Professor Vivek Wadhwa made a great post on TechCrunch a few days ago entitled, “Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Into Finance,” implying that there is a rising trend of engineering students who succumb to an “economic Ebola virus” that infects and brainwashes them into going into the cash-flush field of finance instead, thus “cannibalizing entrepreneurship.”  By implying that engineering students are infected suggests that these people are at the whim of an illness they can’t control, which is blatantly false.

First, let’s remember what Ebola virus is (from CDC): “Ebola hemorrhagic fever (Ebola HF) is a severe, often-fatal disease in humans and nonhuman primates (monkeys, gorillas, and chimpanzees) that has appeared sporadically since its initial recognition in 1976.”  Ebola’s crazy — it’s one of those life-sucking mistresses that literally breaks your heart and destroys your life, and you really don’t have much of a way to protect yourself against it.

But to use this highly infectious vector to describe the phenomenon of engineers turning down entrepreneurship opportunities neglects to mention that engineers are making simple trade offs.  Let’s agree that cash is a major pull, but I think we have to understand how innovation is perceived and developed in both of these fields.

Imagine the choice of finance job versus entrepreneurship work like choosing between two ways to make money: by finishing a coloring book (that pays off more in the short term) versus a filling up blank sketchbook and selling it.

1) Coloring Book (Finance) — I hear finance describe like this: “it’s not a perfect fit for my background, yet it’s something that I have a strong sense that I could potentially be good at.”  Finance is one of those fields that allows you to innovate in an efficiently closed form (financial engineering in the last decade, anyone?), yielding high, stable payoffs and mitigating risk of failure.  Furthermore, recruiters make it clear that anyone smart can do it.

2) Blank sketchbook (Entrepreneurship) — Startups.  It’s the field where 90%+ of business (and ideas) fail.  The failure is independent.  There are no guidelines.  The double-edged sword of creativity is apparent: 1) succeed, and you are truly creative and an independent thinker; 2) fail, and you’ve drawn an unwanted, ugly picture.  Maybe you didn’t even finish the picture.

The rational player facing these decisions, assuming bounded rationality, would more often pick the 1st option than the 2nd.  Go up to any kid over the age of 7 and I’m sure the result would be very similar.  Now what can we do, Professor Wadwha asks friends, to not let friends go into finance? Maybe we should take a look at what finance has done well… (other than the whole $ thing) and recognize that at least a part of the solution is restructuring our choices.

What finance has done right is to offer a closed-form space to foster financial instrument development while also offering a risk-free compensation.  Why is it that the startup experience is often described with words that include failure, uncertainty, independent, independent failure, leadership, loneliness, etc?  Why can’t we, instead, focus on designing the architecture of an innovative forum in other realms aside from financial engineering?

“Well if it’s so simple, why haven’t these so-called self-styled innovators come up with a way to solve this problem already?”

I’ll admit that innovation in the financial industry might come easier in the sense that the creation of the now infamous collateralized debt obligation instrument and its brethren are often spawned to hedge bets or to mitigate risk of losing cash, which are both well-defined problems. Such rigorous definitions of problems may not apply to problems of the real world.  Financial innovation also comes easier in the sense that you are never alone in what you’re doing (frequently, if you are lowly enough, you could be replaced almost immediately  if you dropped dead).  You are never alone (that means you rarely have to take 100% of the blame).  In sum, finance does three things very well to get the new hire: 1) compensation; 2) well-defined “narrow” innovation; and 3) and low-specialization requirements for entry.

The term “economic ebola” initially made me panic (because honestly, if we had an epidemic as bad as ebola, we’re screwed).  But I don’t think our situation as dire as people might think.  So if we’re talking about how to get people more interested in entering entrepreneurship, then I’d like to claim that there are several potential solutions to the high-risk/low return choice problem.  1) Bring the awesome, collaborative, environment to as early as pre-idea stages (such as pre-idea incubators: no equity, not even an idea!); 2) Re-position innovative departments of engineering/startup firms as well-defined problems (I’ll think more about this one, but the answer of how that would be implemented is: ‘it depends’); 3) Remind people that anyone “smart” can do entrepreneurship.  If financial services professionals can make that claim, so can entrepreneurs.

As my Film and History professor (Seth Fein) once said: “Just because you’re an Economics major, doesn’t mean you don’t need to know how to write.”

That everyone should register his or her own domain in case of future fame.  But he then told me that my name was unique, so I probably wouldn’t have to worry about securing my namesake web site for awhile.

But in light of almost finishing college, I realize that I’m in the same position I was in senior year of high school.  Brimming with half-formed thoughts and no academic outlet to finish them, I look to the blog form once more to make “thought babies.”

This blog will probably appear disorganized, but I promise that it’s meant to organize and articulate my ideas and thoughts into one movement.  Here, you will hopefully find my thoughts on social gaming, mobile healthcare, startups, finance, non-profit work, photography, and other interesting minutia.