a very tangible, practical reasoning behind the whole movement of accelerators. So the— we cannot say the academic community or the universities do not contribute to entrepreneurship because it's purely based on practice. That will be not just ignorant but also stupid. But on the other hand, we can also not say that the academics are building the theory by doing research mostly. They're doing research, but they need people who have done this in the field, who are real entrepreneurs, that they need a lot of feedback from. I think that's why most of the entrepreneurship centers are placed under engineering. departments of multiple universities because that's where most of the entrepreneurs came through and that's where most of the entrepreneurs will come through going forward. So in that sense, the academia uses the skill set and the networks they have to research the entrepreneurs that probably went through their own doors, then come up with theories which then starts getting trickled down to practice by entrepreneurs, and that became a nice reinforcing loop. As we learn more, people research more, and we learn more and we research more. That's a nice through. So I think, um, I, I strongly believe in a lot of places there are good research being carried forward and pretty research being carried forward through the success and failures of entrepreneurs. And although that's not super available in Turkey, there are not so many people studying entrepreneurship academically in Turkey, I think it has a huge impact on the global entrepreneurship ecosystem going through research, learning through research, and then coming back and making practice.

Regular Eric Ries stuff. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's quite valuable.

Well, we have a question just as relevant to our topic. So Asen is asking, how should we spread the entrepreneurship in educational institutions of Turkey?

Well, that's a question I struggled maybe 10 years ago before I moved abroad and started doing this in multiple universities in in Middle East and in the US. I think we need to understand that the higher education system, let's divide it to universities, post-university, or universities or pre-university.

Hmm.

So I actually don't have much hopes on the universities leading the entrepreneurship education. There are a lot of universities. People get into universities quite randomly. Many universities don't do any research. Many universities don't have any— don't have enough faculty to carry forward even the mundane teaching tasks are carried forward very poorly in the university environment in Turkey. So actually, I have very little hopes in a big change in the university education sector having an impact on entrepreneurship. They are— they would not even— I mean, we discussed this, um, in a recent Clubhouse, uh, event that we do every Monday, um, that— and, and our conclusion was even the richest family-owned universities, family-built universities are spending so little on entrepreneurship, it's embarrassing. So let's put that aside. I don't think there's much to be done there. If the top 5 GDP creators who own universities in Turkey are spending very little on it, if they do not create university student funds to invest in student entrepreneurs, actually with cash, not with just— desktop and whatever. I don't think that's a mindset we can change.

Yeah.

Maybe it's because the academics in those universities or the presidents of those universities are pretty focused on research. They don't too much care about spending some budgets on the university startups, but that's a shame. Let's leave that aside. But I'm more interested and more enthusiastic about high schools playing a major role, planning increasing the major role in giving their students the ability to experience entrepreneurship during their high school years. And I think that is very important.

Yeah.

Like we did Startup Week in a high school for the last 2 years. We were one of the few ones that did that. There are lots of hackathons joined by high school students.

Yeah.

There are a lot of university, pre-university students joining in competitions, business-making competitions or entrepreneurship competitions. And I think because high schools really understand closely what parents need, And what parents actually care about is creating a future for their children.

Yeah, safe home maybe.

Yeah, and most of the parents are, I think, realizing the fact that having an education, a university education, is not going to give them, give their children a safe ground anymore. I mean, it has completely changed in the last 20 years. Since the whole university environment and the high school environment in Turkey had been disrupted significantly.

Exactly. For example, my department is kind of not directly related with the entrepreneurship, and sometimes I am running that kind of events and etc., and my father always says that, okay, don't Forget to pass your exams, and I am saying if you want me to get a great great grade, then be sure that I will be unemployed. I am. I'm just saying that to him, and he said okay, and he goes like okay. Be sure you pass though. And yeah, it's kind of a traditional thinking. Even if they are supporting me, they are some they feel that. Yeah, they have that urge. And yeah, maybe we should— yeah, for example, for my children and my— this— the people who are the same age as me will not have— our children will not have that kind of a problem. Maybe other problems, of course.

Yeah.

But yeah, we are in a really important transition maybe because As you mentioned before, from the 2000s with Airbnb, Facebook, and everything, a whole new business making, a way of business making is arising. And as Ilker Baydar at the first day of our event mentioned, self-employment will increase day by day, and he is foreseeing an 80% of the youth is forcing to have their own businesses. So this is huge. So it is.

So let me share one thing, if I can manage that. So I hope you can see this.

Yeah, we can.

This is very important. I mean, I really, for the last 2 days, World Economic Forum has been doing webinar series on reskilling and getting back the jobs.

Yeah.

