Spreadsheet One
*Lining Up a 3-Pointer
*Some Lessons Worth Knighthood
*Simmering Down After
the Rolling Boil
*Wear Your Values to Work
*Genomics Promises
Profits, Challenges

Spreadsheet One

Lining Up a 3-Pointer

IN THE YEAR 2000, she went to law school, signed on with a professional basketball team, and started on her MBA. Indecision? No, Kate Paye just wants it all. She is one of 12 Stanford MBA students pursuing the four-year joint degree in law, taking five or six classes each quarter. But she’s equally determined to continue her sporting career. So, come summer she will shed her grad student persona and assume her alternate identity, blocking tall forwards in a single bound as a point guard in the Women’s National Basketball Association league.

The 5-foot-8 San Francisco Bay Area native, who played for Stanford in her college days, was signed by the Minnesota Lynx as a free agent last year. At training camp this May—so tough the players call it “basketbrawl”—she will have to compete again for one of its 11 places. The season starts on May 28 and runs into August. It’s not about the money; the women’s game is not as lucrative as the men’s. “Basketball is my passion,” she says.

Last year, her law professors arranged for her to take exams in Minneapolis. She’s confident the GSB will help her balance scholarship and sport again this year. It’s one reason why the 27-year-old chose Stanford for her graduate studies. “Stanford supports people in their pursuit of excellence.”

Paye sweeps aside any Superwoman references. It’s nothing unusual, she insists. “Everyone at Stanford is busy doing incredible things in multiple arenas.”

Sir John Brown. Photograph by Saul Bromberger/Sandra Hoover.

Some Lessons Worth Knighthood

In 1997, THE CHIEF EXECUTIVE of a global company chose Stanford to announce his commitment to becoming an active, concerned participant in dealing with the potential problem of global warming. That speech transformed the debate over climate change because the executive was Sir John Browne of British Petroleum, the first major energy company to acknowledge that human activities may be altering the Earth’s climate.

When Sir John, Sloan ’81, returned to campus March 7 to accept the Ernest C. Arbuckle Award, the Business School’s highest honor, former dean Michael Spence noted that as BP’s leader for six years, Sir John had transformed the company into the world’s second largest gas and oil company, tripling its stock price and twice reporting the largest quarterly profit ever by any company in any industry. Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1998, Sir John introduced technology that allowed better mapping of oil and gas resources and led BP’s mergers with Amoco and Arco.

Sir John also has been devoted to the School, where he has served on the Advisory Council, talked with the Sloan class every year, and participated in the launch of the School’s first global management course.

During his Arbuckle speech, Sir John reflected on lessons he learned at the School and through 10 years of work experience in the United States. It was this side of the Atlantic, he said, where he learned the importance of trust that is “not based on your background but on a track record of performance,” and that “real performance standards” for individuals are “the key to releasing talent.” The School also taught him that management should be “holistic” and about the “positive difference that people make” because of their diverse talents, characters, and behaviors. Having lived through a series of mergers, he said he has concluded that “a takeover, if it is just a transfer of assets from one owner to another with the people left behind and laid off, is always going to be suboptimal.”

The soft-spoken executive also picked up “the spirit of the frontier” here. That optimism was useful, he said, when thinking about environmental problems. “Denial is the wrong response, but so too is despair.”

Simmering Down After the Rolling Boil

“IT WAS THE BIGGEST BUBBLE I’ve ever seen in my 40 years of business—and the biggest meltdown,” veteran venture capitalist William R. Hambrecht said of last year’s collapse of the over-the-counter market.

“NASDAQ is giving 1929 a run for its money,” said Ron Conway, a general partner at Angel Investors L.P. “It really was a bubble, and it really did burst,” he said. “Investors are looking for reasons not to invest.”

The speakers, addressing the school’s fifth annual Conference on Entrepreneurship, held in February, did offer students still interested in becoming entrepreneurs a little encouragement.