I think this is very important. Like, this understanding, the shift in understanding from degrees to skills is going to change what the shape of working class will look like, what the shape of the future of work will look like. And this is from the Jobs Reset Summit. It is like my, my, I'm 42, my parents are like 72 plus, 70 plus. When they were growing up 40 years ago, when they were going to universities, going into a university was a pretty big deal. Like not many people were able to go, not many people had the ability to go, not many people were able to go, and not many people were graduate, and then after they graduate, there is almost 100%, uh, probability that they would get a job in either state or in the emerging new businesses like these new holdings that were being created back in the '70s, '60s and '70s. I mean, when I was graduating from Middle East Technical University, I didn't think ever if I will be employed or not. I knew I would find a job. It was just a matter of should I work in consultancy, should I do this, should I do that, multiple opportunities. But that is not going to happen going forward. Like I've been working for the last 20 years, graduated in 2001, and for a very long time when you graduate from a good university, you really didn't have much to worry about. You would find a job. Whether they will pay you enough, you'll like to change. So that was not too big of a deal. But crisis after crisis, technological change after technological change, and the recent one is of course the pandemic. It has really been quite agreed upon with many industrial specialists that The way jobs are being found, the jobs are being created, is completely going to change. And it's not about if you will be, as recent graduates, if you'll be able to find jobs, but the World Economic Forum estimates 40% of the workforce that is currently working need to be reskilled in order to continue having jobs. So It's not only will you be able to find a job or not, it's will you be able to keep learning as time goes on to be eligible to keep doing what you were hired to do for the first time. And this is a huge number. And I think what I care about and why I care about entrepreneurship training is, and as Hikaru was saying that as well from a professional perspective, we really need to teach people to build jobs. to create their own livelihood.

Yeah.

To actually create scalable technology-based entrepreneurship endeavors, because existing companies will not provide enough jobs, governments will not provide enough jobs. So we only have creative industries, entrepreneurial endeavors that will support the growth of the economy.

Yeah, while we're talking about that, I think that the core of that change is being open to innovation. Would you like to talk about innovation a bit more? Because there are, even in the, even in the academic world, there are some discussions about should companies need an innovation department, or does, you know, is innovation something that should be all over the company? For example, it's kind of a huge discussion even in the entrepreneurs, active entrepreneurs, and in the— yeah, so what do you think about that?

So I think The buzzword innovation is— we are in a transition period in the terminology. Companies who are afraid that they will not be viable or they will not make sense try to recreate themselves temporarily with temporary solutions like creating innovation department, maybe doing a little bit of corporate innovation or corporate entrepreneurship, blah, blah, blah. But I don't think most of these companies are equipped with the right decision-making tools or are equipped at all. So innovation in the corporate setting is something that's like an oxymoron. If you have a growing sustainable business model, it is really, really, really difficult to persuade a lot of people, especially stakeholders, shareholders, owners of the company, to do things a little differently because, oh, we did this back then, it was difficult, but now we're able to do it, why should we change it? People look into it like we can lose a lot, and they lose perspective of what they can actually gain a lot by doing something different. So I have absolutely almost zero hopes on corporates changing their mindsets, enabling people to make a difference in existing business models.

Yeah.

Because it's against the nature of the corporation to do this. Therefore, unless corporates are really serious about this and spin out divisions or entities that will not report to anybody in the large corporation, they will be independent. We call submarines instead of the large Titanic. They'll just have small boats trying to navigate to new waters. It will be very difficult and kind of ridiculous to expect change to come from corporates. Corporates have the advantage of distribution, have the advantage of profitability, have the advantage of having large known brands. They can use those, but they usually are afraid to lose those. That's why they can't actually make a lot of change through innovation efforts. Of course, there's examples But we see more companies dying at a faster rate than we see— and we see new companies emerging at a faster rate. So old companies are not increasing, they're dying. New companies are growing up.

Yeah.

And that's actually a path forward. So I would have bet my horses on Corpus becoming very innovative and changing something significant in the space.

Well, at the same time, the new generation's expectations about their work lives are changing.

Right.

For example, most of my friends I am talking about, they're like refusing to work within those working hours, and they're saying that, okay, I can do whatever I— I mean, I can do my tasks whenever I am, wherever I want. So this matters because people don't think that money is everything right now. There are a lot of young people who receive— who turn down a high percentage of salaries, high amounts of salaries, just because they don't think that it's their dream or they don't think that they would be happy in this company. So companies need to be— need to change and need to innovate. Maybe because this is the expectation.

I mean, I, I hope companies don't change and it forces more people to build their own future.

Um, ah, that was a nice turn.

It is going to happen. Um, more people will start becoming entrepreneurs. More people will start realizing that there are actually no structural reason why corporations do not change. It's just the head of people, and we'll start seeing this more and more again through WEF. Um, there are a lot of corporations in the United States now who is recovering from COVID with very strong vaccination policies. Um, a lot of the HR departments are struggling. Um, people are trying to find out ways to call people in to justify, let's come back together, let's go back to work. And people are like, nah, I don't think so. I'm happy where I am. I can come to the office a couple of days a month, maybe one day a week, but I'm not going to come to the office. You should not expect me. We were able to do things, and most of the companies who caught the wave of COVID and the new generation technologies increased revenues, increased their valuation. So they were like, We haven't been coming to work for the last 18 months, but we're doing pretty well. Why are you trying to ruin everything? I said I have my setup at the house. Of course, this is— there's huge inequalities. Of course, I mean, I'm not talking about life at home is really the best for many people. Yeah, because connectivity is a problem. Schooling is a problem. There are a lot of inequalities.

Yeah, also, it's very difficult. Exactly, especially it's that. But when we look at the previous year, it's not only working from home. There are also— maybe there is a pandemic, and maybe it could have been more productive if there wouldn't be such a health danger. in our minds, all over the world. But yeah, the thing that you said is also answering the point and clarifying it also. Before we close, I have a final question about the youth that is watching us.

Sure.

So, if you're watching this, you're obviously an entrepreneur. So what would you recommend the young entrepreneurs to take the lessons, entrepreneurship lessons that they are— they've been joining at their schools or from the internet to their practices? So how should they approach? Do you have a suggestion or recommendation?

I mean, maybe we will also share this link on Discord. A couple of weeks ago, I was invited to a podcast, and again, for young people to give advice. And I think the number one advice that I can give to early younger entrepreneurs, less than 25, let's say high school age or university age, they need to really understand the reality of entrepreneurship. And that is sales. Entrepreneurs these days, unfortunately, there's a lot of buzz about like investments, VCs, angels, unicorns, funding rounds, blah blah blah blah. Most of the people are drawn into this rhetoric, assuming there's lots of money waiting for them. Although somebody else will give you a lot of money and you'll do whatever you want. blah, blah, blah. It actually doesn't work that way. In a very small segment of entrepreneurship, VCs operate, investment funds and angels operate. Even if you are going to build a scalable high-technology company and business that might need investments at the scaling phase, I strongly recommend entrepreneurs who are doing it the first time, especially who are doing it the first time, do not focus on building a super scalable, highly technological, definitely money-raising ventures. That is great if you have the skill set, especially if you're alone, if you're a couple of friends. Focus on something that you are able to build and sell with. Most of the founders realize and read those like giant stories of like Facebook and Google, and they keep coming back at me and saying, oh, well, Facebook didn't have a business model, they invented it afterwards, or Google didn't have a business model, or they go like, oh, Twitter is losing shit tons of money, sorry for the French. Those are cases that only, and most of the time only and only exist Oh, Uber wasn't making any money. Amazon has been losing. They lost money for 17 quarters back and back, but they had access to capital. In Turkey, in emerging economies, we do not have access to easy capital, easier capital like them. We have access to punks like this.

Hello.

But that is, that is why the entrepreneurs in emerging economies like Turkey, like Middle East, and there's interesting parts of Middle East that this does not apply, but they have to focus on the number one reason of being an entrepreneur: build something but sell something. Building is great, but if you are not able to understand that you need to sell that, you need to create value for somebody enough that they will pay you money, That's entrepreneurship. That's the number one thing that a lot of people forget, and I think that's something that entrepreneurs should never forget. Sell, sell, sell. I mean, anything else doesn't matter.

Well, that's been the chat. The chat's been great, so thank you so much for having the session, and we will be continuing Would you like to announce his name and do the announcement for the next session?

In about a couple of minutes. Now I'll be the moderator to a really good friend of mine, actually a business partner that we're building Sage with, and also we're collaborating through YellowX, Mark Searle, the founding director of Innovation Accelerator Group, who spun out of UC Berkeley He's still teaching at Stargardt Center for Entrepreneurship in UC Berkeley, and he's traveled to more than 20 countries, built programs in multiple locations for large corporations as well as for startups. So I'll be asking a few things about what we actually started discussing, like the innovation ecosystem, how the terminologies and everything moved forward, and what's the difference between each region that he has seen in entrepreneurship training. It's kind of a nice continuation of the— current discussion we had for the past half an hour. So looking forward to see you in like 2 or 3 minutes.

Yeah, maybe even less. So let's jump back to the other session. And again, thank you so much for sharing your experiences with us. It was so, uh, at the same time, uh, extensive, but a really great summary. I recommend everyone to watch it again. And, uh, yeah, thank you.

You're welcome. Thanks for a great moderation. Take good care. See you soon.

Bye.