“Go slow. Take your time,” said Jeff Hawkins, founder and chairman of Handspring and founder of Palm Computing. He debunked the conventional wisdom that being first to market makes or breaks a company. “Palm Pilot came out five years after the Newton came out.”

Opportunities remain for startups with cutting-edge technology, said Michael Goguen, partner at Sequoia Capital. “It seems to be a law of the universe that the speed with which an established company can exploit a new technology is slower than a group of sharply focused engineers” can exploit it, he said. His own firm is focusing on smaller deals and early-stage startups that require smaller amounts of funding over the short term.

Wear Your Values to Work

“THE WORKPLACE has replaced Woodstock,” Chip Conley, MBA ’84, declares boldly in his new book, The Rebel Rules: Daring to Be Yourself in Business (Fireside, 2001). Work is where “decorum deviates, passion predominates, and rebellion resonates,” says the founder of Joie de Vivre, a niche-market hospitality company in the San Francisco Bay Area that employs a large number of young workers.

Given the transient nature of other social institutions in their lives, Conley argues that Gen Xers, as well as many aging Baby Boomers, want to work for (and buy from) a company that demonstrates its values in addition to making a profit. “Free minds and free markets is the rallying cry. People want to make a difference in the world at the same time they’re making money,” says Conley, who began his company by converting a pay-by-the-hour “no-tell motel” in San Francisco’s seedy Tenderloin to the Phoenix, a hotel with services geared to traveling rock ’n’ roll performers and their fans.

An author who celebrates many business mavericks, Conley also cautions successful entrepreneurs about the dangers of overdeveloping their egos. One of his unplanned treatments: foster parenting a troubled teen who made him a grandpa twice over and, eventually, a “proud papa” too.

Genomics Promises Profits, Challenges

NOW THAT LIVING organisms can be mapped at the level of genes, the pharmaceutical landscape may change from a handful of big companies with blockbuster drugs to a host of small and midsize companies with targeted, smaller market drugs, says physician Paul Auerbach of Delphi Ventures.

“You can pick your population and find that 30 percent of that population has a certain genotype and can really benefit by a certain targeted drug,” he said. “If you go to a major pharmaceutical manufacturer and tell them they should screen to find that 30 percent, as opposed to a mass trial process with the whole huge population that will show a drug either does or doesn’t work, their marketing group won’t go for that. They’d rather sell the drug to everybody who might need it than to those who’ve been shown to actually need it. So, I’m rooting for the middle [size] companies, not for Big Pharma.”

Auerbach, Sloan ’89, was one of the speakers at the January conference “Beyond the Buzzword: Implications of Genomics,” organized by the student Health Care and Biotech Club.

Randy Scott, cofounder, chairman, and CEO of Genomic Health and chairman of Incyte Genomics Inc., said one of the first practical uses of genomic technologies may be to improve the efficacy of existing drugs. “There’s little genomic information or testing on what drugs are doing to genes. That kind of testing should improve drug efficacy and decrease toxicity,” he explained.

As the technology accelerates, startups are not finding it difficult to get funding if they have solid science and business plans, several speakers noted. "Early-stage companies who need only a few million dollars still have plenty of opportunities," Auerbach said. "There are angel networks, there's a huge fallout from the dot-com craziness, and there are dollars falling off in other sectors."

But genomics also involves complex legal, social, and ethical issues that the new industry and society will have to cope with. "The public needs to know that genes are influences, not fate," said Stanford law professor Hank Greely, who codirects the Stanford Program on Genomics, Ethics, and Society.

Added Hugh Reinhoff, founder, chairman, and CEO of DNA Sciences: "There's often a disconnect between what you know about genetic predisposition for a disease and what you can do about it." The breast cancer susceptibility genes—BRCA1 and BRCA2— are perfect examples. Tests can identify these genes, but the only preventive measure available is prophylactic mastectomy.

Electronic medical records could be devised to control access to genetic information but they're not tamperproof, speakers cautioned, and insurance companies could try to screen out healthy people with genes associated with diseases.